"I thought about journalism when I graduated from college, but I got into some good law schools," Bob Woodruff says, sitting in his office at ABC News headquarters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "It took the first Gulf War, watching that from my law office, for me to decide, 'Journalism is what I want to do.' My wife was so cool about it, even though we had a new baby. We were young — 30 — but it was probably my last chance to make the switch in careers. And I took a 95 percent decrease in soldier."

It happens fast, maybe two seconds: I look at him with "Did I hear that correctly?" in my eyes. He looks at me with "Did I say that correctly?"

"Salary?" I offer.

"See — that's it, right there," he sighs, reminded again that his brain synapses have been rearranged. "I was trying to think of 'salary' and I said 'soldier.'?"

On January 29, 2006, shortly after being named coanchor of ABC World News — replacing Peter Jennings after 22 years — Woodruff was trying to do a report from the hatch of an Iraqi armored personal carrier in a convoy heading for Taji. An old Soviet model left over from Saddam Hussein's heyday, the tank made a lot of noise, drowning out Woodruff's voice and forcing retakes as his crew struggled to solve the sound problem. Suddenly an IED — an improvised explosive device — blew up on the side of the road, caving in the left side of his head despite the helmet he was wearing, and ripping open his neck. He almost bled to death on the floor of the tank as a firefight crackled outside.

"Most of the time in this interview, you're maybe not seeing the downside of what happened to me," says Woodruff, who has returned to reporting — filing regular reports for Nightline, Good Morning America, and ABC World News — but not anchoring. "The doctors will tell you it's not a 100 percent recovery. I will never get back my full memory for names and words. It'll improve over time, and the improvement I've had is an absolute miracle, far better than the doctors were expecting. A lot of the neuron separations have gone back together."

Woodruff gets out of his chair and gestures through the venetian blinds over his window. The white walls under fluorescent lights are covered with pictures of colleagues like Ted Koppel and the late Peter Jennings, interspersed with cheery artwork by his seven-year-old twins.

"We all have synonyms for common words that we use in conversation," he says. "'Highway,' 'road,' 'street' — they're all different ways of saying the thing out my window here with cars driving on it. When I first woke up, I couldn't remember any of those words. If I wanted to make a point about your driving, I had to give long explanations of what I was trying to talk about, because I couldn't remember 'road.' Now, instead of three synonyms for each word, I can only remember two, or one. And names are really difficult. Sometimes I can't remember the names of old friends, or somebody running for president. I can interpret what's going on around me — I've still got all that — but so much of it is words. It makes live reporting, which I still do, much more complicated."