ABC's Woodruff To Chronicle Recovery

ABC's Bob Woodruff is working on a prime-time special and, with his wife, a book about his painstaking recovery since being seriously hurt by a roadside bomb in Iraq in January, the network said on Thursday.

The ABC News special, expected to be Woodruff's first on-camera appearance since his injuries, is planned for next spring.

Woodruff will interview eyewitnesses and the medical team that saved his life on Jan. 29, the network said. He will also focus on the military's medical recovery teams and the stories of other injured soldiers from Iraq and their families.

Woodruff is still undergoing outpatient therapy for his traumatic brain injury, the network said.

Random House will publish the memoir by Woodruff and his wife, Lee, as they discuss how their family was affected by the injury.

The two will write about their early life together when he was teaching in China and then working as a local reporter, up to earning one of the most coveted jobs in TV news — anchor of ABC's evening news broadcast. He was on the job for less than a month before his injury.

"No one knows exactly just how they might or might not behave in a crisis until it drops out of the sky and knocks you down like a bandit, stealing your future," Lee Woodruff writes. "Sudden tragic events ... teach us more about ourselves than most of us ever cared to know."

Random House did not say when the book would be published.

Woodruff plans to be at work more regularly after the special, ABC News spokeswoman Cathie Levine said, although his future role is unclear.

Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt were standing in the hatch of an Iraqi mechanized vehicle, reporting on the war from the Iraqi troops' perspective, when the roadside bomb exploded. Both were wearing body armor, which doctors said likely saved their lives.