Fox News Channel’s National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin will return to work Wednesday after her yearlong battle with triple-negative breast cancer.
Griffin’s return to the battlefield is a few weeks early, but she tells Yeas & Nays it’s for an assignment she couldn’t pass up.
“I was supposed to return to work after Labor Day, but when Gen. Stanley McChrystal unexpectedly stepped down and the defense secretary’s office called and asked if I was ready to get back to work, I leapt at the offer to fly to Kabul immediately.”
And so she did. Even though Griffin was undergoing treatment this year, she tells us she didn’t stop following her beat. As soon as Gen. David Petraeus was nominated to take over as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, she wrote to him and requested an interview.
“Any journalist would have done the same,” Griffin said. “We had a back-and-forth joke all year with him asking me in the darkest days of my chemotherapy about whether I was up for a run. So I sent him an e-mail saying, ‘Sir, if you are up for it, I guess that run will need to be in Kabul.”
Griffin was granted the first cable news one-on-one interview with Petraeus in his new position in Afghanistan.
She said she’s a little bruised but feels good about coming back to reporting.
“If there is any group in the world that ‘gets’ why it is psychologically so important to return to the battlefield after being taken out of action, it’s the military. I couldn’t think of a better place to jump back into the fray.”
You can catch her interviews Wednesday and Thursday.
