Martha Raddatz is one of American journalism's most respected voices on national security, foreign policy, and the U.S. military. As ABC News' Chief Global Affairs Correspondent and co-anchor of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," she has spent more than two decades reporting from the front lines of America's wars, bringing audiences firsthand accounts of conflict and its human cost with unmatched authority and empathy.

A seven-time Emmy Award winner, Raddatz was part of the ABC News team honored with a Peabody Award for its coverage of September 11, and she earned an Emmy for her reporting on the killing of Osama bin Laden. She was also awarded the George C. Marshall Award for her distinguished contributions to national security journalism. Raddatz has moderated presidential and vice presidential debates and is widely regarded as one of the sharpest interviewers in political media.

She is the author of The Long Ride Home, a New York Times bestseller that was adapted into a National Geographic miniseries.

Her latest book, The Hero Next Door: Stories of Patriotism and Purpose, published in May 2026 with Simon & Schuster, is also a New York Times bestseller. In it, Raddatz shares inspiring profiles in courage of the 9/11 generation of warriors and their families, drawing on years of face-to-face relationships she built with veterans and their families rather than secondhand research.

For twenty-five years covering America's wars, Martha Raddatz has seen the courage and resilience of the men and women who have been fighting America’s wars since 9/11. What motivates them to do such impossible things? How do they find the strength to walk towards danger, to improvise in the heat of the moment and start over when things don’t go as planned? The Hero Next Door offers a dozen portraits of servicemen and women who are every bit as inspiring as those of the Greatest Generation. Every one of them has shown awe-inspiring strength of character, faced daunting odds in, and come out stronger. What is it about military service that inspires such selfless service and what can we learn from them?

Take Kevin Shaeffer, a naval officer working at the Pentagon on 9/11, whose experience on that day fueled his determination to hunt down Osama bin Laden. Or Mark Little, who swore the day an IED blew up his convoy in Iraq was the best day of his life, wouldn't let the loss of his legs keep him off the ice, and made it his mission, once he'd recovered, to help veterans rebuild their lives when they were down. Or Josh Webster, who dangled by a rope under enemy fire to rescue a fallen officer in the mountains of Afghanistan. Or Rocco Armonda, a highly skilled surgeon who pioneered a new way of treating traumatic brain injury in Iraq. Or Danielle “Purple” Thiriot and Charles “Wingnut” Wickware, who, once they started flying, knew exactly what their mission was. Many veterans returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with wounds that never fully healed. There isn't one of them who would say they could have done it alone.

Life can turn on a moment, and who’s to say what we’ll do? That, Martha Raddatz tells us, is when you spot the real heroes: when no one is watching. “Individually, their stories are deeply inspiring,” she writes. “Together, they offer something beyond inspiration: insight into what it means to live with a life-defining courage and sense of purpose."