First, don't open Word documents directly from any kind of removable
media -- floppies, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, etc. If you forget that a
document is open and you remove the drive, the document is instant
trash and generally unrecoverable. Always copy the document to the
hard drive and open it from there, and copy it back to the thumb drive
after you close the document out of Word.
In this case, after copying the files to the hard drive, start Word
with a blank document. Go to File > Open, select one of the documents,
click the down arrow next to the Open button, and select "Open and
Repair". That _may_ get you a usable document, or maybe not.
If that doesn't work, try setting the "Files of type" dropdown in the
File > Open dialog to "Recover text from any file" and then open one
of the documents. If there's anything recoverable in the file, you can
get it that way, but there won't be any formatting. And _don't_ save
any document that has been opened in "Recover text" mode -- just copy
the text out of it to paste into another file, and close the original
without saving it.
