Returning to Form CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier rebounds from bomb attack in Iraq
When Kimberly Dozier (Grad '93) and her CBS News camera crew were caught in a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad in May 2006, it killed two colleagues and left her for dead.
She lost most of her blood and her heart stopped twice. Both femurs were shattered and she had burns from her hips to her ankles. But "there was nothing special about that attack," Dozier told an audience at Monticello last month. Five car bombs exploded that day in the city and there were many other casualties-that day and every day during the war in Iraq.
Dozier with Iraqi children in Kadamiya, a Shi'ite
neighborhood in Baghdad |
A year after the accident, the former Iraq correspondent has returned to form, albeit 25 operations later, with titanium rods in her legs and screws in her skull. This past Memorial Day, almost one year to the day after the attack, Dozier returned to work with a CBS special, "Flashpoint," that dealt with her grueling journey to recovery. Dozier, 40, had to learn to walk again and says she often asked herself during her slow convalescence why she made it when others died. (CBS cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan died in the May 29, 2006, blast.)
For more than a decade, she has reported from trouble spots around the globe and has chalked up four Gracie Awards for exemplary journalism along the way. Yet her work in Iraq was significantly more dangerous than similar stints in Israel, Egypt, Iran, Kosovo and Northern Ireland. At Monticello, she spoke candidly on the subject of the media under siege. "We used to stand next to the targets; now we are the targets," she says. Western journalists are seen as partisan, and attacks on them by insurgents create bigger headlines.
Dozier earned a master's degree in foreign affairs from U.Va., focusing her study on Islamic extremism. She says she remains indebted to professors R.K. Ramazani and Abul-Aziz Sachedina, whose insights into the Middle East turmoil she likened to an anatomy of Sept. 11, 2001, years before it happened. She told the Charlottesville audience that throughout her career as a foreign correspondent, she has considered it her primary responsibility to show "how our actions are perceived by the other side—whoever that is at the time," she says.
Earlier this month, Dozier received the Helen Duhamel Achievement Award from the Association for Women in Communications, which honors a journalist who has overcome a challenge and given back to society.
Dozier is currently based in Washington, D.C., but hopes one day to resume reporting from the Middle East.
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