Reporter's Recovery
CBS News' Kimberly Dozier on surviving a bomb attack in Iraq
Kimberly Dozier, CBS News
CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier remembers watching TV from her hospital bed last June when an obituary of Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi she had taped made it on the air.
"It cheered me up," she told the Biz. "The car bomb that hit us was built by an offshoot of an Al Qaeda-related group, so I know al-Zarqawi's people had a hand in it."
The horrific attack and her arduous road to recovery is documented in Flashpoint, a CBS News special airing May 29 at 10 pm/ET. It recounts how exactly one year earlier, cameraman Paul Douglas, soundman James Brolan and Dozier (who has worked primarily in Baghdad since 2003) were traveling with the U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division when an IED packed into a yellow taxi was detonated. Douglas and Brolan were killed. The impact of the blast left Dozier's upper legs shredded and both femurs were smashed. A piece of shrapnel pierced her head, and an eardrum was blown out. Her blood loss was so severe that her heart stopped twice.
Now, when she walks into a room, you would never know that her leg injuries were so severe that doctors believed they would have to amputate. Doctors tell her that she's six months ahead in the recovery process. She's back at work after five months in physical therapy and 25 operations, which included several skin grafts and the removal of leg muscles. "I have three quadriceps instead of four," she said. "They were put together in such a way, they work."
But there's one aspect of the situation that still gets her down: "What's depressing for me is knowing what I've come back from is one small microcosm of what happens to soldiers over and over again and what happens on an even larger scale to Iraqis over and over again, and they don't have a team of trauma surgeons and reconstructive surgeons and physiotherapists like I did," she says. "Most people with my kind of injuries are just not going to survive."
It's hard to imagine a patient as determined as Dozier, one of the network's most productive correspondents. To prove to doctors that she suffered no lasting effects from a brain injury, she had them take her off painkillers so she could pass the cognitive tests.
Her involvement with the special became part of her recovery. Doctors and physiotherapists were peppered with questions while they were treating her.
Dozier said she has just started to talk with CBS News execs about her next assignment. While a return to Iraq may be off, she is eager to return to the Middle East, where she's worked since 2000.
"I'm very comfortable there," she said. "I'm desperate for a cup of proper of Arabic coffee. I haven't had it in ages. I just miss that whole vibe."
It's not just where her job is based. It's home.
