Breathing the Fire

Image courtesy of Meredith Books

When this magazine last checked in with CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier (MA Foreign Affairs ’93) in April 2005, she was posted in Baghdad, Iraq, and she talked about insurgents’ disregard for journalists’ traditional neutral wartime status.

We catch up with her on the occasion of Breathing the Fire (Meredith Books), her memoir of recovery after a 500-pound taxi-turned-bomb exploded in an ambush on Memorial Day 2006, killing her crew and military escort. Pronounced technically dead five times, she received more than 2,000 stitches; well over 24 surgeries (they stopped counting); skin grafts on second-degree burns from hip to ankle, leaving donor sites on her back raw and exposed for months; and months of physical therapy. Dozier is back at work in Washington, D.C., earning awards and yearning to return to her home in the Middle East.

“I was a Middle East specialist before. I don’t know why this should change it,” says the woman who spent 15 determined years landing a job as a foreign correspondent.

And speaking of change, how did this experience change her? It confirmed some truths, she says.

“What this experience did was show me the value of all the stuff I learned all those years running into walls, and then figuring out how to get over them or around them, or figure out another way or just ignore it and push on. Those life skills that seem horrible at the time when you go through these things, and you don’t get the job you worked so hard for or you’re told over and over you’re not good enough. So you just keep standing yourself up straight, trying to look yourself in the mirror and get through the next day.

“So when the doctor told me in the hospital bed, ‘You’re not going to walk again,’ the drive that got me to be a reporter combined with the faith and support of my family [kicked in].”

That drive was evident when she arrived at the University in the early 1990s, returning for a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies, to the consternation of some loved ones. “I was told I was making a huge mistake, quitting a good job and a good career for a pipe dream” of being a foreign correspondent, she says, having given up a reporter’s job with a powerful energy newsletter in Washington, D.C.

Then, arriving in the Registrar’s Office, she learned that the program had been closed. “I went directly to Professor [Ruhi] Ramazani [then Government Department chair], and I think I camped outside his door until he came to his office. I just sat there, devastated, and he walked me through,” she says. They built a program in fields ranging from religious studies to foreign affairs with the professors whose reputations had attracted her to Charlottesville.

To pay her way, she worked at St. Maarten’s on the Corner, where she ran into an important press officer who had curried favor with her months before when she was at the newsletter. “He saw me there with a stack of menus in my hand and nearly fell over. I smiled sweetly and said, ‘Hi.’ He said, ‘Kimberly.’ I said, ‘Yes, the special tonight is ... ’

“He must have thought how far I’d fallen.”

Dozier wrote Breathing the Fire for her fallen colleagues and to tell the story of the injured. “I didn’t know what the combat injured went through in Iraq,” she says, but then, “I was living through it.”

Dozier’s Life Lessons
You can fight your way through these things.
Don’t accept no for an answer.
Don’t accept “I can’t” from yourself.
Be your own compass.

Kimberly Dozier will speak at a Miller Center forum on Sept. 29, 2008. Read more here.