When Kimberly Dozier accepts a Peabody Award Monday for her "CBS News Sunday Morning" story about two female veterans who lost limbs in Iraq, it will be a big step in her transition from blown-up journalist to journalist, the AP reported.
Even sweeter, from Dozier's perspective, is that the award has nothing to do with May 29, 2006, when a Baghdad car bomb seriously injured her and killed two CBS News colleagues and a U.S. Army captain out on a Memorial Day weekend story about the Iraq War.
Dozier has made the journey from victim to survivor. She hopes now that telling her story, in the just-published book "Breathing the Fire," can help families and veterans of the Iraq War who return home with physical and psychic damage.
The war has been going on for so long that Dozier is concerned people have become numb to it.
"I'm not lecturing people which way to go on the Iraq War, one way or another, but this sort of willingness to ignore what is going on or turn away from it kind of scares me," she said. "I want people to pay attention."
Her book tells about that fateful day and her long physical recovery in gripping detail. Perhaps more interesting are the emotional after-effects that usually aren't as well documented, from survivor's guilt to the resentment of others to the frustration of well-meaning people who think they understand what she's feeling.
Emotional wounds turned up quickly. Dozier had harrowing hallucinations involving her dead colleagues, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan. She was hypervigilant, so worried about another attack when she was transferred from one military hospital to another that she tensely grabbed the sides of her gurney when any car approached her ambulance.
Army people told her that for many trauma survivors, probably the majority, dredging up harrowing memories is harmful. Others are helped. Dozier fell into the latter camp.
"I was the kind of person who needed to go over this until it lost the power to shock or hurt me," she said.
Her family was supportive and protective. But as with many families of trauma victims, they eventually became too protective. A fellow journalist, CBS News' Bob Schieffer, was the first to truly fill Dozier in on what had happened.
During the brutal period of more than two dozen operations and subsequent strength-gathering, Dozier spent many hours in her hospital bed crying.
She replayed the events in her mind over and over, wondering if there was anything she could have done that would have saved Douglas and Brolan, or even if she should have gone out on patrol at all. She knew some people in CBS News' London bureau, where the two men were based, thought she should have done a less risky story standing on a building rooftop.
Dozier received reassurance from a fellow member of a terrible club.