The face of courage; Kimberly Dozier’s story
The faces of courage, the faces of heroes; this is something that most of us don’t fully understand. What is courage? Who is a hero? The Latter is a bit easier to define. Yet across this nation, there is a legion of heroes who rarely get any recognition. Really, survivors of anything truly life altering fall into that category.
What about courage? Normally we define that term and consider people courageous based on the thinkable, not the unthinkable, yet it’s in the unthinkable where courage lies. Pound for pound, trauma survivors have more courage than the average person would ever want to have. After all, courage is something used to “face” something, is it not? Like the first time a boy asks a girl out, or to the prom or for her hand in marriage. That is not extraordinary courage though.
Perhaps the country’s most famous trauma survivor is Kimberly Dozier; a woman for whom courage has kind of been her middle name since I saw her first on the news. She always took the assignments that put her harms way; if there was a war zone, she was in it. I became enamored by her and in a sense glued to her as she as the CBS News’ main correspondent for the war in Iraq. I was drawn to her courage. She had to know in the back of her head that what she was doing could end badly.
On Memorial Day 2006 it did. I’m not even going to give any of the details, because she owns them. It’s her story. Every trauma survivor has a story, few ever get to tell it, and since the dawn of man, no one has ever told it the way Ms. Dozier has. Her book, “Breathing the Fire” is an amazing and compelling read. As a matter of promotion for her book, she went on the stump telling her amazing story.
Of all the video I’ve seen on the web of her talking about her horrific tragedy, this one is the best and most detailed I’ve found. Many will not be able to listen to this, many simply don’t have the courage even to listen to some of the incredible challenges she faced in the blink of an eye. Yet trauma survivors find snippets and patterns of thinking that they too face and deal with.
So without further delay, I submit to you, a video that for me, speaks of what courage really is all about…
The second half is more “normal” dialog, an interesting Q & A but the first half is riveting for those that have the guts to listen.
