Dozier was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, one of six siblings, and raised by Benjamin (died 2016), a construction worker and retired Marine who served in World War II, and Dorothy Dozier (died 2008).
Dozier started as a stringer for CBS Radio News, later becoming a network TV correspondent for the CBS Evening News. As part of that progression, from February 2002 through August 2003, Dozier was the chief correspondent for WCBS-TV (New York)'s Middle East bureau in Jerusalem, where she covered the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq, before being hired by CBS anchor Dan Rather and reassigned to Baghdad.
After Dozier was injured in Iraq in 2006,[4] CBS gave her temporary assignments covering the Pentagon, the White House and Capitol Hill, for CBS News' Washington, D.C., bureau, from 2007 to 2010, as they were reluctant to let her return to war zones. She left CBS and television reluctantly to become the Intelligence Writer for The Associated Press, to leave the stigma of being combat-injured behind.
In April 2008, Dozier received a Peabody award for "CBS News Sunday Morning: The Way Home", a piece in which she reported the story of two women veterans who lost limbs in Iraq.[5][6]
Dozier received a 2008 RTNDA/Edward R. Murrow Award for Feature Reporting for the same story.[6] She has also received three American Women in Radio and Television (AWRT) Gracie Awards—in 2000, 2001 and 2002—for her radio reports on Mideast violence, Kosovo and the Afghan war, as well as the organization's Grand Gracie Award in 2007 for her body of television work in Iraq.
Dozier was seriously injured in Iraq on May 29, 2006 in a car bomb attack that killed an American soldier, the 4th ID's Captain James "Alex" Funkhouser, an Iraqi translator, and CBS crewmembers Paul Douglas (Cameraman) and James Brolan (Sound Technician).[7] She was transferred to Germany for further treatment.
Most of the patrol was outside their parked Humvees in a residential Baghdad neighborhood. Insurgents waited until the patrol approached the car bomb, packed with an estimated five hundred pounds (230 kg) of explosives, before remotely detonating it. The captain, translator and CBS crew were closest to the explosion.
Dozier underwent more than two dozen major surgeries in the two months following the bombing. Doctors removed shrapnel from her head, rebuilt her shattered femurs, and applied skin grafts to extensive burns on both legs. Dozier was first treated at the Baghdad Combat Support Hospital, and the medical facility at Balad, Iraq, before being medevacked to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the U.S. military's largest overseas hospital.[8]
Although Dozier was unable to speak because she was on a respirator, she was able to write to communicate; the first question she asked regarded the crew.
On June 7, 2006, she returned to the United States for further treatment at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.[8]
Coincidentally, in April 2004, Dozier had been featured in a USA Today article on the safety of journalists covering the Iraq War.[9]
Fully recovered from her injuries, Dozier ran the 10K of the 2008 U.S. Marine Corps Marathon to raise money for Fisher House, which provides a place to stay for loved ones of the combat-injured. Proceeds of her 2011 paperback and e-book and funds from speaking to military-related organizations went to a number of charities including NSWKids.org and WoundedWear.org, and/or to donate thousands of copies of her book to patients and families going through similar medical crises.
Dozier wrote a book, Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Survive, and Get Back to the Fight, which chronicles both her physical and emotional recovery from the IED explosion on Memorial Day 2006 in Iraq. Breathing the Fire was published in May 2008.[12] It was reissued in 2011.[13] In the book, Dozier pieces together her own memories of the explosion and recovery with reports from her doctors, nurses, family members and even rescuers about her condition.[14]
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