Don Teague: ‘There’s Something To Be Learned From This Story’

By Alissa Krinsky 

“There’s something to be learned from this story,” says CBS News correspondent Don Teague about his new book, Saved by Her Enemy: An Iraqi Woman’s Journey From the Heart of War to the Heartland of America, due out in March.

Saved tells the true tale of co-author Rafraf Barrak, whose life was in danger after working as an NBC News translator at the start of the Iraq War. Teague, a former NBC News correspondent who worked with Barrak, helped arrange for her to legally come to the U.S. in 2004 and live with him and his family.

Numerous friends and colleagues — including NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders — contributed time and money to establish a $60,000 graduate school fellowship for Barrak to study at the University of South Florida.

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The book describes Barrak’s adjustment to life in the U.S., and how the Teagues — Don, his wife Kiki, and their two teenage daughters — consider Rafraf a member of their family.

“We’re more alike than we think we are, people from such vastly different areas of the world, different cultures, different religions,” Teague says. “Ultimately, we’re all just people, and I think that’s what we try to show in the book, is that we all have so many things in common, as well as the things that make us different.”

(photo courtesy of Don Teague)

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