When war reporter Lara Logan’s co-workers learned that she had to be hospitalized after being attacked in Egypt, they knew it was serious.
Logan, CBS’s chief foreign correspondent, is known as much for her toughness as for her good looks, so it was clear things were bad.
“She’s not a wimpy, girly girl — she had a pocket for lipstick sewn into her flak jacket as a joke,” one source told The Post yesterday.
Riots, bloodshed and even physical attacks have been part of Logan’s job for years, and colleagues said she relishes her role as being a seasoned reporter in the world’s worst war-torn areas.
When the 39-year-old South African native was embedded with a US Army unit on the Afghan border shortly after 9/11, the armored Humvee she was traveling in was attacked by an anti-tank missile.
The inside of Logan’s mouth was torn up and her face left swollen and bruised.
But when the Army tried to ship her home, she balked.
“I was just enraged,” she told The Washington Post in a 2008 interview. “I’d already been blown up. I said, ‘I’ll just put an ice pack on.’ There was no way I was going to leave, no way in hell.”
Logan wound up never even telling her mother, who was dying, that she had been hurt.
The beautiful war correspondent started her journalism career early on, pushing for and landing a job at the Sunday Tribune in Durban, South Africa, while in high school.
Soon after, she came to New York, working as a hostess at the Water Club on the East River in Manhattan.
When she decided to get serious about reporting again, she returned to South Africa, went to college, took modeling jobs to earn extra cash, and quickly landed a job with a local TV news service.
From there, she launched her international career, traveling throughout the Mideast on stringer gigs with CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN.
It was a CBS Radio freelance job that finally helped her land a coveted correspondent’s position on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
She once told The New York Times that she’s well aware of the risks to her job.
But “I think you’re not really thinking about being afraid,” she said.
“For me, I’m just so happy to be there, in that situation. It’s so fascinating. You get a view into life that you wouldn’t otherwise have.”
But Logan’s stellar rise came with a heavy personal cost at times, she said.
While covering Baghdad in the mid-2000s, her six-year marriage to former professional basketballer Jason Siemon fell apart, she said.
And there’s an infamous incident in 2008 in Iraq involving her relationship with a then-still-married US contractor, Joseph Burkett.
Burkett allegedly brawled with one of Logan’s exes, CNN correspondent Michael Ware, in a Baghdad “safehouse,” and in the ensuing headlines, it was later revealed that Logan was pregnant with Burkett’s child.
Logan and Burkett are now married and has two children.