Local Resident Welcomes Kidnapped Daughter Back from Iraq
By Shelley Basinger

Jim Carroll stepped out of his Chapel Hill home Thursday with a smile on his face. He was finally able to announce that his daughter, reporter Jill Carroll, was coming home.

“We got the call this morning. I got the call before six,” Carroll said. “Jill called me directly. It was quite a wakeup call, to say the least.”

Jill, 28, spent almost three months as a hostage in Iraq. She flew in to Boston Sunday to unite with her parents and twin sister Katie.

Jill isn’t the first reporter held hostage, and her experience shows the risk of reporting in a war zone.

Even in light of cautionary tales like Jill’s, UNC-CH sophomore Tyler Vaughn says he wants to report internationally after he graduates. He spent last summer in the Middle East.

“That is the most diverse place that I’ve ever been in my life. And I use diverse loosely,” Vaughn said. “I thought that I was going to come back this authoritative figure about the Middle East, and I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t know anything.’”

Vaughn said he wants to be a reporter, possibly in Iraq.

“As for the future of reporting in Iraq and in the Middle East, the bottom line is that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Vaughn said. “It’s hard to predict anything of the future of the Middle East. And that’s one of the things I learned this summer.”

Future kidnappings can't be predicted, but Jim Carroll reminds everyone that current hostage victims should not be forgotten.

“It’s been a long haul and we’re done with it now,” Carroll said. “Don’t forget the other American hostages and the hostages of other nationalities still being held in Iraq.”