Back to Baghdad

Kimberly Dozier

Three years after suffering near-fatal injuries in a bomb blast, Kimberly Dozier, the former CBS foreign correspondent makes a redemptive return to Iraq.

Last December, I finally made it back to Baghdad. I’d left on May 29, 2006, unconscious on a stretcher after my CBS News team and the 4th Infantry Division patrol we’d been covering walked into the path of a 300- to 500-pound car bomb. The wall of shrapnel that tore through us took the lives of my colleagues, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolin. The officer we’d been following, Army Capt. James Funkhouser, and our translator, known as Sam, were also killed. The explosion badly injured four other soldiers on the patrol.

It took many months of physical therapy and rehabilitation to get me walking, and then running, again. It took painful hours of reliving the attack to begin moving beyond the trauma of that day. What I could not know then was how much work it would take to get back to the job I loved, as a foreign correspondent, if only for a few short days.

My chance came when Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, invited me to join him and other journalists on his annual USO tour – including eight days of nonstop meetings and briefings with commanders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, finally, Iraq.

For someone who hadn’t been in the field in almost four years, it was like breathing again. I’d asked to go back several times, but CBS had been loath to put me in harm’s way again on the network’s behalf. So with CBS’s permission I took the opportunity the admiral offered to go as a private citizen.

This return trip to Baghdad was a bittersweet glimpse of what used to be, but also a chance to show people that it is possible to heal from the level of injury that I sustained. I’ve tried to send that message in other ways. I wrote a book about the bombing and my recovery, and I regularly speak to groups large and small, military and civilian. I’ve even run a couple of 10Ks, partly to raise money for Fisher House, where my family stayed during much of my hospitalization, and partly to show that I can. That’s where my experience dovetails with that of many of the wounded warriors I’ve met. After proving to yourself that you’re whole, whatever your new definition of “whole” might be, you then have to prove it to your loved ones.

In 2008, a year after I came back to work, I told a New York tabloid that I looked forward to returning to the field, including Iraq. I’d lived overseas covering crises for 14 years. My home was in Jerusalem. I would not be driven away from my life’s work by an al-Qaeda splinter group’s car bomb. “Bomb Girl Wants Back to Iraq” screamed the next day’s headline. It wasn’t meant as an atta-girl compliment. The subtext of the article was clear – this woman is touched in the head. Even close colleagues ventured that seeing Iraq again would trigger some sort of emotional tsunami.

But it’s not as if the trauma was locked away somewhere, to be released only when I set foot again in the country where I was hurt. The emotional weight of losing Paul and James had been with me for years – from the moment I opened my eyes in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Photos of them are on my office wall, and every week or so I’ll run into someone who knew them, or I’ll see a story from a European or Middle East country we covered together.

When a tube was still down my throat, I poured out everything I could remember from the bomb’s aftermath, scrawling it on a pad of paper with a marking pen. And I kept writing, “Where are Paul and James?” I had to be told that they had died at the scene. In that first month, I had post-traumatic stress, with my brain processing the trauma through nightmares, flashbacks, hyper-vigilance and roller-coaster emotions. But I never developed PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder – which is diagnosed when those symptoms become coping mechanisms that stay with you. The more I talked about every detail I could remember, the more the symptoms faded.

Yet many people assume I have PTSD, and they assumed going back to Baghdad would make it worse. My idea is that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’d had ample opportunity to keep “processing” the experience, by meeting just about everyone I could find who was there that day, and giving hundreds of speeches and interviews about the bombing and my recovery. Reliving every part of the attack and grieving for my colleagues was the hardest part of my healing – not traveling down the airport road in Baghdad again and thinking about how it still might be mined with improvised explosives and car bombs. In the previous 3 1/2 years I had gone over far more dangerous emotional territory – like trying to apologize to Paul’s widow for surviving, saying the wrong things and only making her more upset.

I also met Capt. Funkhouser’s widow, Jennifer, who I knew had felt fury toward me for a time. She knew that her husband was chosen for that patrol because he was an articulate spokesman for the U.S. Army’s efforts to train the Iraqi police. If I hadn’t asked for a Memorial Day interview, perhaps he would still be alive. I walked into her house with fear. Instead, I found the a woman who had decided that to be angry that her husband had been on that patrol that day was to dishonor his memory.

As tough as that meeting was, tougher still was meeting James’s 16-year-old daughter when she visited D.C. from London. I’d never met Paul’s and James’s families in person before. I didn’t know what to say. After blurting out surely inappropriate things, I asked her what would most help her to hear. She asked me to walk her through the bombing, detail by detail. I’d been there, and she’d had no one to ask until then.

I told the story of the day of the patrol. When I got to the part where the bomb went off, I spoke of my anger that James – one of the smartest people I had ever known – hadn’t had any warning before it hit him, killing him instantly. His daughter’s face crinkled up, and her eyes filled with tears for a moment. I thought maybe I’d said too much. But she breathed out and wiped the tears from her face. “I thought the same thing,” she said. “I was so angry. And then I decided it was better because he felt no pain.” She told me to stop feeling guilty that I’m still here and that her dad and Paul are not. Her father died doing what he loved.
These journeys were behind me before I stepped on that C-17 headed for Baghdad. And so was much of the pain. The trip became, instead, a small measure of redemption – a chance to be immersed in the action again, following the chairman and his staff as they sized up life-and-death decisions made, and those yet to be made. I reveled in my front-row seat, again getting to witness a slice of history. I felt the same sense of purpose I’d experienced while working with Paul and James, shooting a story in a war zone.

It was a veteran friend of mine, an Army intelligence officer injured in Afghanistan, who found the words for me. She said she too wanted to go back, and that doesn’t make her crazy. “We do what we do because it is who we are and we understand it,” she said. “No one really understands why a soldier wants to deploy again after being injured . . . except us.” She did me the honor of including me in that “us.”

Kimberly Dozier, a former CBS News correspondent, has recently joined the Associated Press, covering intelligence for the AP’s Terror Team. She is the author of Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report, and Survive, the War in Iraq. This article first appeared in the Washington Post, and was adapted for Dateline.