At Miller Center, reporter tells of time in Iraq

CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier and a film crew were visiting a Baghdad neighborhood on May 29, 2006, to cover an assignment about U.S. soldiers working with Iraqi security forces.

“It was a neighborhood that was supposed to be so safe, but we ended up walking into an ambush,” Dozier recalled Monday at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

As the journalists and their military escorts stood in the street, insurgents observing them from four stories up in a nearby building detonated a car bomb.

The blast ripped through the group, killing cameraman Paul Douglas, soundman James Brolan, U.S. Army Capt. James Alex Funkhouser and his Iraqi translator known as “Sam.”

Dozier was slammed backward. She could smell sulfur. Voices were yelling out, “twisted in pain.” Her legs felt as if they were on fire, having been struck with burning shrapnel.

“I remember thinking, ‘Why can’t I move?’ And ‘Where are Paul and James?’” Dozier said.

Within moments, a passing patrol of the Iowa National Guard arrived on the scene. They fought off the insurgents for an hour.

“They fought for us like we were their own,” she said.

Army medics tied tourniquets to both of Dozier’s legs. They doubted she would survive her wounds. Dozier never lost consciousness.

Dozier — a veteran reporter who had spent years covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — suddenly found herself facing the same challenges as numerous American soldiers, including a long and painful rehabilitation, as well as coping with the grief and guilt of surviving.

Dozier recounted her experience in a book published earlier this year titled “Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq.”

“[In Baghdad] you hear these explosions all the time,” she said. “Now we were in the middle of it.”

Dozier, who earned a master’s degree in foreign affairs from UVa, recovered for seven days at a military hospital in Germany.

While there, she learned that her nurse, Nancy Miller, had seen the evolution of the insurgency’s attacks on U.S. troops, which had shifted as American body armor improved.

At the time, Dozier said, the insurgents were increasingly aiming for the soldiers’ unprotected eyes. Miller hated seeing eye injuries, but knew she could not let on her discomfort in front of her patients. So Miller tried to desensitize herself by looking at eye injury photos on the Internet.

“She was one of those people who kept me sane on those days when I was in so much pain that I couldn’t breathe,” Dozier said.

Soon, Dozier was transported to the National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. She underwent numerous surgeries to rebuild her shredded legs. The caregivers, she said, would bring the patients Slurpees occasionally, a welcome reprieve from their normal diet of Ensure shakes.

While at Bethesda, Dozier began the process of physiotherapy. Her physiotherapist, she said, pushed her through excruciating pain so that she could regain the ability to bend her knees. Physiotherapists, she joked, “tortured kittens as children. This is a skill they then bring into their professional lives.”

Dozier never developed post-traumatic stress disorder, though she felt profound guilt over surviving while her compatriots had not.

She read a passage in her book from Funkhouser’s widow, Jennifer. “I’m proud of what he accomplished in his 35 years and I’ll never let our girls forget it,” she wrote.

The experience, Dozier said, has given her an insight into the American military mind and helped her become a better reporter.

“The military took me in,” she said. “I understand a lot of what they’re going through. I understand how they feel when people say they support the troops, but not the war.”