reading

FIGHTING TO SURVIVE, AND GET BACK TO THE FIGHT

KIMBERLY DOZIER

ASSOCIATED PRESS CORRESPONDENT

Breathing the Fire is a revised and updated edition of the original work first published in 2008 by Meredith Books, Des Moines, Iowa. This edition published in 2011 by Fox Chapel Publishing Company, Inc., East Petersburg, PA.

Photography credits: Front Cover Thorsten Hoefle; Flaps Mosadeq Sadeq/AP; AP/Michael Probst

Page 178 top Laura Winter; 178 bottom Megan Towey; 179 top Thorsten Hoefle;

179 bottom Thorsten Hoefle; 180 Ben Plesser; 181 top Kurt Hoefle; 183 Agnes Reau;

184 Agnes Reau; 185 top Ben Plesser; 185 bottom AP/Khalid Mohammed;

189 bottom left Dennis Dillon/CBS News; 190 Don Lee/CBS News; 191 top Nancy Hoss;

191 bottom courtesy Jennifer Funkhouser; 192 top Bill Clark/Roll Call;

all other photos courtesy of Kimberly Dozier

ISBN 978-1-56523-615-8

eISBN 978-1-60765-067-6

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dozier, Kimberly.

Breathing the fire : fighting to report--and survive--the war in Iraq / Kimberly Dozier. -- Rev. and upd. ed.-- East Petersburg, PA : Fox Chapel Publishing, c2011.

p.; cm.

ISBN: 978-1-56523-615-8

1st ed. published: Des Moines, IA : Meredith Books, 2008.

Summary: While serving as a CBS News foreign correspondent in Iraq in 2006, the U.S. Army foot patrol she and her crew were filming was hit by a car bomb, killing some in the group and severely injuring her. This book recounts how the blast changed her life.

1. Iraq War, 2003- --Personal narratives, American. 2. Dozier, Kimberly. 3. Journalists--United States--Biography. 4. Civilian war casualties--Iraq. I. Title.

DS79.766.D695 D695 2011

070.92--dc22 1104

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Printed in the United States of America

First printing: April 2011

ePub Version 1.0

This book was made possible by every soul who stayed by my side, fighting to keep me alive, and by everyone who prayed for me and pulled for me along the way. It is an attempt to thank them—and to honor those we lost that day.

To my family and loved ones: Sorry I put you through all that hell, but were you really that surprised?

I published this in the first edition after it was sent to me through the wounded warrior community. I later had the privilege to meet the author, Navy SEAL Lt. Jason Redman.

He will tell his own amazing story one day. In the meantime, you can see the short version at his website: www.woundedwear.org.

introduction

CHAPTER 1

just before

CHAPTER 2

waking to horror

CHAPTER 3

one bomb refracted

CHAPTER 4

combat support hospital–green zone

CHAPTER 5

word spreads

CHAPTER 6

landstuhl

CHAPTER 7

hard landing

CHAPTER 8

fighting doziers

CHAPTER 9

we can rebuild her

CHAPTER 10

body battles

CHAPTER 11

ambushed

CHAPTER 12

handling it

CHAPTER 13

advice, welcome and otherwise

CHAPTER 14

another setback

CHAPTER 15

zero to a hundred feet—in two weeks

CHAPTER 16

baby steps

CHAPTER 17

finding sanctuary

CHAPTER 18

getting to work again

CHAPTER 19

coming to terms

postscript

introduction

A lot has happened since the bombing in May 2006 . . .

FALL 2008

Every time I sit at my computer to write about the ordeal of the past two years, I find a million other things I need to do—anything but write.

But I know I need to write it, to move beyond it. This ordeal won’t let me go. Put another way, many caring and well-meaning people won’t let me leave it behind.

Perhaps it’s because they never got the whole story and they haven’t caught up with my recovery. They can’t comprehend how the shattered woman they saw on their TV screens two years ago, unconscious on a stretcher, got better. Maybe they can’t quite believe it.

I’m hoping that telling my story will help lay it to rest. And through me maybe I will reveal a fraction of what U.S. troops are experiencing, to say nothing of Iraqi families and anyone else who lives in a war zone.

No one can be the saint worthy of all the prayers that were said for me and the letters, notes, and emails sent to my hospital room. But I understand that I was a symbol for much of what’s happening to the servicemen and women, to Iraqis, to loved ones, or to strangers who become as familiar as loved ones.

I only wish I could be more gracious to some of the well-wishers I meet. When a well-meaning stranger chirps, “Oh, how are you?” or “Can I help you?” I sometimes snarl back, “Fine!” or “No, thanks!”—utterly frustrated with people who still think I need help. And worse, I then have to bite my tongue when I hear their sympathetic follow-ups. “Of course you can do it yourself, dear,” they say indulgently, as if to a 5-year-old who patently can’t.

On Memorial Day, May 29, 2006, I was the hit by a car bomb, along with my camera crew and the U.S. Army foot patrol my crew and I were filming. The weapon was a battered Iraqi taxi, carefully packed with some 500 pounds of explosives with a trigger hardwired to a cell phone inside the car. Someone was watching and waiting for the right moment to dial the phone’s number, complete the bomb’s circuit, and trigger the explosion.

The taxi was parked on a street used by Iraqi patrols. An Iraqi convoy had been hit on the same street the day before. We had come to ask people what they’d witnessed, whom they’d seen, and if anything seemed suspicious or out of place.

So in we walked, an entire U.S. Army foot patrol—10 soldiers, an Iraqi interpreter, and a liaison officer—trailed by an American network TV crew—a cameraman, a soundman, and me, a reporter. We walked straight into what’s called the kill zone of the ambush.

The killers probably could not believe their luck.

Closest to the bomb were my friends and colleagues: CBS cameraman Paul Douglas and freelance soundman James Brolan, just 10 to 12 feet away from the wired car. Next to them was the U.S. Army officer we were following, the Fourth Infantry Division’s Capt. James Alex Funkhouser, and his Iraqi translator, Sam. All four were killed, three just about instantly. With the same stubborn will he’d fought with throughout his life, Paul tried to stave off his death, until he lost too much blood. Soldiers who had run to help stayed with Paul to the end.

I only found this out later. The soldier who treated me at the site kept telling me, “Your guys are fine.”

The blast also killed an Iraqi man who was standing at the wrong tea stand on the wrong corner when we walked into the ambush.

The explosion injured six other soldiers, leaving two of them and me with a yearlong battle to heal our shattered bodies—for me, less than a year. For them an their particular injuries, much longer..

Back in the United States, the attack made headlines. Normally a car bomb that kills one U.S. soldier and wounds six more is a sad footnote to a newscast, if it makes the cut at all. But add in a network TV crew with a female reporter on a slow news day, as U.S. holidays generally are, and you have wall-to-wall coverage.

Maybe the attention came because no network had yet lost so many employees in a single incident. And perhaps it was because for most of that first day, I had a 50-50 chance of surviving. There was suspense. It was probably also because I’m a woman. Although women journalists and women soldiers have been in and on the battlefield for at least a couple decades, the public hasn’t caught up with us yet.

CBS put together a TV special called Flashpoint to tell the story of that day, how one bomb blasted through the lives of so many, including Paul’s and James’ families, Captain Funkhouser’s wife, Jennifer, and his two young daughters, Kaitlyn and Allison, and the six soldiers who were wounded. For U.S. troops this event was sadly routine. As one commander later told me, “Just another day in Baghdad.”

This is the rest of my story. Helped by family, friends, loved ones, doctors and nurses, and corpsmen of unsurpassed skills, and I now realize my own will to live—I came back from near death. It meant facing the horror of two lost colleagues I considered friends and a months-long fight to learn to walk and run again. The bomb changed me—reinforcing some parts and burning away others. In many ways this book is my attempt to put that transformation into words.

One thing I know I’m not: a victim. That’s what anyone is called when he or she suffers major trauma: assault victim, car crash victim, Baghdad car bomb victim. But “victims” have no independence. Family, friends, and colleagues, all with good will, coddle you. They tend to you when you first need it, but they don’t know how or when to let you out of your cotton-cushioned cocoon.

Updating this four years after the bombing, it is harder to prove you’re not a victim than it is to recover. You have to teach those around you that when the “victim” overcomes the trauma—learning from it, changing from it, and moving beyond it—she becomes a survivor, physically, mentally, and spiritually.

I survived. This is a survivor’s tale.

CHAPTER 1 just before

NIGHT BEFORE MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 29, 2006

I hate these nights. Stare at the ceiling, turn left. Turn right. Can’t sleep. Dread tomorrow’s assignment, as usual. In the morning adrenaline will pull me through, as it always does. Tonight, worry is getting the better of me, as it always does.

The aircon is noisy, and the thick hotel drapes (of cheesy pseudo-velvet) block out the spotlights on the catty-corner mosque nearby and the lights from across the river. The drapes are meant to catch any flying glass, should a rocket hit the side of the building. But that’s only ever happened once, so in my mind that’s not the problem. The problem is the next day’s patrol.

I’m “safe” here. I’ve transformed the 12- by 15-foot room into a cocoon fortress—a yoga sanctuary in this half-star hotel floor turned network bureau. I live here about two-thirds of the year. Over three years my personal possessions have migrated to join me. The place is like the Big Brother house crossed with a rusting, peeling, leaking Soviet-era submarine, where the carpet sticks to your feet. We’ve sealed the corridor with steel doors and installed cameras to eyeball would-be visitors.

A ragtag crew of CBS and Iraqi hotel guards protects us (when they bother to stay awake). Our foreign security advisors try to sneak downstairs at odd times of the night to ensure the perimeter guards are awake. They have to make it past the slumbering upstairs guards; otherwise the game is up—the Iraqis upstairs furiously dial their cell phones and wake up all their colleagues at the hotel gates below.

Sleep, damn you.

Tossing and turning is a personal tradition I despise. It happens when I do embeds. I will spend tomorrow morning with a U.S. Army patrol. My two-man crew—my colleagues and friends, cameraman Paul and soundman James—will film the U.S. Army patrol, and I’ll trail them. The truth is, after three years as a late-comer network reporter, I’m still a newbie to the two of them—someone they put up with between assignments with “the boys,” such as news legend Dan Rather, with whom they’ve worked for years.

For this shift, they’re stuck with me: a workaholic news nerd. They’ve watched me climb my way from radio to affiliate to network TV. No matter what I think I am, to them I’m the former wannabe who is still trying too hard.

I’m also the only reporter I know in our overseas bureaus who has a family with a U.S. military background. My father was a Marine in World War II, surviving the campaigns of Guam and Iwo Jima.

That’s probably why I went on assignment with the military a lot, which didn’t always make me popular. Sometimes crews said no to my ideas.

But to those of us involved right now, tomorrow’s assignment makes perfect sense: There is no other place to be on Memorial Day in Iraq than with U.S. troops.

The three of us had done our preshoot security briefing this evening, not that I could provide much detail. The military press officer who had set up the embed couldn’t tell our producers much over the phone, except that the patrol would take place in central Baghdad (so we could get back in time for the 7 a.m. eastern time live shot on The CBS Early Show, which airs at 3 p.m. local time). You can’t say much over the phone because the insurgents are thought to be monitoring the phone lines.

We don’t know exactly where we are going or what we’ll see, but the story has something to do with U.S. troops training Iraqis. Since tomorrow is a patriotic day, I suspect the story will be along the lines of “As they stand up, we stand down”—the mantra of the U.S. commanders.

My crew and I suspect this will also be what we call a “dog and pony show,” something so sanitized for our cameras that it will be hard to get anything more than an Uncle-Sam-knows-best commercial out of the troops.

But we know that whatever we film will air on the morning show and almost certainly on the CBS Evening News. You can’t NOT make air on a patriotic American holiday when you spend the day with U.S. troops.

And Paul always said, “Don’t risk my life unless we’re going to make air.”

God, what a horrific way I kept that promise.

Tonight as we talked about what I thought we might see tomorrow, Paul and James had no qualms about the assignment. And they were never shy about sharing their “qualms,” that’s for certain; only a week earlier James had told CBS Early Show anchor Harry Smith that he had misgivings about a daylong embed in Sadr City, so the embed had been cancelled. And Paul had turned down several recent shoots with other correspondent-producer teams.

Another bit of proof I cling to that tells me none of us saw what was coming: Paul always called up his wife and told her if he was going on a shoot he thought was dangerous. I found out later that he did call her, but he never mentioned the next day’s assignment.

We settled on an 0800 start, and I’ve settled in for the usual night of pre-embed brooding.

My subconscious mind knows all too well that we are about to go on yet another U.S. Humvee patrol, the kind of patrol we can see from our hotel rooftop each morning rolling out of the Green Zone. We watch the vehicles leave the sandbagged, barbed-wired, watch-towered gates and move toward their mission in town. And then we hear the distant booms and know many of the explosions are aimed at Americans.

This is the first embed of this reporting shift. For the past three years, I’ve rotated six weeks in Baghdad, two to four weeks out, and then I’m back again. It’s hard, dangerous, and often monotonous, the same sad story over and over. Even my own family thinks I’m nuts for spending so much time covering the war. I was first assigned to Iraq because no one else wanted it. I volunteered to cover “the war that was over.” (Remember “Mission Accomplished,” the banner on the carrier deck behind President Bush after the 2003 “Shock and Awe” U.S. invasion of Iraq?) At the time, a lot of reporters thought the Bush administration was right. So the network stars came home, their names already made and their reputations won with a victorious story well told.

That’s when, in June 2003, I was finally promoted to network as a Jerusalem-based correspondent and sent to cover a war my TV bosses couldn’t wait to get out of. Every few months I was warned of another plan to close the Baghdad bureau. But the war kept going, and reluctantly my bosses, like all the other TV bosses, churned more and more money into the war, turning bureaus into fortresses and hiring small armies of security guards and a fleet of armored vehicles.

Necessity was part of why I’ve stayed. Iraq just kept getting on the air, ergo, so did I. Job security, grim reaper-style.

Too, I simply couldn’t leave. Like a car crash on the highway—part needless tragedy, part heroes’ tale, almost all nightmare—I couldn’t take my eyes off the war.

So we’ve had our briefing, agreed on a time to meet in the parking lot in the morning to take our armored vehicles on the mile-or-so jaunt to the Green Zone to meet our interview subjects, and called it a night.

Like an overachieving schoolkid, I’ve laid out my clothes, my helmet, and my flak jacket for the morning. I cleaned out a lot of stuff from my flak jacket pocket to try to lighten my load. For some reason I had two casualty bandages. Our security advisors have taught us to carry one bandage with us at all times, just like the military. Two seemed redundant, so I decided to leave one behind. I remember thinking to myself, We’ll be with the military. If anything happens, they have plenty of supplies. I should have left well enough alone.

I’m finished packing, yet my obsessive-compulsive attention to details still hasn’t quieted my mind.

You’ve done this over and over again in three years, I tell myself. The explosions sometimes barely touch the Humvees. It’s a short trip. You’ll be back by lunch.

I still can’t sleep. I call my boyfriend, Pete, in New Zealand, where it’s daytime.

“Hi.”

“Hey, babe.” He pauses, calculating the time at my end—2 or 3 a.m. “Patrol?”

“Yeah, short one.” I’m embarrassed. “No reason to worry. The usual.”

He lets me talk. I tell him how ridiculous it is to be afraid. He’s heard this on many late-night phone calls before, but he’s patient, as always. He’s worked in Baghdad and has served many long years in the military in war zones. He understands what I’m feeling without my having to say much. He’s lived it. Working in these places does not mean you feel no fear. You feel it, calculate the risks, and push through it.

This has become a ritual: I list my worries. He listens, mostly mute. Then I get a few hours of sleep.

“I hope that all the right decisions are made tomorrow regarding security,” Pete says. Decisions by us? We’re with the military—they decide where we go. And since ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameraman Doug Vogt were hit by a roadside bomb four months earlier, the military won’t let journalists go anywhere remotely dangerous. Indeed the military is checking all of Baghdad even as Pete and I speak to make sure they are sending us to the safest part.

I decide that Pete must mean he hopes we make the right decisions about bringing our safety gear.

“I’m going with Paul and James. Don’t worry, they always bring everything—helmets, vests, earplugs, the works.”

I’m calmer. I’ve talked my fears to sleep, or at least to distraction. I tell Pete “see you,” or something equally nonchalant. He says something Kiwi-male-like, like “G’day, sweetie.”

I grab a couple hours of sleep.

Dawn and the alarm clock drag me awake. I jump into the shower, dry my hair, apply my makeup, and mutter to myself that it’s a waste of time. I don’t enjoy the face-painting part of my job. I apply waterproof makeup so I won’t have to pay attention to it.

Paul and James have beaten me to the parking lot, but not by much. Every minute we spend here gives anyone watching us from surrounding rooftops time to prepare an attack. I’ve been told that it’s better to get to the car and out of the parking lot within 15 minutes. I make it a point to be on time.

“Helmets?” I mother-hen. “Flak jackets? Earplugs?” I pull out a ziplock bag of disposable earplugs in case anyone has forgotten his. They protect our eardrums from the shock waves of roadside bombs.

“Have them already, love. Thanks,” James says, with his heavy London Monty Python-esque accent.

“OK, OK—like I could teach you guys anything about security,” I say, shoving the marshmallowlike earplugs back into my flak jacket pocket. Underneath them is my casualty bandage.

We load up and head out.

We drive to the Green Zone: fortified land that’s home to several small U.S. military bases, where the American and other Western embassies and a few Iraqi officials who have the good fortune, or political pull, to secure themselves a space in the base there. There are a few American fast-food places and a small, picked-over PX that’s still a draw for Americans in search of retail therapy in a war zone. The Green Zone is also the pickup and drop-off point for journalists on short or long embeds.

Our security men drop us off. CNN journalists drive by, bound for somewhere else. We wave to each other. Among them is Cal Perry, the CNN Baghdad bureau chief I met briefly at a military meet-and-greet luncheon a couple days earlier. I don’t know any of them well. None of us journalists really meet each other anymore since we’re all behind walled compounds, only occasionally daring the gauntlet that is Baghdad to go to a press conference.

Paul cracks jokes with one of the Gurkhas at the guard shack where we wait. James has a last cigarette and adds a jibe or two. Our press officer, Maj. Mark Cheadle, picks us up and takes us to meet someone he calls “a really good guy”: Capt. James Funkhouser. We’re supposed to call him Alex, Cheadle tells us. He’s heading a U.S. team that is training Iraqis (they’re standing up so we can stand down, remember, I think to myself). And we’re going to the Karrada.

The Karrada? I feel relief. It will be boring, yes, I think to myself, but it’s a relief. Sure, the Karrada is technically in the Red Zone, Baghdad proper. It’s the neighborhood where we’d all first lived after the invasion. We know the streets. Heck, we know the best sandwich and ice cream shops in the Karrada. There are two dicey squares the insurgents seem to like to hit; but other than that it’s tame. I wonder to myself how we’re going to get this on the air, even on Memorial Day.

We are introduced to our host for the day. At first I think, Boy Scout. Rose-colored glasses alert. No one can be this upbeat. He willingly dons the microphone James supplies and starts answering the questions—truly answering them.

He’s not a boy scout. He turns out to be an upbeat realist, and we’re all relieved. In the command center before we leave, Alex is candid about the serious challenges he and the Army face. I’m looking forward to hearing his thoughts throughout the day.

Before we go Alex shares that the hardest part of his job—as much as the mission and his men give him purpose—is being away from his girls, his wife, Jennifer, and his two daughters, Kaitlyn and Allison.

Alex gathers the men, and we move to the Humvees. I’ll ride with Alex, and Paul and James will ride in another Humvee. There’s some hubbub, and the word comes down that our joint Iraqi patrol won’t be coming with us.

Great, I think. There goes the “As they stand up, we stand down” story. Instead we’ll be filming the instantly recognizable Iraqi-American theme: “They don’t show up, so we do the work for them.”

I’m concerned that they’re backing out because of us, that they think we’ll show their faces and get their families killed by vengeful insurgents who hate anyone who works with the Americans.

I make my way to Alex and tell him my concerns. I ask if there’s any way we can correct the situation, perhaps by promising not to film their faces. He tells me this isn’t the problem. The Iraqis simply aren’t ready, he insists. So they only send their liaison.

We pull out of the gates in four Humvees, snaking first through the diplomatic traffic inside the Green Zone and then crawling when we reach Baghdad’s early morning rush hour, which blends seamlessly into afternoon and evening rush hour.

Riding in the Humvees scares the hell out of me. These are magnets for improvised explosive devices (IEDs). I have my earplugs firmly shoved in both ears and shatterproof glasses wrapped around my head beneath my Kevlar helmet. I sometimes tuck my feet up, pulling them out of the Humvee wheel well, and think that if a bomb goes off under my feet, I’ll lose my legs.

I have my guard up until we reach our first stop, pull over, and get out.

I let my guard down.

I pull my earplugs out so I can better hear any exchanges between the young Army captain and the Iraqis he hopes to meet and gently interrogate on the street: “Were you here yesterday? Did you see the roadside bomb hit the Iraqi patrol? Did you notice anything out of place before that? Have any strangers moved into the area?”

But this is your typical wide-avenued Iraqi neighborhood, where every house is behind a high wall. Finding folks to chat with is going to take some effort. The soldiers fan out. They’re doing their yard-by-yard security checks. Do you see a threat within the first few feet? Something that looks like a wire or a hidden bomb? No? Another 10 feet out? No? How about 15 feet out?

One soldier later said something didn’t feel right—he didn’t like the way the cars were parked. But he convinced himself that nothing looked out of place. We walk down a dusty, deserted street with once lovely villas, some now bombed and burned out, others just shuttered against the sun.

The captain and I walk up the avenue a couple feet, and Paul and James gather their gear and catch up. “What are we doing?” Paul asks, looking unimpressed with the surroundings, a dusty, boring street, like dozens of others we’d filmed. “Looking for Iraqis to talk to,” I answer.

“Right, OK,” he says, scanning the soldiers for a good shot. He and James walk away and start filming the soldiers completing their checks, looking around cautiously, rifles ready—the usual.

The captain turns around, and I follow, walking on his right back down the way we’d come. On our left is a high wall, and behind it is a villa shattered by a much earlier blast.

“See that villa,” Funkhouser asks, “to our left?”

“Uh-huh.” I try not to stare directly at it.

“We think an insurgent cell has moved in there—the ones who were behind yesterday’s bombing. We think they’re using it as an OP [observation post]. They could be watching us right now,” he adds.

The captain spots his translator, Sam, half a block ahead of us, making his way toward an Iraqi tea stand. Finally, some Iraqis to talk to, I think to myself. The tea stand is the usual makeshift affair—a few battered bits of plywood with a cheap awning to keep off the sun, surrounded by a bunch of Iraqis taking a break from work . . . if they had work. Most didn’t.

Funkhouser jackrabbits ahead of me, outpacing me in a few strides. I trail, trying to scribble his last couple thoughts in my notebook.

As he strides forward I see above his left shoulder the mustachioed face of an Iraqi man in a crisp blue dress shirt and dark blue trousers. He’s raising a glass of tea to his lips, tipping it on a saucer he holds in his other hand. He’s looking over the tea glass in the captain’s direction, the expression in his eyes just a bit hostile and questioning—the same look any Iraqi male gives to a U.S. soldier in full battle dress who is striding toward him.

Out of the corner of my eye, on my right, I see Paul and James. They’re moving across my field of vision ahead of us, filming generally in our direction. I assume they’re trying to reach the tea stand to capture the classic shot: the Iraqi faces of mistrust and semi-fear dissolving into semi-smiles, as the American captain puts his hand to his heart in greeting and says, “Salaam alaikum” (peace to you).

Capt. Funkhouser didn’t have to stride down that street ahead of me to greet those Iraqis. He could have kept walking at a leisurely pace, holding forth on his opinion of the world to a network TV reporter, and I would have kept pace with him, walking right up to the bomb. But his mission was more important than his ego, and that surely saved my life.

I watch him draw level with the tea stand, thinking I’ll hang back and let Paul get the shot before I step into the frame to listen.

In that moment, the world slammed backward into black.

CHAPTER 2 waking to horror

LANDSTUHL REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER, GERMANY, JUNE 1 OR 2, 2006

Pinpricks all over my legs like little needles.

Fluorescent light.

Blurry face looking up at me from where she/he is pricking my legs.

Machines beeping.

Trying to speak. Can’t.

Ahh, I get it.

My throat is blocked, my mouth wedged open, my tongue a swollen, wooden thing.

I’ve got a tube in my throat.

More pinpricks draw me back to the blurry person.

I think to myself, Something happened to my legs, and they’re treating them. Something bad happened recently, I remember that, but I can only pull at the edges of the memory. So my mind grapples with the physical sensation and tries to find some familiar context.

I try to tell the blurry person: “Nice acupuncture.” No go.

I don’t take well to forced silence.

So I lift my hands and make that universal “please give me my check” motion, one hand writing on the other.

Blurry person “gets it,” and within moments presses pen and paper into my hands. I can feel my hands, but I can’t see them. My hands are fuzzy pink appendages.

“Nice acupuncture,” I write. Or think I write.

“Sorry, can you try that again?” a woman’s voice asks. It comes from the blurry person.

I then realize I have woken up mute into a world of mentally slow people who can’t read.

I try the phrase again, moving the pen very slowly and very carefully.

Penmanship for dunces.

Do you get it NOW? I ask silently, craning my head toward her and holding out the paper.

“Umm, no, I don’t get that,” says the female voice, all the more frustrating to me for its patient tone. She is trying to soothe my growing agitation.

“Can you try again?” she says.

Hell, lady, that was kindergarten block printing, I think to myself. Clear as day. Can’t you read?

Months later my family showed me my first attempts at words, wildly scribbled like a child’s Etch A Sketch. A team of Discovery Channel cryptographers couldn’t have deciphered my writing.

Adding to the confusion, the woman wasn’t doing acupuncture, so she wasn’t expecting me to write that phrase. My nurse, Capt. Nancy Miller, was changing the bandages on my burned legs and pulling off dead skin as she went, shearing it away from the surviving tissue, which screamed at every tug and tear. I couldn’t feel that then.

I did later, and for a time I thought I would never forget that searing, endless two to three hours of pain each and every day as she changed my dressings.

As I try to recall the sensations now, my legs are mute. They remember nothing of the event. I suppose my mind has gone into protective mode. I know there was repeated horrible pain. But it’s been wiped clean from my memory.

At the moment I first awoke at the hospital, the pain simply felt distant and small. I was floating, courtesy of some of the best drugs the Western medical profession has to offer. I didn’t realize what was happening. I’d been so straight-laced all my life that I had no frame of reference for a Class A drug trip. Versed, morphine, an epidural drip, and IV Dilaudid were now my rotating feast of narcotic companions.

Time fogged by. Even now the memories from Landstuhl aren’t sequential. They’re a kaleidoscope, overlapping in a daze. But Nancy later told me she didn’t expect me to remember my stay at Landstuhl at all—most people don’t.

Maybe it’s because I woke up frustrated and angry so the adrenaline hammered home my memories. I didn’t understand why no one could understand what I was writing. There were more pinpricks on my legs, and then she finished whatever she was doing to them. I felt as though my legs were disembodied from me, floating at the end of the bed, swathed in white.

I drifted. Nancy meanwhile had gone straight to find my loved ones to tell them: She’s woken up. She’s with us.

The next event I recollect is a sea of faces around me. I study them through eyes I can barely open. My family—at least as many members as CBS could gather at that moment—surround me. They were scattered all over the world and rarely gather. The last time I remembered them all in the same room was 1995, for my wedding. (The marriage didn’t last, but the ceremony produced the only family photo my parents possessed of all their children together, ever. Mom kept the picture on display, despite the reminders that it also heralded another divorce in the family.) So family gatherings are a rare event.

Yet half of my family members are at the hospital—and one new addition, my boyfriend, Pete.

Pete comes into focus . . . then my sister, MeiLee, who is next to Pete (part of my brain thinking, Wow, my sister only comes up to Pete’s shoulder). Then I see my 80-plus-year-old mom and dad. My brother Mike and his Texan wife, Sherry, my “second mom,” are just outside. I don’t take them in until later. My three other far-flung brothers, Bob, Larry, and Doug, are missing. Mike is their delegate, so to speak.

My mind scrambles to make sense of this gathering. I think to myself, Pete’s here from New Zealand. MeiLee’s here from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Mom and Dad, who haven’t stepped on a plane in a decade, are here from Baltimore . . .

Two thoughts war in my head, Wow, I always wanted Mom and Dad to meet Pete . . . and Oh, no. Something really bad must have happened.

“You have both your legs,” someone tells me.

Yeah, of course I do. I thought they were doing acupuncture on them.

“You’re going to be fine,” someone else says.

Yeah, yeah. I think to myself.

“I love you,” says Pete.

I freeze. This is a new shock. In three years together, since meeting on the way to Iraq, he’s never said that.

My mom later says triumphantly, “He said it in front of all of us. He can’t take it back!” My parents don’t know Pete. They are watching everything he does, judging his worthiness, while he is grappling with seeing me . . . like that.

I later saw photos my nurse, Nancy, took for me at Pete’s request. He said to her, “She’s a journalist. She’ll want to know.” I did, but the pictures were hell to look at—hell to know that’s what my family saw and tried not to react to, to keep from upsetting me.

My face and body were swollen with 30 pounds of fluid, the body’s response to trauma. In layman’s terms, my body panicked after losing more than half its blood and simply held on to all the IV fluid that was pumped into it. But there was no room for the excess fluid in my blood vessels or my organs, so it filled my extra spaces, such as my abdominal cavity, my lungs, and, most visible, my neck tissue and limbs. I looked like a pale Jabba the Hut, with Michelin Man-sized arms and legs swathed in white cotton bandages. There was still dried blood under my fingernails and crusted on my puffed-up hands. Tubes were in my nose and mouth, and IV lines ran directly into my blood vessels. A large burn visible on one of my arms was oiled with unguents. My head was half shaved, and there was a stitched incision. The doctors had opened my skull to remove shrapnel, then riveted it back in place with titanium screws with plates attached to either side to hold the floating bone in place. When I look at the photo, I see another Star Wars image: Darth Vader’s glowing, scarred skull.

My face and the right side of my body were peppered in red and blackish cuts where shrapnel had bored into me. It will be working its way out of me for the next several months and years.

In the hospital, though, at that gathering, I can’t see any of this. I only know Pete has just said he loves me. I think, He said he loves me. Oh, God, if he said that, I must be in real trouble.

I fade out again. Pete said I could barely keep my eyes open—later, when I could speak, I would even drift off midsentence.

I wake again. Nancy is doing something with the tubes or the wires or the bandages—I’m so critical, she is doing “one-on-one” care, meaning she almost never leaves my side for an entire 12-hour shift. I am going to take advantage of that constant presence and get some answers.

Ever so carefully I pick up the pen and try again, writing with intense, determined concentration.

I think to myself, She won’t know what I mean if I write, Where are Paul and James?

So I write ever so carefully: “WHERE . . . IS . . . MY . . . CREW?”

All I know for certain is that the LAST moment I remember before this blazing white world, I was with my crew—though Paul and James hated that phrase. “We’re not your fucking crew,” Paul would tell anyone who called him and his soundman that, chip prominent on his shoulder.

But my crew was with me. I was their correspondent, whether they liked it or not, and now we are forever linked by this event.

Nancy came into focus, her kind brown eyes with arching brows, her reddish hair covered with some sort of puffy hat, her blue scrubs, a gown, and gloves. She may have also been wearing a mask. I was peering so intensely at her eyes, looking for a reaction, that I hardly took in the rest of her face.

She was expecting this question.

“Where is my crew?” she asks, forming the words carefully. “You want to know about your cameraman and soundman.”

I think I nodded, or tried to.

“I’ll get someone for you,” she told me.

That was another vague answer, and frustration welled up in me again. This was all people gave me. I don’t remember much of those early hours or days, but I know that wherever I was, I asked about Paul and James. And I kept receiving the same answer: silence.

Nancy sought my family in a nearby waiting room.

“She’s asking about her camera crew,” Nancy says. “Do you want to tell her?”

My dad calls it, immediately. “If she’s asking, she needs to know,” he says. “We have to tell her.”

As they’re deciding who will deliver the news, I’m in my own evanescent world.

Memories of the explosion start to come back. I work hard, snatching at those edges and puzzling together the memories—but they don’t always stay where I put them. They keep sliding away from me. There was an explosion, I know that. I want to know what type—I will be told conflicting things over the next few weeks about what it was.

I remember some of what it felt like. Sulfur smells, like fireworks burning just under my face. Jagged images: I had been at work, in Baghdad, filming something with Paul and James, and the world had slammed backward like I’d been knocked into a black dimension.

I didn’t know when that was or where Paul and James were. But I needed to find out.

My family decided my Baghdad producer, Kate Rydell, would tell me what had happened. I didn’t know at that point that she had been at my side since I reached the Baghdad emergency room.

She walks into my Landstuhl hospital room and slowly comes into focus. At 5-foot-nothing, she seems dwarfed by the medical equipment around me, small in the fluorescent, glowing white room. Kate is a lady, always dressed perfectly in understated, quiet linens and silk sweaters—her defiance against the awful places we work, I guess.

Now she is crushed, her face shrunken by grief, pinched in on itself. She has none of her usual composure. I see the way she steels her face to look at me, takes a deep breath, and starts what she’s been endlessly rehearsing in her mind.

She says, “I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

She doesn’t need to say another word. I don’t really want her to.

“Paul and James didn’t make it,” Kate chokes out.

She cries.

I can’t.

The tube is still in my throat. My face is frozen and numb. My mind does an instinctive “this is not happening,” and I close my eyes. I am so paralyzed, it’s as if I have lost the power to cry.

If I could have spoken, all I would have said was no.

Kate later told me that my whole body imploded, trying to ball up and drive backward into the hospital bed. My body said what my voice couldn’t: no, no, no.

She leaves. My mind starts scrambling. Now I desperately need to remember what happened—what killed them.

We’d been filming something. Then impact. A shuddering crash, then black. It was a bomb, I think. Where were they? Where was I? Where was the bomb?

Minutes, or hours, later I reach for my pen and paper again—my family has to hold it for me and try to switch the pages when I run out of space—I’m completely unaware.

I write things like “I remember it. BOOM. An explosion.”

My writing has gotten sharper.

“I heard screaming,” I wrote.

My drug- and pain-scattered memories stumble to catch up. My brain starts sentences it can’t finish and picks them up minutes, or hours, later. I am an indifferent conversationalist at best.

In the jumble, some facts are now crystal clear: I am in an intensive care ward in Landstuhl, Germany. Other soldiers from my patrol were in rooms nearby. My family is here; my CBS colleagues are here.

And Paul and James are gone.

Another unwelcome realization creeps into my consciousness within a day or so of waking up, about three days into my stay—the world was waiting outside. My survival, and my condition, is news.

I wasn’t ready to think about that just now. I didn’t know how to respond or what to say. My mind was stuck in a Baghdad street, trying to remember.

My sister was the first to hear my halting account. She didn’t encourage me to keep talking. The fact that I remembered the blast shocked her. My family hoped I’d remember nothing. She hid her horror; she didn’t want to hear about the blast, but she didn’t let me know that.

I also didn’t know that the first time she’d come into my room, she’d seen me swollen, bandaged, with blood-streaked hands, and she’d burst into tears. My mom, ever the German policeman of our emotions (and her own), pulled MeiLee aside and said, “Don’t let her see you like that. Smile. We have to be strong for her.” My mom didn’t want anyone to be the mirror that showed me how bad I looked. They were parceling reality out to me slowly in horrible—but, they hoped, manageable—bites.

Still I knew more than they did. They couldn’t protect me from my memories. If they could have, I’m sure they would have tried to take them away, but that would have damned me. I learned that for me to avoid the recurring nightmares, the anxiety, and the host of other symptoms that are normal in the month after trauma, but left unheeded can develop into the infamous “PTSD” or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I needed to relive everything I could, moment by moment.

I started that process in my hospital bed. In between the doctors, the nurses, the endless surgical procedures, the drug drifts, and my loved ones holding my hand, there were moments of clarity when the pieces started coming back, sticking where I put them.

I told MeiLee that Paul and James were walking ahead of me, a bit to the side, trying to move ahead of Alex. I don’t remember how much detail I told her at that moment. I had to work backward in my head from the single moment that stayed with me clearly: the instant of the explosion. It was like when you hit your head hard and momentarily see stars, only a thousand times worse. There was pitch blackness, a smell like a thousand burning matches, and a feeling of being strangely weightless, as if I were diving underwater. Once I’d grabbed the edge of that memory, I kept revisiting it, repeatedly, for weeks. I’d remember the blast and the slam sideways, and my body would be frozen in space with the memory, locked in that moment.

CHAPTER 3 one bomb refracted

Over the next few days, I pulled together the sequence, from blast to pain to rescue to unconsciousness, reliving it as if I was there.

I remember in that blackness saying to myself, Bomb, some sort of bomb. The sulfur helped prove that to me.

I knew the what but not the where or the how. At first there was no pain, no sound, no sensation of my arms or legs or face. I didn’t even have time for horror. Just awareness: This is happening.

I was flung into the air, but I don’t remember landing. By the time I did, both legs were smashed from the sheer force of being knocked back, and the explosion had scorched much of my right leg, some of my left, and parts of my arms. I was peppered with bits of molten metal and car parts, which were embedded in me from head to toe.

Where are Paul and James? my brain stuttered. I was searching for familiar points of reference, and that meant them.

I tried to remember where they’d been standing. I tried to remember where I’d been standing.

Then I tried my voice. Pauw-hhhh. No sound. I didn’t know both my eardrums were blown out. If I was speaking at all, I couldn’t hear myself or anything else. Then Ja-hhhhh, I tried.

It was like those nightmares when you try to call for help but your screams are mute. You wake up hearing a long, useless “Hhhhhhhhh” coming from your throat. You’re powerless.

My brain started ticking, trying to figure out why there was no input, no sensation. A colleague’s words floated back to me. I’d read them in an article only the day before the patrol. It was in a stack of a couple hundred pages of newsprint I’d made my way through to catch up on whatever my colleagues have been up to. It was my routine every time I started a new shift in Baghdad.

This time my “homework” saved me from panic. I’d read the account by ABC cameraman Doug Vogt about what it felt like to be hit by an improvised explosive device (IED). He’d been hit by a blast while filming anchorman Bob Woodruff as he recorded an on-camera web chat out of the top of an Iraqi armored vehicle. They’d been attacked exactly four months prior to when our patrol was attacked: January 29, 2006. They both took shrapnel and rocks to the head.

Doug’s words came back to me. “When the bomb hit, I couldn’t move,” he wrote. I remember thinking how awful that must have been to be aware of what was happening around you but remain paralyzed, shell-shocked.

I knew Doug from brief introductions in various hellholes. He was a wizened pro, who had seen it all before and greeted you with gruff “Hi, how are you.” I didn’t know him well, but in that moment of panic, I immediately trusted his words.

I told myself, OK, Doug, you were right. I can’t move.

And then, what seemed an eternity later, OK, Doug, I still can’t move.

Then louder in my head, losing patience now, Doug, when can I move?

I drifted into blackness.

The next thing I saw was bright, blazing hell. I was lying face-to-the-sky in the debris. My legs were burning, searing. Pain and heat. I lifted my head and saw a burning car, maybe 20 or 30 feet away. The chassis burned bright orange, the tires, a little darker. I thought the heat of the car’s fire was hurting me. Again my brain was trying to make sense of the moment, putting the clues together that it could see or feel, trying to make some logical whole. My car theory wasn’t right. The burning I was feeling was from damage already done, the blast-molten shrapnel embedded throughout my body, car-parts-turned-missiles, literally searing into my flesh and melting parts of my clothing into my skin.

Luckily for my sanity, as I lay there on the ground, I could only see the bulk of my flak jacket, not the ruin of my legs.

Even if I could have seen them, I don’t know how much I would have taken in. I lifted my right hand and failed to see the cut on my pointer finger, a seven-inch gash that started at the top of the finger, to the back of my hand, bloody and tendon-deep. My mind blocked it out.

I started crying out for help, still weak, but this time I said words I could hear.

“Help! The car’s burning me. Help!” God, how pathetic, I thought. My inner critic barked that I sound like a cliché.

I heard other voices, choked by pain, calling for help. They sounded otherworldly and unidentifiable. “Help me! Somebody help me!”

Did my voice sound like that too, strangled and high-pitched? I asked myself.

Should I be calling for help? chimed in another voice in my head. In triage, you go to the people who aren’t making any sound first. It’s the rules of the ABCs: airway, breathing, and circulation. You first ensure all your quiet casualties have an airway and are breathing. You make sure their hearts haven’t stopped.

Then you help the ones who are making noise. They obviously have an airway, as I did. Just by calling out, I knew I’d made myself a lower priority for the medics.

Next I thought, The hell with that. The car’s burning me. That meant I was in immediate danger, and I needed to get away. I gave myself permission to scream.

Louder now, “Hellllp!” I rasped. “It’s burning. Helllllp!” It must not have sounded like much. One of the soldiers later said I was crying. I don’t remember that. I remember a take-charge voice in my head barking orders at me and then only somewhat more gently at my rescuers.

Within a minute or two, as near as I could tell, a soldier was dragging me away from the blaze. I couldn’t see his face. When I lifted my head, I still couldn’t see anything but the front of my flak jacket and the fire.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

introduction

CHAPTER 1

just before

CHAPTER 2

waking to horror

CHAPTER 3

one bomb refracted