Kimberly Dozier, a CBS News correspondent who had been covering the war in Iraq since August 2003, was seriously wounded by a car bomb on Memorial Day, May 29, 2006. The blast killed her fellow passengers, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, as well as the U.S. Army captain they were following and his Iraqi translator. Gravely injured, Dozier underwent multiple surgeries and months of physiotherapy and eventually recovered completely. This is an excerpt of her story, “Breathing the Fire.”

A Story of Tragedy ...

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 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.

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