Kimberly Dozier

Kimberly Dozier is a former CBS news correspondent who became the news during an embed assignment in Baghdad over the Memorial Day weekend in 2006. What was to be a ’routine’ assignment, if such a thing existed, turned into a hellish nightmare after a 500 pound car bomb was detonated at the scene. Assigned to follow a patrol over the holiday while Americans at home were eating their barbeque and doing their best to forget about the war, the incident put the war back ‘above the fold’. Four members of the party, Captain James Alex Funkhouser, USA, CBS cameraman Paul Douglas, CBS soundman James Brolan and Captain Funhouser’s Iraqi translator, Sam, died at the scene, all but Douglas, instantly. Breathing the Fire is Dozier’s account of that day and the aftermath it wrought.
The story is engrossing, and as a reporter, Dozier makes it a compelling read. The book opens with Dozier setting the scene the night before the assignment. From there she darts back and forth through time, recounting the story as well as how she put the pieces of the story together. Not unusually for a traumatic brain injury (TBI) sufferer, it took a lot of time and a lot of digging to get the pieces to fall into place. She had to rely on information from outside sources until her slowly recovering brain could fill in all the facts.
Breathing the Fire gives an in-depth view of trauma care and a small glimpse of the people who provide it. Dozier sets the scene from the Baghdad street corner all the way through her return to work. Included are stops at the Combat Support Hospital (CSH) in Baghdad’s Green Zone and the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a “way station” in Germany for injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as troops based in Germany and their family members. From there Dozier is transferred to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and finally to Kernan Hospital for further rehabilitation.
Through each step, Dozier paints a vivid picture of her injuries, her pain and her care. The tale is emotionally raw and honest. She describes the toll that the bomb took not only on her and her loved ones, but those of the other victims as well. She talks to other service members from the scene as well as family members of those that were lost. In the process, she also tells the story of how she got to her position in Baghdad. The book is really an autobiography of her entire life, including her fight to return to ‘normal life’ and get back in the field.
Overall, this was a riveting read; almost in stream-of-consciousness mode, the pages keep turning as the tale moves along. The faults are few: Dozier shows a tendency to repeat herself occasionally; the quickly shifting timeline can be a little confusing at times; she also tends to break situations, things and people into simply dichotomies. There is very little grey; there is good and there is evil. And, with very few exceptions, regarding people, the split is class-based: military figures in the field are all good, administrators, not so much. Nurses and corpsmen are good, doctors tend to be evil. (This is one area where exceptions can be found, notably Dr. Dunne at Bethesda)
Additionally, Dozier spends a decent amount of the book justifying herself, her life and her career choices. While understandable given the context, at times it doesn’t come across very well. She mentions in the postscript to the paperback edition that with some time and distance, she saw the writing as “angry” and chose not to edit that out, as it was her true self at that time. I didn’t sense anger so much as defensiveness and I don’t know that Dozier has anything about which to be defensive.
… (altro)

Memorial day, 2006. Stateside. It is a time for hamburgers on the grill, cold beer, flags and a race car race. Swimming pools open for the first time for the season. Churches host picnic's and parks will fill with people and their dogs, all out to enjoy the start of the summer.

Memorial day, 2006. Iraq. In Bagdad, the capital city, within the Red Zone, in a neighborhood called Karrada, the scene is quite different. Instead of hamburger and cold beer, laughing children and people walking their pets, an Iraqi terrorist watches in secret as a US military patrol motors into an area that just the night before suffered a car bomb that killed Iraqi soldiers. The Iraqi terrorist watches with interest as the motor patrol stops, and troops get out to ask questions in an attempt to gather intelligence on yesterday's bombing. At just the right time, a homemade bomb, placed in the trunk of a car, parked alongside the roadway, is remotely detonated using a cell phone killing Captain James Funkhouser, his Iraqi translator, Sam, CBS news cameraman Paul Douglas, CBS news soundman James Brolan, and an Iraqi citizen who happened to be enjoying a cup of tea at the wrong time at the wrong place. Five dead. CBS news foreign correspondent Kimberly Dozier lies critically injured, bleeding to death in the street. Six US soldiers each with varying degrees of shrapnel and flame wounds have been injured in the blast as well.

This is the reality of the Iraq war. No day is a safe day in Iraq.

What follows is the true grit tale of the remarkable recovery and journey that Kimberly Dozier takes. This journey is painful even to the reader. Ms. Dozier has written her story with such clarity and insight that you can feel the pain as the bandages are being taken from her burned and shrapnel shredded legs. The pain as she undergoes physical therapy to get her knees to move and bend again. The pain she has from the skin graft donor sites as she is literally skinned alive to move living flesh to places that the flesh had been burned away. These are the physical wounds.

You are given a ringside seat to the emotional trauma that she experiences. The pain and sorrow of the death of her friends and coworkers Paul Douglas and James Brolan. You can feel the pain of Ms. Dozier's aging parents, who first show up in Landstuhl, Germany, to be beside their daughter just hours after the blast, as they watch their daughter fight to get healthy enough to even move to the United States for care. Ms. Dozier's boyfriend, Pete, a brother and his wife, and a sister from Vietnam are also there to witness the aftermath of roadside terror and daily life in Iraq. Pete, the stalwart from New Zealand, will spend hours, which quickly turn into days of his life in the protection and care of his severely damaged girlfriend.

Working in the medical industry and married to a registered nurse, I found the transition of care from Germany to stateside remarkable. And disgusting. And we wonder why we have a health care crisis here in America.

One of my favorite stories is about Lidia Garner, a wound care specialist RN at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Maryland. This Ms. Garner has to have the mettle and moxie of seasoned prizefighter, countermanding orders of physicians who were practicing treatment methods of a decade past. Any registered nurse, willing to cancel the order of the I-am-the-doctor-therefore-I-am-god and change a course of treatment for a patient, and stand up and not back down has my respect. Wherever she currently works, her patients are getting care from one extraordinary nurse.

This story is fascinating and horrible to read all at the same time. It made me shed tears and made me smile. I cannot say it made me laugh, for it did not. It was much to serious for that. But there are joys and happy times recorded in Ms. Dozier's road to recovery. There is support from family and friends few people are lucky enough to enjoy. Support from an employer willing to do things to help in the recovery, like flying family members from all over the globe to her bedside. And the remarkable, constant and ever present support from her companion, Pete. That is one hell of a guy.

I recommend this book to anyone and everyone. This is a remarkable tale of courage and determination. Of one woman's fight to live, and her road to recovery, both physical and mentally. And it is a tribute to the fallen members of that embedded news team, Paul Douglas and James Brolan, and Captain James Funkhouser, United States Army.

In war, some die. Others live. There is no reason as to who or why. As Ms. Dozier wrote, when recalling meeting colleague's who do not understand that; 'Yes, I'm here. No, I'm not apologizing.'

Godspeed, Kimberly Dozier.… (altro)