Dozier: No Safety Guaranteed In Iraq

CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was critically injured by a car bomb in Baghdad, wrote this article for the 2005 Summer issue of Wellesley, the magazine of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association.

The blast was just close enough to our hotel to give everyone in the bureau a rude wake-up call, but it was much worse for our Iraqi bureau manager, Firas. He'd just driven by the target — an Iraqi forces recruiting station — seconds before a suicide car bomber rammed into the front gate, killing 35 would-be recruits and injuring 100 more. Firas' car was rear-ended by the force of the bomb, the windshield blown out, the windows cracked. But he fared better than the guy behind him, whose car was practically obliterated.

Firas made it to work, sent his car to the shop, and poured himself a stiff early-morning Scotch (he doesn't drink), then retreated to a darkened room for the rest of the day. He did not tell his family — especially his mother — fearing she'd henceforth ban him from leaving their house. That's what many Iraqis do to avoid the violence on Baghdad's streets: They stay home for weeks, sometimes even months.

For most Americans, the bombing was just another ugly headline that would doubtless cause many to change the channel. It would likely prompt yet another U.S. military commander to ask me, "Why do you always report the bad news?" Because I can't ignore 35 people being killed, no matter how many hospitals or schools have been rebuilt, I would invariably reply.

There has been good news in Iraq — the election, for instance, with the massive popular turnout, which rocked the pessimistic press back on its heels, me included. But there are still more bad days than good, which is not a welcome message back home. It's also hard to find a new way to describe the same horrors over and over in order to keep Americans listening, when they've heard a phrase like "hail of shrapnel and glass" 100 times before.

Then again, I can't go so far as to show on air what I really see, like the bits of people I've inadvertently ended up standing upon amid the wreckage of a car bomb. After I'd finished stand-ups at one scene, the producer pointed out, "Did you notice you were standing on someone's toe?" We can't put that on TV.

The truth is, no matter how I'd like to spend my days doing "good news" stories, Iraq is still a horror show, one most Iraqis and many young American soldiers cannot escape, and one U.S. commanders have admitted will take years to change, given the strength of the insurgency.

So we stay on, broadcasting a message that isn't always popular with the military or our audience, in an environment that has gotten more dangerous for journalists, and for every other type of foreigner, by the day — and more dangerous still for Iraqis.

A City of Armed Camps

Baghdad's skyline has to be etched into every American's brain by now: a chockablock dun-colored hodgepodge of ugly post-Soviet modern buildings with a couple of blue mosques thrown in, which help break up the skyline when someone has bothered to dust them off. The Tigris runs through it, but the river is treated more like an obstacle to traffic than anything else. Saddam Hussein didn't let anyone on it, parceling out the best riverside plots to his chums. The attitude stuck; people turned their backs on the river then, and it has stayed that way. The few restaurants that did make a living along the shores are now mostly shut, because few people dare to venture out after dark for an evening meal.

Our bureau takes up an entire floor of one of the city's largest hotels. When security gets really bad, say when the militants put out one of their occasional "We're gonna get all the foreigners" flyers, we're mostly housebound. Then the hotel compound becomes what I like to call "the Habitrail Hotel for Hamsters and Journalists," and my days dissolve into a mind-numbing series of trips from my room, to the office, to the roof, to the office, to the roof, to the room, and to bed.

When we do go back outside, we have to take care, because we stand out. While a newspaper journalist can still get around a bit — just one person, with an Iraqi driver, a notebook, a recorder, and a microphone — TV news requires a small army: a correspondent, a producer, a cameraman, a soundman, a translator, and two drivers, all tucked into two armored vehicles.

That means we need a veritable army to guard us. On every trip outside the hotel, we take along at least two former British Special Forces guys, with AK-47s tucked discreetly inside their first-aid packs. Their job: to watch for anyone in the traffic who seems to be paying too much attention to us.

They tell us, however, that two to three of them are still not enough to fight back if, say, a dozen armed attackers hit us — a method that has been used to kidnap foreigners from vehicles or compounds in the past. But they say they may be able to buy some of us enough time to get away. Not very reassuring, to say the least.

So when we drive to interview an imam or a politician, our "security advisors," as they are called, are ready to respond, with one hand on their radios and the other resting on the butt of the gun at their feet — or tucked in the trigger at particularly tense moments. When we get invited to barbecues or dinners at other networks across town, we usually decline. Like Iraqis, we've learned the merits of traveling only when absolutely necessary.