On The Edge, Between Life And Death

When Kimberly Dozier was brought to the U.S. Combat Surgical Hospital — the Baghdad "CASH" as it's called — she was clinging to life.

Army surgeon David Steinbruner was on call. "I came down, threw my M-16 on my shoulder, 'cause we carry it wherever we are. I'm in PT clothes, you know, shorts and a T-shirt, and I see one of our best nurses down there," Dr. Steinbruner recalls. "He said, 'Dr. Steinbruner, I need you in the back. This woman's really sick."

"So I walked around to the back and she was as white as a sheet laid out on the bed. I had no idea who she was," Steinbruner remembers. "Her legs were clearly badly injured and she was, seemed to me unconscious. Came up to the bedside just to see if she could breathe, if she was alive. And she said to me with closed eyes, with the mask on, 'My name is Kim.' Pushed the mask off. She clearly was somewhere else at that time."

CBS News producer Kate Rydell got to the hospital as fast as she could. "I grabbed my bag and I grabbed two of our security guys and we flew down the stairs and even as I was running down the stairs, my phone was ringing, and it was a reporter from Reuters television saying, 'Can you confirm that your guys have been severely injured?'" she remembers.

"The doctor took me around the corner and there is Kimberly covered in blood, from head to toe. I thought, this is it, we have to kiss her goodbye, because this is, nobody looks like this and is going to survive this kind of thing," Rydell recalls.

"We lose the pulse. So we slam home blood as fast as we can, I get a pulse back. By definition, she died for a moment," Steinbruner says. "At the time, when we lost her pulse, I thought we were actually going to lose her completely. I mean I kind of think of that as being on the edge of a precipice between life and death, and she's pushing, rocking back and forth. She's still alive, but I don't know how much longer."

"They keep using expressions like, 'Very sick, she's very sick… we don't know if she's going to survive…50-50 chance if she's going to make it. If she makes it, she's probably not going to keep her legs,'" Rydell remembers.

While Dozier hovered between life and death, several soldiers from the 4th I.D. were also being treated for serious injuries from the blast. One of them was Cpl. Michael Potter.

"Your hands are obviously scarred from this. At the time this happened, what did they look like?" Katie Couric asks Potter.

"I couldn't tell you. I was just in a daze. They all told me they looked purple," he says. "They were swollen. Almost twice the size they are now. …I was in the same room as Sgt. Farrar, Sgt. Reed, and it was just everyone was in pain. It was terrible."

Staff Sgt. Nathan Reed had a badly wounded leg; Sgt. Justin Farrar was battling multiple life-threatening injuries; Spc. Leon Snipes had shrapnel wounds to his face; and Sgt. Ezequiel Hernandez had a seriously injured leg and a blown-out eardrum.

"It was a total chaos in there and I was in another room 'cause I wasn't severely injured and to myself, I was just thinking, 'How could this happen to us?'" Hernandez recalls.

But the fact they had all even made it to the "CASH" was astounding.

Dozier would have died on the street if not for a near-miracle. Her savior was not even a medic, just a soldier whose patrol responded to the scene of the explosion. His name is Jeremy Koch, a staff sergeant with the Iowa National Guard.

"I didn't know if she was gonna make it or not but I was gonna do my best. She was laying in a pool of blood," Koch remembers. "And that's when I noticed the cuts that are on both her legs. And that's when I started putting the tourniquet on.

"If they had left off a tourniquet, she might have died in route," Steinbruner says. "So that kind of bravery and presence of mind, to know how to apply the skills that they've learned there on the field of battle is pretty impressive."

But as that awful day in the "CASH" dragged on, the day's losses began to sink in.

"Since nobody had said anything about Capt. Funkhouser to me, and this was almost, you know, four hours later, you know. My heart just kind of sank," remembers Spc. Scott Rietvelt.

Funkhouser did not survive. He was the 2,467th American soldier killed in the war in Iraq. His translator, Sam, was also killed. The unit was devastated and decimated.

"I wake up the next day, and Farrar and I, we'd been rooming together. Farrar wasn't there anymore," Rietvelt remembers. "When I go to work, the commander would always walk out in his flip-flops you know, and he'd say, 'Hey,' and he's not there anymore. I'd look outside, and my truck is there, but I know it wasn't going anywhere, 'cause I didn't have anybody to go with me."

Meanwhile, Dozier was flown to a specialty hospital in Balad, Iraq, for emergency surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel that had penetrated her skull. Still critical, she was then rushed out of Iraq, to the military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

The most severe U.S. casualties from the war zone are taken to the U.S. hospital in Landstuhl; Dozier arrived there just one day after the bombing.

The first face Dozier remembers waking up to was Nancy Miller, an Air Force nurse assigned to Kimberly's case.

Miller took photos, which showed the severe injuries Dozier had suffered. There were breathing tubes, IVs and lots of shrapnel wounds.

Almost as soon as Dozier was admitted to the intensive care unit at Landstuhl, her boyfriend, Pete — who had flown all night — arrived from New Zealand.

"That's a bit of a shock. She looked different," he recalls. "I said, 'Sweetheart, it's me. It's Pete. I'm here beside ya. Everything's gonna be okay.' And she responded by squeezing my hand. A huge pressure was released and it was a great relief I felt."

During dressing changes, Miller says Pete would hold Dozier's hand and talk to her to keep her distracted.

Dozier had several surgeries at Landstuhl. Most critically, she had titanium rods inserted in both legs to save them. But while she lay in that hospital bed, unable to speak, it wasn't her legs she was most worried about. She wrote a barely legible note, asking about Paul and James.

"She couldn't even really properly write, and she still wanted to get the message out to us she wanted to know what happened to them. So I moved up to the head of her bed and I said, 'Kimberly, Paul and James were killed in the blast. They didn't survive,'" Rydell remembers. "And it was an immediate physical reaction. Her body collapsed from inside. It was like every ounce of air that she had inside sucked out, and I didn't know if she was going to have some really serious reaction to this. It was like she could not bear the brunt as if I had struck her with a heavy object."

"That was the beginning, though, wasn't it, of your survivor's guilt, feeling, 'Why am I here and they're not?'" Couric asks Dozier.

"I thought we were more prepared than I was for this to happen. I felt like we'd gone on what was supposed to be a safe mission and this horrible nightmare had opened up on us. And I immediately thought, their wives, they're going to want to know why I took their loved ones into that," Dozier replies.