Reliving Memorial Day 2006

On Memorial Day 2006, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier and her camera crew, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan, were on patrol with the 4th Infantry Division to cover a story when a car bomb exploded.

The bomb, made up of at least two artillery shells and weighing between 300 and 500 pounds, was placed in a car and remotely detonated.

The bomb struck with deadly force, killing Douglas, Brolan, an Army captain and his translator; Dozier and six others were injured.

What followed is a story of survival, sacrifice and heroism.

Asked how many surgeries she has had since the car bomb changed her life forever, Dozier tells Katie Couric, "I've lost count. More than 25."

"If you had to go through a laundry list, Kimberly, of what you've experienced since you were wounded, can you tick it off for me?" Couric asks.

"The car bomb went off on this side of me," Dozier says, referring to her right side. "So most of the damage was to this side of my body."

One of her leg bones was broken in three places from the force of the blast. "My legs have rods in them," Dozier explains.

"Seeing that, it's a lot more messed up than I realized," she says, looking at an x-ray of her legs. "I try not to think about this as me...it sometimes hits me later."

"My eardrum was blown out," she adds.

"There's some shrapnel floating somewhere in here," Dozier says, touching her head. "I've seen it on the x-rays, it'll probably always be there."

Aside from shrapnel injuries, she also suffered burns, mostly to her right leg.

"I went in and out of the O.R. so many times that, like breathing, it was just another thing I had to do every couple of days," she says, reflecting on her many surgeries.

"I just wondered if you wake up incredulous that you have gone through all that you've gone through?" Couric asks.

"For the first six, seven months, whenever I'd wake up, it would all come back. What had happened, why I was there. How far I had to go before I could get back to normal, back to where I was. And the people I'd lost. The people we all had lost that day," she replies.

A year ago, Kimberly Dozier was reporting for CBS News from Iraq. "Coming back to Iraq is like coming home," she says. "Since the invasion, I spent most of my working life there."

"That was my family. The CBS Baghdad bureau. I had moved into one of the rooms," she remembers.

When Dozier returned to Baghdad at the end of last May, she was assigned to work with cameraman Paul Douglas, soundman James Brolan, and producer Kate Rydell. Their first assignment was to produce a story for Memorial Day.

"It was a piece that The Early Show asked us to do about Memorial Day, that the soldiers don't get a holiday," Rydell recalls. "It's any other day for them. They don't get to sit back and have parties and hot dogs. They're at work."

So the team quickly planned to embed themselves with a unit of the Army's 4th Infantry Division.

Asked how the assignment came about, Rydell says, "The Army wants as few people as possible on any kind of patrol. The reporter has to go, the cameraman has to go, the question is the sound man. Does the sound man have to go? Any cameraman in these situations wants somebody who's going to watch his back. But it puts another person at risk. So the Army wanted to take two, and I argued very strongly for three."

The Army relented and soundman James Brolan was allowed to go. James was new to CBS, but was a veteran combat journalist, having recently worked in Iraq for ABC with anchor Bob Woodruff.

"James, he just started working with us, especially working with Paul," Dozier explains. "They need to be a team that reads each other's mind, so to speak. And James and Paul had that sort of teamwork going.

Paul Douglas was one of the very best and most experienced cameramen at CBS News.

"Paul was sort of the life of the bureau. Big man, big personality. Amazing smile. When you were shooting in a dangerous situation and you were dealing with soldiers at a checkpoint and they didn't want to let you through, he would just change the mood—that big smile, joking around, and pretty soon the tension would dissolve and the soldiers would say, 'Oh yeah, sorry, go through,'" Dozier remembers.

"He is the guy that I would go into hell and back with," Rydell says. "I mean, if he said it was safe to do this thing, we could do this, I'm in the car, absolutely. And he got us into and out of many dicey situations."

Still, the night before the shoot, Dozier was anxious. "I was always scared going out with U.S. patrols. I could never sleep the night before. Always 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning I'd be staring at the ceiling going, 'If you don't get some sleep, you won't be able to think straight tomorrow.' Having this argument with my fears," she explains.

So she called her boyfriend, Pete, who used to work in security in Iraq and lives in New Zealand. "We both knew the risks. We lived in Baghdad, which is the most dangerous city on earth at the present time," Pete says. "I was apprehensive and I looked forward to her checkin' in again after it was finished."

The next morning, Memorial Day, Dozier and the camera crew met their subject, 35-year-old U.S. Army Captain Alex Funkhouser, who led a unit of the 4th Infantry Division, from Fort Hood, Texas.

Funkhouser had left his wife and two young daughters in Texas just a few months before. It was his first tour of Iraq and it came at a difficult time — sectarian violence between Iraq's Sunnis and Shiites was exploding. But Funkhouser was determined to make a difference.

"Great guy. Great officer. One of the rare types that you meet. He was open about the problems he faced, as well as being extremely optimistic about his ability to tackle the situation," Dozier says. "And we were all relieved because it's like, okay, when you've got a person like that to follow, it brings everything to life."

Funkhouser was also admired by the soldiers of the 4th I.D. "He was a father, a captain, I mean, you know, all in one. 'Cause he was the daddy of the company and that's how it went," explains Sgt. Justin Farrar.

"He would always be the lead truck whenever we went out," remembers Spc. Izzy Flores. "It would be like, 'Sir, maybe you shouldn't be the lead.' And he'd be like, 'No, something happens, it'll happen to me first.'"

Sure enough, at 10 a.m. Memorial Day morning, Funkhouser led a convoy of three Humvees out of the so-called "Green Zone" and into the streets of Baghdad. Staff Sgt. Nathan Reed was second in command.

"What was the mission that day?" Couric asks.

"Be a security detachment for Captain Funkhouser, and a CBS News crew, to take 'em to Iraqi check points that we were in the process of turning back over to the Iraqi army," Reed explains.

Their first checkpoint was the Karradah, a previously safe residential neighborhood where an improvised explosive device, or IED, had gone off the day before.

IEDs are responsible for well over half of the American combat casualties in Iraq.

"What did you do first?" Couric asks Reed.

"When we first rolled in, me and my driver basically looked at each other and, I mean, we just had a, just the way the cars were parked, we were like, 'Man, this looks kinda shady. I don't like this, the way it's looking.' Because, it just didn't look right to us for some reason," he recalls.

Funkhouser got out of his Humvee and started walking towards a group of Iraqi civilians.

"He was maybe 15 or 20 feet ahead of me when I saw Paul and James sort of out of the corner of my eye moving to intercept. Because it's the perfect shot. The American soldier in what we call full battle rattle: helmet, flack jacket, weapons," Dozier remembers. "And Paul wasn't gonna miss a shot like that."

Normally, Justin Farrar would have been at Funkhouser's side, providing protection. "But that day he told me to hold back and stay with Kimberly," Farrar remembers. "We were walking, you know, trying to catch up to Captain Funkhouser, and all and next thing I know I heard a loud boom, and everything just went black."

"So I remember I turned to my left, and I seen that one Humvee on fire. And then I turned back to my right and I seen Captain Funkhouser fall," Farrar recalls.

It was chaos. Medic Izzy Flores scrambled to treat several wounded soldiers at once.

"First patient I came up to was Sgt. Reed. And he was laying on his side. And right away you can just tell he took a large shrapnel wound to his calf," Flores remembers. "I ran to Sgt. Farrar. He had shrapnel through his foot. Shrapnel to his sides, shrapnel to his face and the back of his neck. He was just all bloody. And then, a little ways from the wall, Kimberly Dozier was laying down and she had deformed legs, shrapnel."

"I couldn't feel anything, I couldn't see anything, I couldn't hear anything," Dozier remembers. "I do remember somewhere in all of that I said, 'Where are my guys? How are my guys?'"