Ifinally made it back to Baghdad. I’d left on May 29, 2006, unconscious on a stretcher after my CBS News team and the 4th Infantry Division patrol we’d been covering walked into the path of a 300-to 500-pound car bomb.

The wall of shrapnel that tore through us took the lives of my colleagues, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan; the officer we’d been following, Army Capt. James Funkhouser; and his Iraqi translator, known as Sam. The explosion badly injured four other soldiers on the patrol.

It took many months of physical therapy and rehabilitation to get me walking and running again. It took painful hours of reliving the attack to begin moving beyond the trauma of that day. What I could not know then was how much work it would take to get back to the job I loved, as a foreign correspondent, if only for a few short days.

My chance came when Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, invited me to join him and other journalists on his annual USO trip in December—including eight days of nonstop meetings and briefings with commanders in Afghanistan, Pakistan and, finally, Iraq. For someone who hadn’t been in the field in almost four years, it was like breathing again.

I’d asked to go back several times before, but my employer had been loath to put me in harm’s way again on the network’s behalf. So with CBS’ permission, I took the opportunity the admiral offered to go as a private citizen.

While my employer was keenly aware of the public response to me and my injury, it took me years to perceive and then understand what that response meant to my future. It’s common to other people injured in combat and, to a lesser extent, those who have served in war zones: Once you’ve been hurt, people become protective and think you should stay where it’s safe. I still get letters and e-mails admonishing me never to go back.

This return trip to Baghdad was a bittersweet glimpse of what used to be, but also a chance to show people that it is possible to heal from the level of injury that I suffered and resume doing whatever you used to do, wherever you used to do it.

I’ve tried to send that message in other ways. I wrote a book about the bombing and my recovery, and I regularly speak to groups large and small, military and civilian. I’ve even run a couple of 10Ks, partly to raise money for Fisher

House, where my family stayed during much of my hospitalization. And partly I ran, like many who’ve been injured, just to show that I can.

That’s where my experience dovetails with that of many of the wounded warriors I’ve met. After proving to yourself that you’re whole, whatever your new definition of “whole” might be, you then have to prove it to your loved ones. And you find, if you tell people that you want to go back to doing what you did before, that their reaction isn’t always one you want to hear.

In 2008, a year after I came back to work, I told a New York tabloid that I looked forward to returning to the field, including Iraq. I’d lived overseas covering crises for 14 years. My home was in Jerusalem. I would not be driven away from my life’s work by a car bomb.

“Bomb girl wants back to Iraq,” screamed the next day’s headline. It wasn’t meant as an attagirl compliment. The subtext of the article was clear — this woman is touched in the head. How dare she consider risking her life again?

And then there was the companion question: What might happen if she does go back? Even close colleagues ventured that seeing Iraq again would trigger some sort of emotional tsunami.

But it’s not as if the trauma was locked away somewhere, to be released only when I set foot again in the country where I was hurt. I never locked it away. The emotional weight of losing Paul and James had been with me for years — from the moment I opened my eyes in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

Their picture is on my office wall, and every week or so, I’ll run into someone who knew them, or I’ll see a story from a country or city we once covered together, in Europe or the Middle East. When a tube was still down my throat, keeping me from speaking, I poured out everything I could remember from the bomb’s aftermath, scrawling it on a pad of paper. And I kept writing, “Where are Paul and James?” I had to be told that they had died at the scene.

In that first month, I had post-traumatic stress, with my brain processing the trauma through nightmares, flashbacks, hyper-vigilance and roller-coaster emotions. But I never developed PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder — which is diagnosed when those symptoms become coping mechanisms that stay with you. The more I talked about every detail I could remember, the more the symptoms faded.

Yet many people assume I have PTSD, and they assumed going back to Baghdad would make it worse. Few people seem to be aware of post-traumatic growth, which is the far more common response from people who have been in the field. It’s the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, especially when it makes you go back over every aspect of the experience in order to move on from it.

I’d had ample opportunity to keep “processing” the experience, by meeting just about everyone I could find, or who could find me, who was there that day, and giving hundreds of speeches and interviews about the bombing and my recovery. Reliving every part of the attack and grieving for my colleagues was the hardest part of my healing — not traveling down the airport road in Baghdad again and thinking about how it still might be mined with improvised explosives and car bombs. In the previous 3z years I had gone over far more dangerous emotional territory — like trying to apologize to Paul’s widow for surviving, saying the wrong things and only making her more upset.

I also met Funkhouser’s widow, Jennifer, who had felt fury toward me for a time. She knew that her husband was chosen for that patrol because he was an articulate spokesman for the U. S. Army’s efforts to train the Iraqi police. If I hadn’t asked for a Memorial Day interview, perhaps he would still be alive. I walked into her house with fear. Instead, I found the grace of a woman who had decided that, if she was angry that her husband had been on that patrol that day, she was dishonoring his memory and his mission.

As tough as that meeting was, tougher still was meeting James’ 16-year-old daughter a couple of months ago when she visited Washington from London. I’d never met Paul’s and James’ families in person before. I had offered to through friends, but this was the first time anyone from James’ family agreed. I didn’t know what to say. After blurting out surely inappropriate things, I asked her what would most help her to hear. She asked me to walk her through the bombing, detail by detail. I’d been there, and she’d had no one to ask until then.

I told the story of the day of the patrol. When I got to the part where the bomb goes off, I spoke of my anger that James — one of the smartest people I had ever known—hadn’t had any warning before it hit him, killing him instantly. His daughter’s face crinkled up, and her eyes filled with tears for a moment. I thought maybe I’d said too much. But she breathed out and wiped the tears from her face. “I thought the same thing,” she said. “I was so angry. And then I decided it was better because he felt no pain.” There aren’t too many people to whom either of us could have said those things.

She told me her dad would have wanted her to turn this loss into something positive. So she’s planning to come to the United States to study journalism or diplomacy, or some related field, so she can speak up for those who can’t, just like her father used to. She also related what she thinks her dad would have told me: to stop feeling guilty that I’m still here and that he and Paul are not. Her father died doing what he loved.

These journeys were behind me before I stepped on that C-17 headed for Baghdad. And therefore, so was much of the pain. The trip became, instead, a small measure of redemption — a chance to be immersed in the action again, following the chairman and his staff as they sized up life-and-death decisions made, and those yet to be made. I reveled in my front-row seat, again getting to witness a slice of history. I tried to come up with a way to describe the sense of purpose that gives, the same I’d experienced while working with Paul and James, shooting a story despite all the complications of a war zone.

It was a veteran friend of mine, an Army intelligence officer injured in Afghanistan, who found the words for me. She said she too wanted to go back, and that doesn’t make her crazy. “We do what we do because it is who we are and we understand it,” she said. “No one really understands why a soldier wants to deploy again after being injured . . . except us.” She did me the honor of including me in that “us.”

By the time I got to Baghdad, the most painful issue left to be examined had nothing to do with my injuries. It was this: why many people can’t accept that I want to return to what I used to do, and why I, like so many survivors of combat injuries, often trigger a reaction of pity tinged with wariness, instead of respect. That’s a slog I’m still on, together with some amazing survivors, both military and civilian, trying to get back to doing what we love.

This one short trip gave me hope that it can be done. When I met some of my tribe along the way — officers, diplomats, aid workers, journalists — their greetings were everything I’d hoped to hear: “It’s about time. Welcome back.”

Kimberly Dozier is a reporter and correspondent for CBS News’ Washington Bureau and the author of “Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Report and Survive the War in Iraq.”