KIMBERLY: I had no idea there could be so much pain, so many levels and so continuous. If it happens to you, it’s not like … you can decide whether you want to go through it or not. It made me understand what my grandmother went through all those years in a hospital bed, dying slowly. It was a horrible insight, and yes, it surely changed me.

But as for PTSD — I was in a way lucky. I had to deal with the emotional pain up close and inescapable too, because there was no escaping that hospital bed. There were no distractions. And in the end that helped, by forcing me to talk it through, and work it through.

Here are some of the normal symptoms of trauma: nightmares, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, numbing yourself to your family and loved ones to cut off the pain, bouts of uncontrollable grief. I had most of that in the hospital bed — but it stopped before I left Bethesda Naval Hospital. And that, I was told, was expressing "appropriate levels of grief." Those symptoms did not haunt me afterward. PTSD is only diagnosed if those symptoms continue after the first 30 days after trauma, which for me would have been after I left the hospital.

LESLEY: I’m wondering, given how powerful the book is, and how honest you are about your suffering, how it’s been received. Not so much by the critics (I know you have been highly praised), but by soldiers who’ve been injured, and the military.

KIMBERLY: I’ve heard some amazing things from both currently serving troops, and from veterans from Gulf War I and Vietnam, thanking me for writing about it, especially writing about how "talking it out" helped me get beyond the grief, the guilt of losing my colleagues and the combat stress. One Veterans Administration psychologist even told me she’s been playing parts of the audiobook to troops there, and one woman soldier in particular was able to open up for the very first time about a horrible suicide car bombing she’d been through. That gives me great hope, and if that’s what the book does, it was worth writing about.

But some other vets — especially Vietnam vets who’ve been plagued for decades with PTSD — have really attacked me for daring to suggest that talk therapy helped me. They took it as some sort of lecture that they should somehow "get over" their PTSD. It wasn’t meant as that at all — it was meant as a message of hope. So hearing their anger, in blogs and in e-mails to my website, has hurt. I try to let that roll off my back a bit, but it’s still there.

LESLEY: I can understand your feeling the sting of criticism from vets who’ve been injured. You must feel you’re in a secret society with them all. But I actually did a story a couple of years ago on PTSD. It seems pretty clear that “reliving” the event helps – even decades later.

I’m wondering, as you’ve been going around the country on your book tour, what the overall reaction has been. Do people think that you showed your colors about the war itself? When I read the book I thought you were trying hard to maintain your objectivity as a journalist. Did you end up being against the war?