KIMBERLY: I’ve tried to scrupulously avoid making a for-or-against declaration on where the war should go — a strict timeline for withdrawal versus an open-ended commitment. I always thought the war was poorly thought out, that we didn’t take the advice of our regional allies — but we’re there now, and I know the rest of the world is watching what we do there. So I try to ask people to keep paying attention, because we’ll be judged by what we do next. We’ve made such an amazing and painful investment there in lives as well as financially … and I think it’s like the Chinese proverb — you save a life, then that life becomes your responsibility. We may as a nation be angry now that we got into this war, but we owe it to Iraq and ourselves to find a healthy way out that leaves that region at least as stable as when we went in.

LESLEY: There are something like 200 thousand women on active duty in the military, with thousands having been wounded in Iraq. You got remarkable care in military hospitals — maybe not always the best advice, but lots of attention. The Veterans Administration has admitted that women warriors are not getting as good care as the men, and they are opening a summit to explore how to improve. Do you think wounded women soldiers have a harder time recovering and fitting back into their old routines?

KIMBERLY: Well, I got great advice, but lots of it, but the patient and his/her caregivers often have to break the tie choosing among different options. That was sometimes hellish, but it’s just part of why it’s so important to have good patient advocates (in this case, my family) at your side. As for how wounded women are treated in the V.A., I never attended a V.A. facility, so cannot speak to that, but I do know from some of the women vets I’ve spoken to that they face unique problems in their recovery — how do you define yourself as a woman again, if you are missing an arm or are scarred in the face, when society still judges a woman in many ways by her looks? (Everyone kept saying about me: "How’s her face? It’s okay? Oh, good." I was shocked by that.) The vets I’ve spoken to feel society is not ready for their war wounds — and in a weird way, they don’t get as much respect for them. So perhaps the V.A. system, too, is catching up with this new reality.

LESLEY: Well, your face was untouched. However, your legs were shattered. It’s a miracle that you’re walking now with only the slightest limp — which took months and months of rehab and a supreme amount of will power.

Once you recovered, you went to the bosses at CBS and said, “Send me back to Iraq or at least to the region.” They wouldn’t send you back – which, frankly, sounded like a wise decision to me. Why on earth did you want to go back to the scene of the crime, so to speak?

KIMBERLY: Well, everyone in the States, as they watched my stretcher travel from Iraq to Germany to Washington, DC, was saying, "Welcome home." For me, as I’ve lived overseas for 14 of the last 16 years or so, I was leaving home. I’ve still got a house in Jerusalem, where I’ve lived in between Iraq assignments since 2001. It’s where I feel comfortable — same for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, the Gulf, Egypt, etcetera. And I miss it. But we only put it on the air, in the media, when it’s blowing up, as a general rule — so I suppose to everyone back here, it looks like sending me back to the fire.

As for going back to a war zone, well, heck, that is what I did before — I’m not letting the car bombers keep me from my life’s work. So I’ll be back. Eventually.