Editor’s Note: Kimberly Dozier has been a CBS News correspondent since 2003. A Wellesley graduate, she started her career at CBS radio in Cairo in 1992. She moved to Israel, where she has had a home outside Jerusalem since 2003. Her new book, Breathing the Fire, is about her surviving — and what it took to recover from — a car-bomb attack while she was on assignment in Iraq.

The numbers are staggering – an estimated two million people came to see it. There was a single arrest reported – but it was minor. Thirty kids in all lost their parents – but by day’s end, all were reunited.

I got to experience the privilege of hiking, trudging and at some points, almost swimming through that crowd, covering it for CBS News. Our assignment – to "find stuff." We did, from a lady who’d watched the MLK speech on the mall, and now was back to see its pleas and promise come to reality, to the frustrated cop who said "this is a mess" as he tried to get an ambulance moving through the crowd (it only took minutes – he was a perfectionist), to scores who said yes, they were cold to the point of hypothermia, and annoyed with being jostled, and herded, and not actually seeing everything – but every single one said they were glad they came, and they’d do it again.

I started this day at five o’clock AM with a moon above, a backpack with a thermos full of coffee, and breakfast for the camera crew, producer and satellite truck operator, who woke hours before me to sneak their truck into position, next to Memorial Bridge, tucked behind the Lincoln Memorial. I trudged a couple of surreal miles, through downtown DC, past National Guard troops and humvees stationed every few blocks. I haven’t seen those since Baghdad.

But they were comforting because I knew the folks manning them were all as thrilled to be here – and be part of it – as I was, and as everyone walking the streets with me at that ridiculous hour was. I’d spent Monday touring the national mall with Staff Sgt. Jeremy Koch – a now-friend from the Iowa National Guard. (He tied the tourniquets on me that saved my life, on Memorial Day, 2006. Click here to learn more and click here to read my conversation with Lesley Stahl about the experience. There, we’ve now dispensed with that.)

Jeremy and his four fellow guardsmen from Iowa got three hours off to "see Washington." I met them at Union Station on MLK Day, and walked them through near-standstill pedestrian traffic to the Capitol, then down the entire length of the mall to the Vietnam and Lincoln Memorials. They loved being a part of this day, and they were rock stars. Every time they stopped to take tourist photos of themselves, tourists stopped and asked to take photos of them. Black, white … OK, it was MLK day – it was mostly black folks hanging out on the mall – but everyone wanted photos with them. I spent the day behind the camera, taking their pictures for people, and quipping, "You know, usually people want pictures with ME" and not meaning it.

One of them said incredulously, "This little girl just came up and hugged me. That’s never happened before." When he spotted her again in the crowd, he said, "There she is!" as if she were some National Geographic oddity – a good one.

So fast forward to the next day, when I ended up with that satellite truck, watching a similar group of guardsmen trying to hold back the crowd at Independence and 14th St. SW, and I kind of understood why they stood their ground against the crowd for a bit, and then finally gave way. "I can’t hold them back," one soldier told his commander. They just retreated to high ground, on a security platform, and watched the crowd surge.