CBS remembers Paul Douglas and James Brolan, killed in Iraq attack

Two decades after a roadside bomb ripped through a CBS News convoy in Baghdad, the deaths of Paul Douglas and James Brolan still define the risk journalists accepted to cover Iraq from the front lines. The two men were embedded with the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division when the attack hit on May 29, 2006, and correspondent Kimberly Dozier was seriously wounded in the same blast.

Douglas, 48, was a veteran cameraman who had spent years filming in war zones and other conflict areas. Brolan, 42, had served in the Royal Green Jackets from 1983 to 1988 before building an extensive career as a sound recordist in conflicts that included Afghanistan and Bosnia. CBS later described them as veterans of war coverage, a phrase that captured both their experience and the danger that followed them into Baghdad.

The crew was on patrol with Iraqi and American soldiers when the convoy was struck. CBS and the Committee to Protect Journalists both described the attack as a car bomb or roadside bomb that exploded while the team was embedded and moving through the city with troops. The blast also left Dozier, the third member of the CBS crew, seriously injured. The attack unfolded in one of the deadliest periods for journalists in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, when the country became a place where reporting from the field could mean dying alongside the soldiers and civilians being covered.

Their deaths became part of a larger reckoning inside newsrooms about how much danger embedded war coverage could absorb before it became unacceptable. The loss of Douglas and Brolan, and the severe injury to Dozier, underscored that even highly experienced crews were not protected by their skill or by military escort. It also made plain what audiences often only glimpse through television screens, that access to frontline war reporting depends on people willing to absorb enormous personal risk.

Iraq continued to mark that toll in 2024, when it unveiled the Guardians of Truth monument in Sulaymaniyah. The memorial includes the names of Douglas and Brolan among 551 Iraqi and foreign journalists killed since 2003, a count that places their deaths within a long, violent ledger of press losses in Iraq. CBS has continued to mark their deaths on memorial anniversaries, preserving the memory of two men whose work helped bring the war into public view, and whose deaths exposed how costly that access could be.