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Dave,
I did some API documentation for a while a few years ago. For that job they mostly required that I be able to read and understand the code so I could pull out samples to put in the documentation. When I applied for the job I made it absolutely clear that although I could read code and understand it for the most part, there was no way I could ever write code, even for samples. They were fine with that, and as it turned out, my ability to read the code was enough.
I would guess that the fact that you you can write C--even though it is very different than C++--will serve you well in an API doc job. You will have better than average skills at looking at the C++ and being able to pull samples from it by virtue of the fact that you can write code in another language.