ISLAND VOICES
Counting on the boys on the bus

Paul Costello is the vice president for external affairs at the University of Hawai'i.

Two American journalists died in Iraq last week: NBC reporter David Bloom from an apparent health problem exacerbated by war and Michael Kelly, a columnist for the Washington Post, in a humvee swerving to avoid bullets. Both were solid journalists. Young men. Fathers of children not even in their teens.

I came to know both men as "boys on the bus" in the different and far less dangerous battlefield of politics. Mike was a friend whom I met during the 1988 presidential campaign, and I crossed paths with David when I worked as a political liaison to NBC News at the Democratic convention in Los Angeles in 2000.

Mike was an Irish cherub. A small man with large owlish glasses that swallowed his face. He had the wonderful wry wit of his ancestry and the impish smile of a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He fell in love with another fellow traveler on the press bus in 1988: His wife, Max, was then a CBS producer.

His written words could be a killer. When he struck, it was with a punch that bore the equivalent power of a strike from the great Ali. He was a liberal who morphed into a conservative. I often thought that his attacks on Bill Clinton and Al Gore were over the top, but they were always pure Mike — passionate and ferocious.

The last time I saw David Bloom, it was on the floor of the Democratic convention in L.A. He was from the Tom Brokaw school of journalism — a tough competitor, carefully coiffed with an air of authority on television that comes from DNA, not journalism school. He was obviously an heir-apparent to greatness at NBC. One of those broadcast talents whom the networks fight to nurture.

Both men are now part of the history of the war in Iraq. Each leaves children who will never really know them and wives forced to mourn and start anew.

In presidential politics, you cross paths with hundreds of journalists. You always think in some other time, some other campaign, at another political convention, you'll see them again on the press bus. You count on the boys on the bus returning because they always do.