Peggy Noonan on David Bloom: I wish I could write like this. (Page down most of the way to get to this part, although the whole article is great.)
I want to say something about David Bloom. When television journalists die, they're not always captured and written of in the same way that print writers, such as the late Michael Kelly, are. Part of the reason is that print reporters hang with scribblers, who know how to write eulogies. TV broadcasters tend to hang with TV broadcasters, who are more likely to show you through pictures than tell you through words. And scribblers don't always fully appreciate TV stars, not having experienced what they're up against in a daily and institutional way. So I'm not sure David Bloom is going to get his written due, and I'd give a great deal to be able to say I knew him well so I could try to give it. I knew him only slightly but admired him enormously, and personally.It wasn't David Bloom's job to ponder and search for justice, it was his job to tell you what is going on. That's why he was in a specially rigged-up space-age truck bouncing along the road to Baghdad with the army of the United States. Bloom's reports were riveting and historic. I hope that truck winds up in a museum. You could see from just watching him on TV, and I saw in the newsroom at MSNBC, as a live feed came in and people stopped talking to each other to watch the screen, that David Bloom was having the time of his life telling America what the Third Infantry Division was doing each day in the war.
He was on fire. He seemed to have no agenda but to bring you the latest. It seemed like every time you turned on the TV he was there, in the green glow of the nighttime desert hookup lights, and he'd be pointing out toward the desert and telling you that this wasn't a road they were on, it was a long flat place where they had a lot of trucks and Humvees, one after [another], which made a convoy, which was pointed at Baghdad.
The U.S. Army is almost in full control of that sad place this morning. David Bloom won't be with the Mighty Third and reporting on the last fighting and the first greetings, and that's a shame and a loss to us all. Some fool said yesterday that David just died of an embolism; it's not a war death. He died of a blood clot, which is the type of thing that tends to be created or exacerbated by physical realities such as long flights or long truck rides through the desert, or tough work covering a war. David died with his boots on.
And he brought joy to the endeavor, didn't he? He brought hunger, and energy. He made being a reporter look like the best job in the world. Rest in Peace, David of Arabia, journalist of warriors.
