Two Canadian soldiers are dead, as is an Afghan intepreter, following an IED blast in Zhari district of Kandahar province, Afghanistan.

Another Canadian soldier was injured. Charles Dubois, a Radio Canada cameraman, suffered serious injuries to his leg, and reporter Patrice Roy is suffering from shock but not otherwise physically injured.

Since this is a media-centric blog, I'll focus on the journalists. From the CBCnews.ca story:

Both journalists volunteered to go to Afghanistan and were well-trained, said Radio-Canada, which is the French-language arm of the CBC.

Reporter Daniel Lessard, a colleague of Dubois and Roy at Radio-Canada, said Dubois is an experienced journalist who has covered wars and political unrest in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Charles is a fearless cameraman, one of the best, if not the best, I know," Lessard said from Ottawa. "Every time there is something dangerous and we need a cameraman, he is always willing to go."

Lessard said Roy was just as fearless.

"He didn't want to just go and look from Kandahar," Lessard said. "He wanted to see everything, go with the soldiers, live with them, travel with them.

"A lot of people told him, 'You should not, it's dangerous,' but he said, 'No, I want to do the whole thing.'"

I think Canadian reporters have avoided injury for the most part, despite taking on some significant risks.

CTV News' Steve Chao got "lucky" last year. He was out on patrol with some Canadian soldiers when they got "friendly fire" bombed by a U.S. jet. Luckily for them, the 500-pound bomb dropped on some unusually wet ground, so it blew them back but didn't blow them up.

But he came perilously close to being a dead foreign correspondent.

I greatly admire the courage of our soldiers, but I also admire the courage of journalists in Afghanistan -- the Radio Canada guys and our CTV News reporters: Chao and Paul Workman, but also Lisa LaFlamme, Denelle Balfour and Tom Clark.

However, I'd also like to give a shout-out to the Afghan reporters who toil under very dangerous conditions and, in some ways, at far greater risk to their personal security to make their society more informed.

A quote I once read has always (partly) stuck with me.

"I admire you journalists," said a South American military officer to someone I can't remember. "We are trained to face death, and you are not. Yet you do it anyways."