Last week, military writer William Cole took the unusual step of using his Sunday column to criticize the Navy for not being forthcoming with answers about the grounding of the USS Port Royal off Honolulu airport in February. I supported his decision because it is clear that the Pacific Fleet is dragging its feet about the damage done to the Port Royal with its evasive answers. The Navy is usually much more forthcoming, as we saw during the 2001 USS Greeneville collision with the Japanese training vessel Ehime Maru.

Cole has been covering the military for eight years and in all that time, I have rarely received complaints about him or his work. Most military leaders I have encountered have high praise for Cole because of his balanced reporting and respect for what they do. In 2004, he spent three months with our Schofield troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was embedded with Hawai'i National Guard soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait for five weeks in 2005, and later that year he accompanied for three weeks a CH-47 Chinook helicopter unit to Pakistan to report on earthquake relief efforts.

The Advertiser has long maintained a full-time military reporter because of the military's importance to this state and to the nation. We realize that the military and federal government are second behind tourism in driving our local economy, that we are the third-ranking state in annual per capita federal defense spending at $4,259 per person in fiscal year 2007, and that the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard is the state's largest industrial employer. More than 100,000 people living here have ties to the Defense Department.

But Cole faces challenges in covering the beat because of numerous layers of public affairs officers, commanders and everyone in between, all of whom have their own idea of what information can be released. For the most part, military leaders tend to be more conservative and see the media as liberal organizations that do not support their mission, especially in times of war. They are more than happy to provide snapshots of the military doing great work, which we cover in detail, but they are more reluctant to help answer questions about controversial issues.

In one recent example, Cole called Schofield Barracks in mid-February and asked for suicide statistics for the Army in Hawai'i after Army headquarters saw a disturbing increase. U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter pointed him to Tripler Army Medical Center, which directed him to the U.S. Army Medical Department in Texas. Tripler then re-directed Cole to the U.S. Army Medical Command headquarters, which eventually referred him back to U.S. Army Pacific at Fort Shafter, where he began. The information was delivered about a month after he first requested it, with an apology from the public affairs officer at Army Medical Command headquarters.

None of this has dampened Cole's enthusiasm for being the Advertiser's military writer. Eight years covering the same topic is unusually lengthy in this industry but Cole keeps it in perspective.

"I always say I love covering the military half the time, and the other half, the bureaucracy, drives me crazy," he said. "There is excitement, drama and sometimes life and death in covering the military. No other newspaper 'beat' can get your heart rate and senses going like the military, and the characters in it are a cross-section of America doing extraordinary things."