In the pre-dawn hours of April 7, 2003, at my instruction, CTV correspondent Tom Kennedy and cameraman Al Stephens left the Jordanian border town of Ar-Ruwayshid in a seven-car convoy and made a runner for Baghdad. Saddam Hussein's regime was melting away, the border guards had abandoned their post, and the chance to be a witness to history was a 14-hour drive away.

They didn't make it.

Two days later, while Iraqis in Baghdad watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come down, Tom and Al were trapped in what would later be called the Sunni Triangle, watching a group of young men with guns approach, and wondering if this was how it ends. But our driver, armed only with a box of cookies, diffused the tension and kept our crew alive.

Two days later, I woke up from a fitful sleep, turned on the television, and there was Tom, live from Baghdad on Canada AM. They had come out of seclusion in no-man's land, rolled the dice, and made it safely to Baghdad. When I asked why they did not call first to say they were OK, they said they would have missed their deadline.

In the early evening hours of August 5, 2009, at my instruction, CTV correspondent Genevieve Beauchemin and cameraman Hugh Haugland left Montreal and made a runner for Mt. Laurier, Quebec, where a tornado had touched down a few hours earlier. It was a three-hour drive, barely enough time to get there, shoot the story and make their deadline, which they did as always, with minutes to spare.

It would be close to midnight when they finished packing their gear, and they had to be there the next day to file a report on the aftermath. But still they wanted to drive the three hours back to Montreal so they could be at home for a few hours with their sleeping spouses and children. We didn't let them. Worried about their safety on the roads, driving tired so late at night in bad weather, we ordered them to overnight instead.

Early the next morning, under clear skies, Genevieve and Hugh hired a local helicopter pilot who had just taken a crew from our sister station TVA to get aerial footage of the tornado zone. The chopper only had room for one, so Hugh went up alone.

He didn't make it.

The Canadian flag outside CTV headquarters in Toronto is no longer flying at half-mast, but our hearts are heavy still as we ponder the vagaries of fate and the meaning of calculated risk.

When I left the foreign assignment desk, I thought I had left behind the burden of worrying about the safety of our men and women in the field. When Hugh turned down assignments to Iraq and Afghanistan, he did so with a heavy heart, knowing they were stories that had to be told, that he wanted to tell.

When his family and hundreds more gathered at a Montreal cathedral recently to remember Hugh, the stories told were of a man who loved life so much he could not help but take calculated risks, right down to those last hours gambolling up the road to Mt. Laurier, playfully telling Genevieve to take the binoculars out of the glove compartment and watch for cops.

There was a lot of talk about family that night -- the Hauglands of course -- but the CTV family too. During a more innocent time, when a plumb foreign assignment meant a trip to Washington to document the hormonal urges of President Clinton, Hugh and Al worked together in our Montreal bureau and were often the first domestic cameramen sent on the road for the big foreign assignments.

Since 9/11, Al has roamed the world for CTV and risked his life on countless occasions to record the images you take for granted every night. Like so many others, he paused to pay tribute to Hugh in a touching video tribute sent from his current base of operations in Southeast Asia.

Last week, CTV received a request from the curators of the new museum dedicated to journalism in Washington, D.C. to post Hugh's name on the wall dedicated to those who died on the job. So sometime soon, Hugh will make one last trip abroad, in spirit, where he will go up on that wall, alongside former CTV correspondent Clark Todd, killed in Lebanon in 1983, and former CTV fixer Jawed "Jo-Jo" Yazamy, killed in Afghanistan earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Al is on assignment in Afghanistan this week, documenting the outcome of an election that many people, and no small number of Canadians, gave their lives to make possible. It may not make any sense to you, but in my own mind, Hugh is one of them.