Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died at 91.
Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He had entered the hospice on Saturday while he was suffering from prostate cancer.
As a wire service correspondent, Arnett was best known to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after broadcasting live updates for CNN of the first Gulf War.
While almost all Western journalists had fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led attack, Arnett stayed. As the missiles began to rain down on the city, he broadcast a live account via cell phone from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion right next to me, maybe I heard,” he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice after the loud explosion of a missile attack rang out in the air. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens sounded in the background.
“I think it took out the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They’re hitting downtown.”
It was not the first time that Arnett had come dangerously close to the action.
Peter Arnett reports from Baghdad’ interviewing Saddam Hussein on February 28, 1991. – Fairfax Media Archives/Getty Images
Fighting in Vietnam
In January 1966 he joined a battalion of American soldiers looking to disrupt North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when the soldier stopped to read a map.
“As the colonel looked at it I heard four loud shots as bullets cut through the map and into his chest, a few inches from my face,” Arnett recalled during a talk with the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
The obituary of the fallen soldier would begin like this: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer and a battalion commander. But Lt. Col. George Eyster had to die like a rifle. It could have been the colonel’s rank leaf on his collar, or the map he had in his hand, or just a remote chance that Vietnam chose that Vietnam at that five. path of the dusty jungle.”
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam only a year after joining the Associated Press as its Indonesia correspondent.
That job would be short-lived after he reported that Indonesia’s economy was in bad shape and the country’s angry leadership fired him. His dismissal marked only the first of many controversies he would find himself in, while shaping a historic career as well.
At the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of reporters, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photo editor Horst Faas, who would between them win three Pulitzer Prizes.
He credited Browne in particular with teaching him many of the survival tricks that would keep him alive in war zones over the next 40 years. Among them: Never stand near a medic or radio operator because they are among the first that the enemy will shoot at and, if you hear a shot coming from the other side, do not look around to see who shot because the next one will probably hit.
He would remain in Vietnam until the capital of Saigon fell to Communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975 and in the time leading up to those final days he was ordered by AP’s New York headquarters to begin destroying the Bureau’s papers as cover for the war wound.
Instead, he sent them to his apartment in New York, believing that one day they would have historical value. They are now in the AP archives.
Baghdad, Iraq: Veteran American journalist Peter Arnett during a live feed for CNN from the Al Rashhed hotel during the Gulf War on February 21, 1991. – Kaveh Kazemi/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A star on cable news
After the end of the war, Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly formed CNN.
Ten years later he was in Baghdad covering another war. He not only reported on the frontline fighting but won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995 he published the memoirs, “Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.”
Arnett resigned from CNN in 1999, months after the network retracted an investigative report he did not prepare but recounted alleging that the deadly nerve gas Sarin had been used on American soldiers who invaded Laos in 1970.
He was covering the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for giving an interview to Iraqi state TV during which he criticized the US military’s war strategy. His remarks were denounced back home as anti-American.
After his firing, TV critics for the AP and other news organizations speculated that Arnett would never work in television news again. Within a week, however, he was hired to report on the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job teaching journalism at China’s Shantou University.
After his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Born on November 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Arnett got his first exposure to journalism when he got a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.
“I didn’t have a clear idea of where my life was going to take me, but I remember that first day when I walked into the newspaper office as an employee and found my little desk, and I had – you know – an enormously delicious feeling that I had found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.
After a few years at the Times he made plans to move to a bigger newspaper in London. On his way to England by ship, however, he made a stop in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
Soon he was working for the English-language Bangkok World, and later for its sister newspaper in Laos. There he would make the connections that led him to the AP and a lifetime of war coverage.
Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.
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