Los Angeles
AP
—
Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent many years dodging bullets and bombs to deliver the world eyewitness accounts of struggle from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died at 91.
Arnett, who received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for worldwide reporting for his Vietnam War protection for The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by associates and household, stated his son Andrew Arnett. He had entered hospice on Saturday whereas struggling from prostate most cancers.
As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was identified principally to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 till the struggle’s finish in 1975. He turned one thing of a family identify in 1991, nevertheless, after he broadcast reside updates for NCS of the primary Gulf War.
While nearly all Western reporters had fled Baghdad within the days earlier than the U.S.-led assault, Arnett stayed. As missiles started raining on the town, he broadcast a reside account by cellphone from his lodge room.
“There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard,” he stated in a relaxed, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud increase of a missile strike rattled throughout the airwaves. As he continued to talk air-raid sirens blared within the background.
“I think that took out the telecommunications center,” he stated of one other explosion. “They are hitting the center of the city.”
It was not the primary time Arnett had gotten dangerously near the motion.
In January 1966 he joined a battalion of US troopers in search of to rout North Vietnamese snipers and was standing subsequent to the battalion commander when the soldier paused to learn a map.
“As the colonel peered at it I heard four loud shots as bullets tore through the map and into his chest, a few inches from my face,” Arnett recalled throughout a chat to the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
He would start the fallen soldier’s obituary like this: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer and a battalion commander. But Lt. Colonel George Eyster was to die like a rifleman. It may have been the colonel’s leaves of rank on his collar, or the map he held in his hand, or just a wayward chance that the Viet Cong sniper chose Eyster from the five of us standing in that dusty jungle path.”
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam only a yr after becoming a member of The Associated Press as its Indonesia correspondent.
That job could be short-lived after he reported Indonesia’s economic system was in shambles and the nation’s enraged management threw him out. His expulsion marked solely the primary of a number of controversies he would discover himself in, whereas additionally forging an historic profession.
At the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett discovered himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, together with bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photograph editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.
He credited Browne specifically with educating him lots of the survival methods that might preserve him alive in struggle zones over the subsequent 40 years. Among them: Never stand close to a medic or radio operator as a result of they’re among the many first the enemy will shoot at and, in case you hear a gunshot coming from the opposite aspect, don’t go searching to see who fired it as a result of the subsequent one will doubtless hit you.
He would keep in Vietnam till the capital of Saigon fell to the Communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975 and within the time main as much as these remaining days he was ordered by AP’s New York headquarters to start destroying the bureau’s papers as protection of the struggle wound down.
Instead, he shipped them to his condo in New York, believing they’d have historic worth sometime. They’re now within the AP’s archives.
After the struggle’s finish Arnett remained with the AP till 1981, when he joined the newly-formed NCS.
Ten years later he was in Baghdad masking one other struggle. He not solely reported on the front-line preventing however received unique, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995 he printed the memoir, “Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.”
Arnett resigned from NCS in 1999, months after the community retracted an investigative report he didn’t put together however narrated alleging that lethal Sarin nerve fuel had been used on deserting American troopers in Laos in 1970.
He was masking the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for granting an interview to Iraqi state TV throughout which he criticized the U.S. army’s struggle technique. His remarks had been denounced again dwelling as anti-American.
After his dismissal, TV critics for the AP and different information organizations speculated that Arnett would by no means work in tv information once more. Within every week, nevertheless, he had been employed to report on the struggle for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job educating journalism at China’s Shantou University.
Following his retirement in 2014, he and his spouse, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Born November 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Arnett acquired his first publicity to journalism when he landed a job at his native newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after highschool.
“I didn’t really have a clear idea of where my life would take me, but I do remember that first day when I walked into the newspaper office as an employee and found my little desk, and I did have a — you know — enormously delicious feeling that I’d found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral historical past.
After just a few years on the Times he made plans to maneuver to a bigger newspaper in London. En path to England by ship, nevertheless, he made a cease in Thailand and fell in love with the nation.
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 masking struggle.
Arnett is survived by his spouse and their kids, Elsa and Andrew.