LOS ANGELES (AP) — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring eyewitness accounts of the war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91 years old.
Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for the Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He was suffering from prostate cancer.
As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was often identified with fellow journalists as he reported on Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. He became a household name in 1991, however, after broadcasting live updates for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.
Arnett stayed, as almost all Western journalists fled Baghdad in the days leading up to the US-led invasion. As missiles began to rain down on the city, he broadcast a live account by cellphone from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion near me, you may have heard,” he said in a quiet, New Zealand-accented voice, as the loud boom of the missile attack swept through the airwaves. Air-raid sirens blared in the background as he continued to speak.
“I think it took out the telecommunications center,” he said of another blast. “They’re hitting downtown.”
Reporting from Vietnam
It wasn’t the first time Arnett had gotten dangerously close to the action.
In January 1966, he joined a battalion of American soldiers trying to defeat North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when an officer stopped to read a map.
“When Cornell looked at it, I heard the map a few inches from my face and four loud pops as bullets ripped through his chest,” Arnett recalled during a 2013 talk with the American Library Association. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
He would begin the martyred soldier’s death thus: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer, and a battalion commander. But Lt. Col. George Easter should have died like a rifleman. It might have been the colonel’s rank on his collar, or the map he held in his hand, or the way he had chosen five containers by chance. We are standing on that dusty forest road.”
Arnett arrived in Vietnam a year after joining the AP as its Indonesia correspondent. That job would be short-lived after he found Indonesia’s economy in tatters and the country’s angry leadership ousted him. His dismissal marked only the first of many controversies in which he would find himself embroiled, while also building a historic career.
In AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of reporters, including bureau chief Malcolm Brown and photo editor Horst Fass, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.
He specifically credited Brown with teaching him many of the survival tricks that would keep him alive in war zones for the next 40 years. Among them: never stand near a medic or radio operator because they shoot at the first enemy. And if you hear a gun shot from the other side, don’t look around to see who fired because the other one will hit you.
Arnett remained in Vietnam until 1975, when the capital of communist-backed North Vietnamese insurgents fell to Saigon. In the lead up to those final days, he was ordered by the AP’s New York headquarters to begin destroying the bureau’s documents as part of its coverage of the war.
Instead, he sent them to his apartment in New York, believing they would someday have historical value. They are now in AP’s archives.
A star on cable news
Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly formed CNN.
Ten years later he was covering another battle in Baghdad. He not only reported on front-line fighting but won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995, he published a memoir, “Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zone.”
Arnett resigned from CNN in 1999, months after the network retracted an investigative report that he did not prepare but alleged that the deadly sarin nerve gas was used in the desert on US soldiers in Laos in the 1970s.
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 in which he criticized the US military’s war tactics. His statement was condemned at home as anti-American.
After his dismissal, 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 assigned to report on the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates, and Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job teaching journalism at Shantou University in China. After his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Born November 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Peter Arnett got his first exposure to journalism when he got a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times, right 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 as a staffer when I walked into the newspaper office and found my little desk, and I had a — you know — very delicious feeling that I had found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.
After spending a few years at The Times, he planned to move to a larger newspaper in London. On his way to England by ship, however, he stopped in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
Soon he was working for the English-language Bangkok World and later its sister newspaper in Laos. There he would make connections that would lead him to the AP and a lifetime of cover warfare.
Arnett is survived by his wife and their children Elsa and Andrew.
