Peter Arnett, Pulitzer Prize winner who covered the Vietnam and Gulf wars, dies at age 91 | US News

Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world’s eyewitness accounts of war, from the rice fields of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died at 91.

Arnett, who won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 1966 for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach, Calif., and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew Arnett said. He entered the hospice on Saturday while suffering from prostate cancer.

As a news correspondent, Arnett was best known to his fellow journalists when he reported from Vietnam from 1962 until the war’s end in 1975. He became a household name, however, in 1991, after broadcasting live updates for CNN on the first Gulf War.

While almost all Western journalists had fled Baghdad days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining down on the city, he broadcast a live report on his cell phone from his hotel room.

“There was an explosion right near my house, you may have heard it,” he said in a calm voice with a New Zealand accent moments after the loud sound of a missile strike shook the airwaves. As he continued speaking, air alert sirens blared in the background.

“I think it destroyed the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They are hitting the center of the city.”

This wasn’t the first time Arnett came dangerously close to the action.

In January 1966, he joined a battalion of American soldiers seeking to rout North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when the soldier stopped to read a map.

“As the colonel looked at him, I heard four loud gunshots as the bullets tore through the map and entered his chest, inches from my face,” Arnett recalled at a conference at the American Library Association in 2013. “He fell to the ground at my feet.”

He began the fallen soldier’s obituary 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 rifleman. It might have been the colonel’s rank slips on his collar, or the map in his hand, or just crazy luck that the Viet Cong sniper picked Eyster out of the five of us standing in that dusty jungle path. “

Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining the Associated Press as a correspondent in Indonesia.

That job would be short-lived after he reported that Indonesia’s economy was in shambles and the country’s enraged leaders had forced him out. His expulsion marks only the first in a series of controversies he will find himself in, while also forging a historic career.

At the AP bureau in Saigon in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photo editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.

He credits Browne in particular with teaching him many of the survival tips that will keep him alive in war zones for the next 40 years. Among them: never stand near a doctor or radio operator, as they are among the first the enemy will shoot at, and if you hear a gunshot coming from the other side, do not look around to see who fired, as the next one will probably hit you.

He would remain in Vietnam until the capital Saigon fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975, and in the run-up to recent days, AP headquarters in New York ordered him to begin destroying office documents as coverage of the war ended.

Instead, he shipped them to his apartment in New York, thinking they would one day have historical value. They are now in the AP archives.

After the war ended, Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the new CNN.

Ten years later, he was in Baghdad covering another war. He not only covered front-line fighting, but also secured exclusive and controversial interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In 1995, he published his memoir, 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 withdrew an investigative report he had not prepared but which alleged that the deadly nerve gas Sarin had been used on deserting American soldiers in 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 television in which he criticized the US military’s war strategy. His remarks were denounced in his country as being anti-American.

After his firing, television critics at the AP and other news outlets speculated that Arnett would never work in television news again. Within a week, however, he was hired to cover the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.

In 2007, he accepted a position teaching journalism at Shantou University in China.

After retiring 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 had his first exposure to journalism when he landed a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.

“I didn’t really have a clear idea of ​​where my life would 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 – the extremely delicious feeling of having found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.

After a few years at the Times, he considered moving to a larger newspaper in London. However, while traveling to England by ship, he stopped off in Thailand and fell in love with the country.

Soon he was working for the English-language newspaper Bangkok World, then for its sister newspaper in Laos. There, he would make the connections that would lead him to the AP and a lifetime of war coverage.

Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.