los angeles — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring global eyewitness accounts of the war from the rice fields of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died at the age of 91.
Andrew 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 surrounded by friends and family, his son said. He entered the nursing home on Saturday suffering from prostate cancer.
As a wire correspondent, Arnett was known mostly among fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the end of the war in 1975. However, he became a household name in 1991, after he broadcast live updates for CNN on the First Gulf War.
While almost all Western reporters fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led attack, Arnett remained. As missiles began raining down on the city, he broadcast a live account via mobile phone from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion near me, you might have heard it,” he said in a calm voice with a New Zealand accent, moments after a missile strike echoed over the airwaves. As he continued talking, air raid sirens blared in the background.
“I think that destroyed the communications center,” he said of another explosion. “They’re hitting downtown.”
This wasn’t the first time Arnett had gotten dangerously close to the action.
In January 1966, he joined a battalion of American soldiers seeking to defeat North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when the soldier stopped to read a map.
“As the Colonel was looking at it, I heard four loud shots as the bullets went through the map and into his chest, just a few inches from my face,” Arnett recalled speaking to the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
The fallen soldier’s obituary began thus: “He was the son of a general and a battalion commander. But Lieutenant Colonel George Easter would have died a rifleman. Perhaps it was the colonel’s rank papers on his collar, or the map he held in his hand, or just the passing chance that a Viet Cong sniper had chosen Easter out of the five of us standing in the dusty jungle path.”
Arnett arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining the Associated Press as its correspondent in Indonesia.
This position did not last long after he declared the Indonesian economy in chaos and was fired by the country’s angry leadership. His firing was only the first of many controversies he found himself in, while also building a historic career.
At the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Brown and photo editor Horst Vass, who together won three Pulitzer Prizes.
He credited Brown in particular with teaching him several survival tricks that would keep him alive in war zones for the next 40 years. Among them: Never stand too close to a paramedic or radio operator because they are among the first to be shot by the enemy, and if you hear a gunshot coming from the other side, don’t look around to see who fired it because the next shot will likely hit you.
He would remain in Vietnam until the capital of Saigon fell to communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975, and in the run-up to those final days, AP headquarters in New York ordered him to begin destroying the bureau’s papers as coverage of the war declined.
Instead, he shipped it to his apartment in New York, believing it 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 newly formed CNN.
Ten years later he was in Baghdad to cover another war. Not only has he written about fighting on the front lines, he has also obtained exclusive and controversial interviews with former President Saddam Hussein and September 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 retracted an investigative report he had not prepared but which allegedly recounted that the deadly nerve agent sarin had been used against deserting American soldiers in Laos in 1970.
He was covering the Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for giving an interview on Iraqi state television in which he criticized US military war strategy. His statements were denounced at home as anti-American.
After his firing, television critics told the AP and other news organizations that Arnett would never work in television news again. But within a week, he was assigned to report on the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he got a job 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.
Arnett was born on November 13, 1934 in Riverton, New Zealand, and was first exposed to journalism when he got a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.
“I had no 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 — a very 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 larger newspaper in London. On his way to England on the ship, he stopped in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
He was soon working at the English-language Bangkok World, and then at its sister paper 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 two children, Elsa and Andrew.