Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent many years dodging bullets and bombs to convey the world eyewitness accounts of warfare — from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq — has died. He was 91.
Arnett, who gained the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for worldwide reporting for his Vietnam Battle protection for the Related Press, died Wednesday in Newport Seaside and was surrounded by family and friends, mentioned his son Andrew Arnett. He had been affected by prostate most cancers.
“Peter Arnett was one of many best warfare correspondents of his technology — intrepid, fearless, and a lovely author and storyteller. His reporting in print and on digital camera will stay a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come back,” mentioned Edith Lederer, who was a fellow AP warfare correspondent in Vietnam in 1972 and 1973 and is now AP’s chief correspondent on the United Nations.
As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was identified largely to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 till the warfare’s finish in 1975. He grew to become one thing of a family title in 1991, nonetheless, after he broadcast reside updates for CNN from Iraq through the Persian Gulf Battle.
Though nearly all Western reporters had fled Baghdad within the days earlier than the U.S.-led assault, Arnett stayed. As missiles started raining on town, he broadcast a reside account from his lodge room.
“There was an explosion proper close to me, you could have heard,” he mentioned in a peaceful, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud growth of a missile strike rattled throughout the airwaves. As he continued to talk, air-raid sirens blared within the background.
“I feel that took out the telecommunications heart,” he mentioned of one other explosion. “They’re hitting the middle of town.”
It was not the primary time Arnett had gotten dangerously near the motion.
In January 1966, he joined a battalion of U.S. troopers searching for to rout North Vietnamese snipers and was standing subsequent to the battalion commander when an officer paused to learn a map.
“Because the colonel peered at it, I heard 4 loud pictures as bullets tore via the map and into his chest, a couple of inches from my face,” Arnett recalled throughout a chat to the American Library Assn. in 2013. “He sank to the bottom at my ft.”
He would start the fallen soldier’s obituary with this: “He was the son of a normal, a West Pointer and a battalion commander. However Lt. Colonel George Eyster was to die like a rifleman. It could have been the colonel’s leaves of rank on his collar, or the map he held in his hand, or only a wayward likelihood that the Viet Cong sniper selected Eyster from the 5 of us standing in that dusty jungle path.”
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam only a 12 months after becoming a member of the AP as its Indonesia correspondent. That job can be short-lived after he reported Indonesia’s financial system was in shambles and the nation’s enraged management threw him out. His expulsion marked solely the primary of a number of controversies during which he would discover himself embroiled, whereas additionally forging a historic profession.
Peter Arnett sits for a portrait in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 18, 1963.
(Related Press)
On the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett discovered himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, together with bureau chief Malcolm Browne and picture editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.
He credited Browne specifically with educating him most of the survival methods that might hold him alive in warfare zones over the subsequent 40 years. Amongst them: By no means stand close to a medic or radio operator as a result of they’re among the many first the enemy will shoot at. And when 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 in all probability will hit you.
Arnett stayed in Vietnam till the capital, Saigon, fell to the communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. Within the time main as much as these closing days, he was ordered by the AP’s New York headquarters to start destroying the bureau’s papers as protection of the warfare wound down.
As an alternative, he shipped them to his condo in New York, believing they’d have historic worth sometime. They’re now within the AP’s archives.
Arnett remained with the AP till 1981, when he joined the newly shaped CNN.
Ten years later, he was in Baghdad overlaying one other warfare. He not solely reported on the front-line combating but additionally gained unique, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995, he printed the memoir “Reside From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years within the World’s Battle Zones.”
Arnett resigned from CNN 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 overlaying the Iraq warfare for NBC and Nationwide Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for granting an interview to Iraqi state TV throughout which he criticized the U.S. navy’s warfare 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. Inside per week, nonetheless, he had been employed to report on the warfare for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job educating journalism at China’s Shantou College. After his retirement in 2014, he and his spouse, Nina Nguyen, moved to Fountain Valley.
Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Peter Arnett obtained his first publicity to journalism when he landed a job at his native newspaper, the Southland Occasions, shortly after highschool.
“I didn’t actually have a transparent thought of the place my life would take me, however I do keep in mind that first day after I walked into the newspaper workplace as an worker and located my little desk, and I did have a — you realize — enormously scrumptious feeling that I’d discovered my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral historical past.
After a couple of years on the Southland Occasions, he made plans to maneuver to a bigger newspaper in London. En path to England by ship, nonetheless, he made a cease in Thailand and fell in love with the nation.
Quickly 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 overlaying warfare.
Arnett is survived by his spouse and their kids, Elsa and Andrew.
“He was like a brother,” mentioned retired AP photographer Nick Ut, who lined fight in Vietnam with Arnett and remained his pal for half a century. “His dying will depart an enormous gap in my life.”
Rogers writes for the Related Press.
