Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett has died

LOS ANGELES — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent a long time dodging bullets and bombs to carry the world eyewitness accounts of conflict 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 Warfare 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 the greatest war correspondents of his generation — intrepid, fearless, and a beautiful writer and storyteller. His reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come,” mentioned Edith Lederer, who was a fellow AP conflict correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 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 conflict’s finish in 1975. He grew to become one thing of a family title in 1991, nonetheless, after he broadcast dwell updates for CNN from Iraq in the course of the first Gulf Warfare.

Whereas virtually 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 dwell account by cellphone from his lodge room.

“There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard,” he mentioned 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 mentioned of one other explosion. “They are hitting the center of the city.”

Reporting from Vietnam

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.

“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 Affiliation 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 12 months after becoming a member of 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 an historic profession.

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 photograph editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.

He credited Browne particularly with educating him lots of the survival tips that may preserve him alive in conflict 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 facet, do not go searching to see who fired it as a result of the subsequent one will seemingly hit you.

Arnett would keep 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 AP’s New York headquarters to start destroying the bureau’s papers as protection of the conflict wound down.

As an alternative, he shipped them to his house in New York, believing they’d have historic worth sometime. They’re now within the AP’s archives.

A star on cable information

Arnett remained with the AP till 1981, when he joined the newly-formed CNN.

Ten years later he was in Baghdad masking one other conflict. He not solely reported on the front-line preventing however gained unique, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In 1995 he revealed the 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 community retracted an investigative report he didn’t put together however narrated alleging that lethal Sarin nerve gasoline had been used on deserting American troopers in Laos in 1970.

He was masking the second Gulf 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 conflict technique. His remarks have been denounced again residence 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 every week, nonetheless, he had been employed to report on the conflict for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.

In 2007, he took a job educating journalism at China’s Shantou College. Following his retirement in 2014, he and his spouse, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.

Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Peter Arnett bought his first publicity to journalism when he landed a job at his native newspaper, the Southland Instances, 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 a number of years on the Instances, 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 masking conflict.

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 buddy for a half century. “His death will leave a big hole in my life.”