Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91.
As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the war’s end in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after he broadcast live updates for CNN of the first Gulf War.
While almost all Western reporters had fled Baghdad in the days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast a live account by cellphone from his hotel room.
“There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard,” he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background.
“I think that took out the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They are hitting the center of the city.”
It was not the first time Arnett was dangerously close to the action.
In January 1966 he joined a battalion of U.S. soldiers seeking to rout North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when the soldier paused to read 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 during a talk to the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”
He would begin 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.”
Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Arnett got his first exposure to journalism when he landed a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.
