I never would have thought it possible, but it can in fact be done - you can write a book about the Iraq War (II) and remain politically neutral. Chris Ayres manages this remarkable feat in his autobiographical account, WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS, by staying focused on his own experiences both before and during the war.
Chris Ayres makes for an unlikely war reporter, and WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS spends most of its length trying to explain how he, the London Times' Los Angeles entertainment reporter, ended up embedded with a marine artillery regiment. To explain it, he recounts his career as a journalist, bringing a jaundiced and cynical eye to bear on the profession, its practitioners, and himself. His self-professed vanity and cowardice combined to find him riding in a humvee across the Iraqi desert during the charge towards Baghdad...and finding the first excuse he could to get back out.
This book is a darkly humorous account, not just of the war itself, but of journalism and journalists. Ayres prose is clean and light, mixing humor, pathos and drama in equal measures as he recounts his own confused thoughts and actions through the momentous events of recent years. WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.
Chris Ayres is a small-town boy, a hypochondriac, and a
neat freak with an anxiety disorder. Not exactly the
picture of a war correspondent. But when his boss asks him
if he would like to go to Iraq, he doesn't have the guts to
say no.
After signing a $1 million life-insurance policy, studying
a tutorial on repairing severed limbs, and spending $20,000
in camping gear (only to find out that his bright yellow
tent makes him a sitting duck), Ayres is embedded with a
battalion of gung ho Marines who either shun him or
threaten him when he files an unfavorable story. As time
goes on, though, he begins to understand them (and his
inexplicably enthusiastic fellow war reporters) more and
more: Each night of terrifying combat brings, in the
morning, something more visceral than he has ever
experienced-the thrill of having won a fight for survival.
In the tradition of M*A*S*H, Catch-22, and other classics
in which irreverence springs from life in extremis, War
Reporting for Cowards tells the story of Iraq in a way that
is extraordinarily honest, heartfelt, and bitterly
hilarious.
No excerpt available.
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