Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported on Vietnam and Gulf wars, has died

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Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported on Vietnam and Gulf wars, has died

[html]Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett, left, marches with Vietnamese troops in Vietnam, Nov. 11, 1965. (AP Photo, File)

2025-12-18T01:57:46Z

                                       

LOS ANGELES (AP) — 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.

Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his         data-gtm-enhancement-style="LinkEnhancementA" href="https://apnews.com/article/vietnam-war-anniversary-saigon-final-day-1996f738e1e4f8186897df54cb918491">Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, said his son Andrew Arnett. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

“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,” said Edith Lederer, who was a fellow AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and is now AP’s chief correspondent at the United Nations.

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 from Iraq during the first Gulf War.

           
               
                   

   

       
   


       

       
     
   

   
   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   
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Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett stands with gear that he carries out in field while covering the Vietnamese army 1963, in Saigon, Vietnam. (AP Photo, File)

               
           
       
       
   

   
   
   


               
           
       

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.

   
   
       
           
               
   
   


   
   
       

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“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.”

   
       
   

Reporting from Vietnam

It was not the first time Arnett had gotten 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 an officer 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.”

           
               
                   

   

       
   


       

       
     
   

   
   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   

   
       

   
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FILE - Newly-landed U.S. Marines make their way through the sands of Red Beach at Da Nang, Vietnam, on their way to reinforce the air base as South Vietnamese Rangers battled guerrillas several miles south of the beach, April 10, 1965. (AP Photo/Peter Arnett, File)