Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett, who reported on
Vietnam and Gulf wars, has died
[December 18, 2025]
By JOHN ROGERS
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 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.
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.”
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."
Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining AP as its
Indonesia correspondent. That job would be short-lived after he reported
Indonesia’s economy was in shambles and the country’s enraged leadership
threw him out. His expulsion marked only the first of several
controversies in which he would find himself embroiled, while also
forging an historic career.
At the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a
formidable roster of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne
and photo editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer
Prizes.
He credited Browne in particular with teaching him many of the survival
tricks that would keep him alive in war zones over the next 40 years.
Among them: Never stand near a medic or radio operator because they're
among the first the enemy will shoot at. And if you hear a gunshot
coming from the other side, don't look around to see who fired it
because the next one will likely hit you.
Arnett would stay in Vietnam until the capital, Saigon, fell to the
Communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. In the time leading up
to those final days, he was ordered by AP’s New York headquarters to
begin destroying the bureau’s papers as coverage of the war wound down.
[to top of second column]
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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)
 Instead, he shipped them to his
apartment in New York, believing they’d have historic value someday.
They’re now in the AP’s archives.
A star on cable news
Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the
newly-formed CNN.
Ten years later he was in Baghdad covering another war. He not only
reported on the front-line fighting but won exclusive, and
controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and
future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
In 1995 he published 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 network retracted
an investigative report he did not prepare but narrated alleging
that deadly Sarin nerve gas had been used on deserting American
soldiers in Laos in 1970.
He was covering the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic
in 2003 when he was fired for granting an interview to Iraqi state
TV during which he criticized the U.S. military’s war strategy. His
remarks were denounced back home as anti-American.
After his dismissal, TV critics for the AP and other news
organizations speculated that Arnett would never work in television
news again. Within a week, however, he had been hired to report on
the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and
Belgium.
In 2007, he took a job teaching journalism at China’s Shantou
University. Following his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina
Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.
Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Peter Arnett got his
first exposure to journalism when he landed a job at his local
newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.
"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 history.
After a few years at the Times, he made plans to move to a larger
newspaper in London. En route to England by ship, however, he made a
stop in Thailand and fell in love with the country.
Soon 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 covering war.
Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.
"He was like a brother," said retired AP photographer Nick Ut, who
covered combat in Vietnam with Arnett and remained his friend for a
half century. "His death will leave a big hole in my life.”
___
AP journalist Audrey McAvoy contributed to this report.
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