I used many reference materials during the research for this book. Some of the most helpful books were Ernie Pyle’s War, by James Tobin; Trying Not to Go Deaf on the Gun Line, by Scott Bernard Nelson of the Boston Globe (his report can be found in Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, edited by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson); Churchill, by Roy Jenkins; The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy; A Reed Shaken by the Wind, by Gavin Maxwell; The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story, by Leonard A. Cole; Hostage, by Chris Cramer and Sim Harris; Give War a Chance and Holidays in Hell, by P. J. O’Rourke; In Harm’s Way, by Martin Bell; Iraq: The Bradt Travel Guide, by Karen Dabrowska; Iraq: An Illustrated History and Guide, by Giles Munier; and the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. I found Microsoft Encarta and Wikipedia.com to be invaluable resources. I also used many newspaper and wire service reports—far too many to list.
Finally, I would like to thank my fiancée, Lucie, who agreed to marry me weeks before I disappeared into my office to write this book. I emerged, months later, exhausted, ratty, and even balder than when I began. She must have wondered what she had done. Without Lucie’s patience, support, advice, and proofreading, War Reporting for Cowards might never have been completed. She claims she was laughing with me, not at me, when she giggled over early drafts.
On several occasions, however, she couldn’t resist asking: “You didn’t really do that, did you?”
Unfortunately, I did.
Praise for War Reporting for Cowards:
“Imagine George Costanza from Seinfeld or one of Woody Allen’s hypochondriacal heroes being sent off to cover the Iraq War, and you have a pretty good idea of what Chris Ayres’s hilarious new memoir is like. In War Reporting for Cowards, Mr. Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, recounts how he went from being the paper’s Hollywood correspondent, used to interviewing stars and starlets, to being embedded with a group of Marines who called themselves the ‘Long Distance Death Dealers’ as they helped spearhead the American invasion of Iraq. The book he has written reads as though Larry David had rewritten M*A*S*H and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the peculiar experience of being an embedded reporter.”
“No one would confuse Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, with a stolid war correspondent. Instead, he’s a pasty-faced hypochondriac who gets transferred from L.A., where he hoped to ‘sink vodka martinis in the Sky Bar,’ to the front lines of Iraq as a reporter with a Marine battalion who call themselves the ‘Long Distance Death Dealers.’ Ayres’s often wry descriptions of preparing to be an embed are imbued with a refreshing Gen-X view of the world. When he buys a tent, it isn’t until he practices setting it up that he realizes it’s the wrong color: ‘I imagined a huge yellow blob appearing on an Iraqi radar screen and a Republican Guard… officer pointing excitedly.’ When the military gives him ‘auto-injectors’ to counteract chemical attacks, ‘along with the canisters The Times had given me,’ he writes, ‘I now had enough liquid narcotics to fuel a Hollywood rave.’ Ayres’s stories of life with the Marines are gripping—in part because he’s the perfect neurotic foil.”
“It’s a book I was prepared to hate. It was messy and nasty and you were scared? Well, we chose to go into a war zone, after all. Nobody claimed it would be like covering the Academy Awards. But a funny thing happened on the way to fulmination. The more I read the book, the more I liked it. The closest comparison I can come up with is P. J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell…. [War Reporting for Cowards is] a helluva book, which is more than most embeds can say.”
“Antiwar only in the sense that it presents an unvarnished (and nauseating) picture of combat, War Reporting for Cowards provides details of conflict journalism that a more daring or combat-seasoned writer might never have thought to record, or would have been ashamed to admit…. There is a thin yellow line between functional cowardice—what we more leniently call self-preservation—and the sort of bug-eyed, lip-gnawing panic that makes this book so darkly entertaining. Ayres’s reports from the front lines of the invading force appeared as lead stories in the [London] Times, and on his return, he was nominated by his peers in the British press as foreign correspondent of the year. From his memoir, it is easy to see why. Beyond the laughs, he powerfully conveys the physical miseries of combat life, the terror of being under bombardment and the ethical impasse of wanting desperately to survive, even if it means the deaths of those on the other side of the battlefield.”
“Ayres writes in a breezy, cheeky style that is often very funny. The style fits the book’s central motif of the combat-averse Gen-X reporter forced to make his way in the vast bureaucratic and technological world of death and destruction that is the modern army. Indeed, Ayres’s prose is best whenever he describes the machinery of war; the descriptions crackle and vividly call to mind the awesome menace of 20,000-pound trucks, hundreds and hundreds of artillery cannons and massive tanks. Excellent… among the best of the growing number of accounts of the Iraq War.”
“Ayres’s book is exciting, revealing, and very, very, funny. Ayres knows his own limitations and never tries to paint his adventure as anything other than it is: a harrowing yet empowering journey for a young man learning he has more about him than he thinks. Ayres makes no attempts to protest or proselytize, and the book is all the better for it. He simply tells his experiences, and tells them delightfully well. And while the book is humorous, Ayres doesn’t dodge reality. His experiences at Ground Zero on 9/11 are suitably horrifying and unashamedly gripping. Even the comic absurdity of Ayres’s presence on the battlefield (a fleshy young man in a bright blue Kevlar vest—a natural target, his military handlers gleefully point out) does not lessen the severe reality of the war. War, like life, is full of contradictions. Gung ho Marines can come to appreciate nervous journalists, and a self-professed coward can find within himself his own measure of courage.”
“I laughed out loud at Chris Ayres’s account of his tour in Iraq for The Times of London, recounted in his new book, War Reporting for Cowards. To begin with, Ayres was a foreign correspondent of a different sort—assigned to Los Angeles and fully expecting his toughest logistical assignment to be getting a seat at the right table at the right restaurant. But, hung over and half asleep, he offered up an ill-considered ‘Love to!’ when his editor called one morning and asked if he wanted to cover the war in Iraq. His is the kind of truth and honesty we need more of in journalism: reporters who cheerfully admit that their idea of a hazardous assignment is one in which the pressroom does not have an open bar.”