“British journalist Chris Ayres, who covers the U.S. West Coast for The Times of London, never aspired to be a war correspondent, to say the least. But a few twists of fate found him with a notepad on the front line in Iraq, where he almost died… of anxiety. He recalls his brief, brief stay in the war zone in his new, laugh-out-loud memoir, War Reporting for Cowards.”
“From Falstaff to Bob Hope, Woody Allen to Yossarian, Flashman to Barney Fife, the comic coward has a great, if cowering, lineage. A reminder that we are flesh and blood, that life is worth living, the chick-enhearted soul embodies the reality principle in action—the action, mostly, of escaping death. Chris Ayres’s War Reporting for Cowards is the frazzled, initially hilarious account of his efforts as a London Times journalist determined not to get the inside story of 9/11, the anthrax attacks, or the Iraq War…. Much of the book’s setup—its immediate plunge into the Iraq War and then its flashback to fill in how the poor schmo got there—is wonderfully funny, perfectly pitched. And one of the more accurate reports of reporting today… In [Evelyn Waugh’s] Scoop…[John] Boot winds up the hero but fails even to show up for his own awards dinner. Mr. Ayres doesn’t manage all of that as his stint under fire is halted. His book turns rather touching, though, as he tries to assess what it has meant. The lamb may not become a lion, perhaps, but he does toughen up. His wool, as it were, gets a bit steelier.”
“Ayres is embedded with a force of invading Marines on the front lines, and this hilarious and disturbing account of a man who wants nothing more than Starbucks in the morning is the result.”
“No American war correspondent would have dared to write War Reporting for Cowards. His account is seething with fearful (and very funny) thoughts…. [Ayres also] has a keen sense of the ridiculous—he sees the bleak humor in the military guidelines on ‘How to Deal with a Dead Media Representative.’ One of the most powerful chapters deals with the terror attacks of September 11. Ayres was in New York that day, and his descriptions are wrenching, sympathetic, and somehow wry. Much has been written about that day, but here truly are some fresh views. On September 11 and on the battlefront, Ayres demonstrates he is not an adaptable man, and perhaps that is the best thing about his perspective. He never really accepts his circumstances, stubbornly refusing to create what is sometimes called a ‘new normal.’ He just wants the old normal back. Don’t we all?”
“Wildly entertaining… Ayres is at his best once he gets to Iraq, hyper-alert, borderline hysterical, and evisceratingly self-aware. He’s said in interviews that more than anything he wanted to convey the day-to-day life of the troops on the ground—the shitty food, the smelly underpants, the hours of mind-numbing tedium relieved by terrifying bursts of violence. But War Reporting for Cowards is also an excellent primer on the peculiar pathology of journalism. It’s Ayres’s ego—his fear of being scooped—that gets him into this mess in the first place and, recognizing that, he goes on to lampoon the macho mythology of war correspondence.”
“[Ayres’s] memoir would seem endlessly whiny if it weren’t so dramatic and funny.”
“Seriously good and hysterically funny. More importantly—a refreshing read amid some of the other B.S. written about the media in hostile environments.”
“Ayres delivers this book with a humble sense of accomplishment. He writes in a way that offers both brutal honesty and situational question marks that entice the reader to have a laugh at his expense.”
“The most honest rendering we’ve seen of embedded life, hands down, comes from Chris Ayres.”
“Ayres’s book about his war-time experience—a rich and penetrating black comedy of fear never beaten and of flight to safety at the first opportunity—takes readers into a personal realm where traditional hairy-chested war correspondents rarely venture. And because Ayres weaves this with comic vignettes highlighting farcical and offbeat aspects of conflict, War Reporting for Cowards may become a war-reporting classic, perhaps even a nonfiction version of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.”
“A twenty-seven-year-old hypochondriac, Ayres managed just nine days as an embed in Iraq before retreating to a luxury hotel in Kuwait, and his book is principally about the serendipitous career path that landed him in the back of a Humvee. With self-deprecating wit, he recollects his days as a newsroom intern and then as a reporter covering the dotcom boom for an English paper. He dates his vocation as a war correspondent to the collapse of the Twin Towers and the receipt of an e-mail from London requesting a ‘thousand wds please on “I saw people fall to death,” etc.’ When the Iraq invasion began, his editors dismissed embedding as a diversionary ruse by the U.S. Army, and put their veteran correspondents far from the front lines, leaving Ayres with an American artillery unit nicknamed ‘Long Distance Death Dealers.’ Facing his own death during an ambush by Iraqi tanks, Ayres admits that he feels like a coward not ‘for being scared of war’ but, rather, ‘for agreeing to go to war’ and letting ‘my journalist’s ego get the better of me.’”
“The bobbling British dork in the midst of stoic, commanding Marines is a refreshing reprieve from the self-important, flak jacket-clad, hotel roof-inhabiting war correspondent.”
“Outside Baghdad, waiting to die as Iraqi tanks bear down on his storm-stuck Humvee, Ayres berates himself for the cowardice of letting his journalist’s ego get the upper hand, for a selfishness that would cause his loved ones great and lasting pain. While these moments of bitterness claw at his soul, he delivers a first-rate glimpse of how terrifying are the wages of war, and not just the carnage and doom: the first time he needs to use the field as a toilet, he squats directly over a tarantula’s nest. Ayres a coward? Come on, give the guy a medal.”