Customer Reviews

War Reporting for Cowards

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Chris Ayres in War Reporting for Cowards is an entertaining read. Will it win the Pulitzer? Nope. Will it go down in history with other books about war? Maybe. Will you be glad you read the book? Yup.

I thought the most entertaining parts of War Reporting for Cowards are those sections dealing with the Marines he was attached and the war itself. There is a lot of personal history that Ayres includes that may be important, but I found to be distracting. I especially liked Ayres story of his first few minutes at Camp Grizzly. Approached by a young Marine who wants to banter a few lines from Full Metal Jacket, Ayres finally catches on. Truly irreverent but so truly typical of Marines.

An easy read, War Reporting for Cowards will give you a view of the war in Iraq not available anywhere else.

The author definitely had a tendency to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in New York during 9-11, the anthrax letters got people at his paper working on the same floor as him, and he was embedded with a front line unit in the Iraq invasion.

A lot of the book is really how he changes his viewpoint as these events occur. He starts off as someone who is writing about the news but is not really involved. And as these events occur he becomes involved and realizes that we are entering a war and he is on one side of the war.

There is discussion about what is happening around him - but it is in the context of how it makes him feel and how it affects him. As he points out, when you are embedded with the troops, you suddenly have a very strong desire to see your troops win every battle - and as easily as possible. Because you want to live.

This is a unique view - more on reporting the war than the war itself and it is very well written. The author is also openly critical of himself in many places which again makes it a better book.

Really 4-1/2 stars and very hard to put down once you start.

I've been reading a bunch of books lately about the Iraqi war, but this one has given me the most personal look at the war. Chris Ayres communicates clearly his ambivalence about the war and reporting from the battlefield. He feels badly for the Iraqis, but he also would rather they be dead than he and his Marine convoy. The better part of the book begins when he becomes a "war correspondent" and has to make his preparations to go to Iraq. The earlier chapters are Ayres just getting in backstory and it is not as compelling. His descriptions of being at the scene of the 9/11 attacks were real and disturbing. A funny thing about Ayres is he doesn't strike me as someone who should be a reporter. He expresses almost no curiosity about anything. Even when he could see the smoke coming from the World Trade Towers on 9/11, he didn't immediately go the site. He just thought it was an accident, and really had no interest in checking it out. When gathering up his equipment to go to Iraq, he displayed an astonishing amount of ignorance. If I were going to war, I would make sure I had all the right equipment--not in bright colors. The first half of the book was marred by his constant use of this annoying phrase: "veal-fattening pen." I counted five times by page 95, twice on page 92--in the same paragraph. He also had a lot of product brand-name dropping: Neutrogena, Sony Vaio, Dolce & Gabbana, etc. Ayres was an unlikely candidate to be a war reporter, but he does his best (while squeezing his eyes shut and screaming) and the last half of the book is a good read.

Ayres's basic premise will win over any pacific or Iraq-war-doubter. He's a wimp, a coward, and he doesn't want to go to war (not to mention that he doesn't think he would physically survive war). His "wimpiness" is what endears even the most skeptical reader to his story. Our narrator doesn't have all (or ANY) of the answers, he's not an activist, and when fired upon by Iraqis, he's darn surprised by his own desire to have them obliterated to save his own hide.

Ayres's story is not just about Iraq in 2003. His history starts much earlier, as that of a journalist trying to make a living, that of a NY resident/journalist coping with the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and that of a New York Times reporter grappling with the reality of anthrax afflicting the very people who work in his office. When I picked up this memoir, I expected to get into the gory details of war, but Ayres educates the reader in the reality that the life of anyone at war in Iraq has a history in 9/11.

One of the most-eye opening and heartbreaking moments of the Ayers experience was in finding the drafted members of the Republican Guard who refused to fight and were subsequently executed. Again and again, Ayers faces an enemy that he can't fault for choosing this way of life (or be executed), yet he still wants those bad guys to be killed before they attacked Ayers's convoy.

If there is one theme of this memoir, of war as a whole, of the military experience, it is uncertainty. The ground forces faced uncertainty and changes of orders on a moment's notice, of course. Ayers got out of the war on uncertainty--his satellite phone was seized for no reason, and therefore he had no means with which to do his job. When he got his guilt-free release from war, he was nearly killed in random RPG fire on the way out of the county (he was fine in the front lines, though!).

I loved the premise of this book, when it was first described to me: a pampered Fauntleroy-turned-journalist leaves his cushy business reporting post on a lark, for an assignment as an embed with an American Marine unit in the early stages of the Iraqi War. For the most part, the story didn't disappoint. The juxtaposition of Chris Ayres, an admitted hypochondriac, and the gritty scenes of the early stages of combat provided more than a few laugh-out-loud moments. Noteworthy was the tent he bought at a sporting goods store, later discovered as fluorescent yellow with a bulls-eye on top; packing so much gear, including hand cream and moisturizer (his girlfriend asked, "Have the marines ever met a metrosexual?"), that the wheels on his accompanying luggage rack (!) failed in the Iraqi sand; and struggling at tasks like digging a latrine or making remote phone calls while drowning in sweat and rendered nearly blind by weighty desert gear.

One reason War Reporting worked so well is that Ayres so often found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time- great for journalism, horrible for a paranoiac with anxiety issues. He arrived in New York from London just before September 11th; the floor of his office building was targeted with mailed Anthrax spores; and he climbed the professional ladder just in time to be particularly conspicuous for a war assignment. Self-deprecating throughout the book, Ayres admits that his cowardice contributed to his volunteering for Iraq, in that agreeing to the job represented the path of least vocational resistance, and that he felt compelled by a fear of someone else stealing his combat opportunity and succeeding.

All told, Ayres was only in combat for a few days, and spent far more time in training and living high on the hog at a plush hotel in Kuwait. Plus, the very hypochondriac qualities at the fore in repeated scenes in the doctor's office also had a way of making the Iraqi scenes seem overdramatic. Ayres only saw about one or two days' worth of fighting, and then he bolted for the safety of home, leaving behind the Marines whom he half-respected, and half-pitied in a smarmy, borderline-condescending way. There wasn't a ton of editorializing in War Reporting, but enough to make you want to remind Ayres that the military was doing him a favor by letting him tag along (and potentially endanger their safety), and not the other way around.

Ayres is an unlikely war journalist. He admits to being a coward, to coming from a long line of cowards. And yet, in his quest to further his career he is sent to Iraq. Ayres focuses on his cowardice and much of the book is concerned with back-story demonstrating this cowardice and detailing his evolution from business reporter to was correspondent. Where the book is by far most compelling is the description of his nine days in actual combat. He does an excellent job describing the small details that make war hell. One wishes there was more of this. But, alas, Ayres was only in battle for nine days.

This leads me to wonder, no matter how good Ayres is at what he does, why am I reading a book on the War in Iraq from a journalist who wasn't even there for two weeks? In part, the answer lies in Ayres respectable honesty and refreshing lack of an agenda. However, this book left me wishing for more and convinced that there are embeds who have more to tell us about the non-abbreviated experience of war. Still, I would encourage folks to pick up this book. Just realize that this is more a memoir of Chris Ayres than an "Iraqi War Book".

I loved this book.

Chris Ayers's writes an honest book about his fear, hypochondria, and misery as an imbedded journalist in the opening days of the Iraqi war. His self-deprecating humor is often laugh out loud funny, while having a tinge of Everyman. Every honest man.

While Ayres's slant is about his admitted cowardice, he is actually quite brave. A real coward wouldn't have gone to Iraq. A brave person feels fear, admits that he is frightened, and then goes forward to do what needs to be done. That is what Ayres does.

The lead character of a book should be a changed person by the end of the story. Chris Ayres definitely changed during his short tour with the Marines. It would have been interesting to see how he would have changed had he stayed for six months.

This is a good read: informative, educational, and funny. Perhaps most important, it's honest.

His disturbing description of standing before the burning Twin Towers on September 11, watching as people leaped to their death and then seeing the subsequent collapse of the buildings, will remain with me for a long time. For sure, the image of the man sitting on the curb reading to his child during all this will be burned in forever.

As the author of WARRIORS and the co-author of ON COMBAT, I highly recommend this great read.

While it was hard to quell the urge to reach into the pages and slap some sense into this boy (no neon in a war zone! Duh!), the story he tells was very well written, a fast and fun read, and all around worth the time.

So often we read war stories from soldiers, reporters, and civilians alike that only talk about the events, or a polished over, mostly forgotten personal experience. The writer wasn't afraid to showcase his cluelessness, and for that the book is fantastic because of it.

This book begins with the author's experience as a beginning journalist in England, then details his personal view of 9/11 as an observer near Ground Zero. His time in Los Angeles is funny and wry, as is his gearing up to become a war correspondent. But war is a serious business, even for him, and the second part of the book is a grim accounting of what happens after he is embedded with American troops. When he leaves his assigned unit a few weeks into the war, he feels a sense of incompleteness, and so does the reader. Even for an observer (as journalists must be) the war changes him and hardens him. He's not a coward; just a rational man. I would've given the book 5 stars except that it stirred up ambivalent feelings in me, unrelated to his writing.

There is a bit of sitcom-level smugness in celebrity reporter-turned-war correspondent Chris Ayres's account of nine days on the front lines in Iraq. After all, nine days is hardly enough time for a personal transformation regardless of the amount of carnage he witnessed. At the same time, his firsthand experiences provide a vividly personalized stamp on the events we see every day on CNN. In his sometimes comic, sometimes provocative account, he tells how he ended up on the front lines, riding toward Baghdad with three Marines in a Humvee and making palpable the amount of firepower the U.S. troops have to sustain the conflict. The Marines were there not only to safeguard Ayres but also to look for base sites for long-range artillery - hardly a cozy assignment.

Embedding journalists with the troops was a new one when Ayres went in 2002, and the press was not enamored with the liability much less the journalistic effectiveness of placing reporters so close to the action. Unlike Ayres, more experienced correspondents who provide most of the news coverage were placed at strategic points around Iraq such as the northern Kurdish area or in Baghdad. The precarious position of traveling side-by-side with the troops is a far riskier move, as was unfortunately seen with the recent injuries sustained by ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, and from the perspective of military brass, unlikely to yield anything positive other than PR. Because of the constantly mobile front lines, the so-called "embeds" have turned out to play a valuable role in documenting the progress of the war. Consequently, Ayres lends an unexpectedly bird's-eye view into the perils of combat.

On the surface, Ayres seems like the anti-correspondent with no physical prowess or military acumen to get around by his wits. This is the source of most of his comedy as he really oversimplifies his perspective on the war for the sake of gaining reader sympathy. As a self-professed coward, he has been coddled by the intellectual elitism and metrosexual lifestyle of his self-contained milieu. But during his brief adventure, Ayres gets reflective on his own myopic existence and does so by smartly eschewing politics and any examination of whether the war was justified. Instead, he focuses on the absurdity of life on the front lines. As a most unlikely marine, the author is at his most honest when he writes of the soldiers upon whose protection his life depends. It's the journal of an insulated snob brought down to earth by what he has only seen on TV - not overly meaningful but valuable nonetheless.