War Reporting for Cowards (Hardcover)

by Chris Ayres (Author) "The day, like most of my days in Iraq, had got off to a bad start..." (more)
Key Phrases: lunch tutorial, media dude, blue flak jacket, New York, Los Angeles, Camp Grizzly (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Ayres asserts from his opening sentences that he is a coward. But this sometimes amusing, often harrowing but poorly organized account of war life makes it clear he is anything but a wimp: he is stuffed inside the confines of a Humvee, digs foxholes in the desert and watches Iraqis blown apart or incinerated (and fears the same will happen to him; he clutches a can of diazepam to commit suicide if he is struck by nerve gas). He reported from Iraq for the London Times from 2002 to 2003 and asserts that he takes no point of view on the war, yet the tone of his story is highly uncritical of the war, and his epilogue (alas, now hopelessly out of date) puts the U.S. firmly in control of the battlefield and describes the insurgency as on the wane. The book's strengths lie in Ayres's details of the gritty, hot, lonely daily grind; its weakest aspect is the too-long tangent of his rise as a young reporter. Ayres's gratitude at surviving his tour is palpable, as he writes, "Now that I know what war is like, I've stopped worrying about death.... I made it home. I'm still alive."
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From The New Yorker
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 dot-com 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."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1ST edition (July 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871138956
• ISBN-13: 978-0871138958
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #481,144 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Humorous yet informative, August 19, 2005

By	Robert Busko (Waynesville, NC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How the reporter is affected by all of this, April 1, 2006

By	David N. Thielen (Boulder, CO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This coward will win over any reader, from the war doubter to the pacifist to the one who desires to be on the front lines, March 1, 2006

By	Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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!).