Review

War Reporting for Cowards
Chris Ayres
Grove Press; 304pp

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 US 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.'
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of view on the war, yet the tone of his story is highly uncritical of the war, and his epilogue (alas, now hopelessly out of date) puts the US firmly in control of the battlefield and describes the insurgency as on the wane.
—Book courtesy Books Plus