The war correspondent has his stake - his life - in his own hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute… being allowed to be a coward, and not be executed for it, is his torture.

— War photographer Robert Capa,
killed by a landmine in French Indo-China, 1954

Click here for the book’s official website

I don’t have any aspirations of being a war reporter per se, but since it’s an offshoot - or perhaps the seed - of global journalism (which I’m interested in), I guess that’s why I’ve always tried to follow the whereabouts and stories of a number of conflict journalists. And with all of them, what amazes me is how they seem not to comprehend the reality of their own mortality - or maybe it’s exactly the opposite, maybe it’s because they do that they take chances with their lives. So when I came across Chris Ayres‘ memoir, so intriguingly titled, I had to pick it up. It was a great read, but I must say, however, that it wasn’t what the book cover set it up to be. I was only anticipating a laugh-out-loud, omg-that’s-so-stupid-this-guy-is-a-joke kind of read. But it wasn’t. For all his professions of being a coward, Chris Ayres really isn’t one at all.

The Review:

CAUTION: Avoid making the biggest decision of your life when you’re hung over. Especially when that decision propels you onto a collision course with a real war that you’re hopelessly ill-equipped for.

Chris Ayres was an accidental war correspondent of The Times whose career’s lifespan short-circuited just after nine days in Iraq. An unwitting “Yes!” into the phone the morning after a heroically drunken night had him embedded with US marines who called themselves the “Long Distance Death Dealers”, as efficient as an assembly line dishing out Iraqi body parts. In what he describes as an act of cowardice, Ayres didn’t dare refuse his editor’s cheerful offer, because it might have cost him his job.

To hell with nobility or bravery, he’d never wanted to be a war correspondent. He was a hypochondriac prone to anxiety attacks, whereas war reporters - real, macho war reporters - were “a different species: fearless and suntanned outdoor types who became Boy Scout leaders at school… and probably knew the correct way to eat a sheep’s penis at the table of an African warlord.” Besides, a war reporter was apt to lose his head to terrorists on television. What Ayres really wanted was to hightail it to LA to meet Paris Hilton and dine at Michelin-star restaurants.

Ayres graduated from London’s City University as the self-proclaimed “least cool student” — it was a well-known fact that those in the concentration of financial journalism were the lepers of the field. After an uneventful stint at the business desk of The Times, he moved to NY as the paper’s Wall Street correspondent, where he landed himself in waters hotter than he’d ever bargained for: 9/11.

While the book on the whole is hilarious, Ayres describes the pathos of Ground Zero with subtle sensitivity:

At first we thought it was burning debris falling from the upper floors of the World Trade Center. Then we noticed the debris had arms and legs. At first it seems inexplicable that they would choose to jump. Then comes…the conclusion that there is no choice at all.

And indeed, Ayres oscillates between his two voices - comic and sober - comfortably.

Some of the funniest bits in the book come through when Ayres recounts his shopping experiences in preparation for his Iraq junket. He’d bought all the wrong equipment - a flak jacket (the only blue thing in Iraq) and a fluorescent yellow tent with a red bull’s eye on top so it could be identified by mountain rescue teams from the air. “None of the Marines, I noticed, stood next to me for very long,” he wrote.

The appeal of this book lies in its lack of self-importance and it’s kaleidoscopic perspective. Ayres doesn’t just tell us about war reporting, but also how it affected his personal life. However, he makes no attempts to proselytize. This is not a pro-war book or an anti-war book. It is an “anti-sending-me-to-war” book, in which he debunks the macho mythology of war correspondence.