Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Peter Arnett dies aged 91

Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from Vietnam to Iraq, has died aged 91.

Mr Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press, died in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, his son Andrew said.

He had entered hospice on Saturday while suffering from prostate cancer.

As a wire-service correspondent, Mr Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the war’s end in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after he broadcast live updates for CNN of the first Gulf War.

While almost all Western reporters had fled Baghdad in the days before the US-led attack, New Zealand-born Mr Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast a live account by phone from his hotel room.

It was not the first time Mr Arnett had gotten dangerously close to the action.

In January 1966 he joined a battalion of US soldiers seeking to rout North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when the soldier paused to read a map.

“As the colonel peered at it I heard four loud shots as bullets tore through the map and into his chest, a few inches from my face,” Mr Arnett recalled during a talk to the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”

Mr Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining The Associated Press as its Indonesia correspondent.

At the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photo editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.

After the war’s end Mr Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly-formed CNN.

Ten years later he was in Baghdad covering another war. He not only reported on the front-line fighting but won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In 1995 he published the memoir, Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.

Mr Arnett resigned from CNN in 1999, months after the network retracted an investigative report he did not prepare but narrated alleging that deadly Sarin nerve gas had been used on deserting American soldiers in Laos in 1970.

He was covering the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for granting an interview to Iraqi state TV during which he criticised the US military’s war strategy.

After his dismissal, Mr Arnett was hired to report on the war for TV stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.

In 2007, he took a job teaching journalism at China’s Shantou University. Following his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.

Born November 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Mr Arnett got his first exposure to journalism when he landed a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times.

“I didn’t really have a clear idea of where my life would take me, but I do remember that first day when I walked into the newspaper office as an employee and found my little desk, and I did have a - you know - enormously delicious feeling that I’d found my place,” he recalled.

Mr Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.