thedrifter
09-05-05, 07:20 AM
Posted on Sun, Sep. 04, 2005
Anxious correspondent finds himself embedded with U.S. Marines unit
By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS
By Chris Ayres
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 280 pages, $23)
Imagine George Costanza from Seinfeld or one of Woody Allen's hypochondriacal heroes being sent off to cover the Iraq war, and you have a pretty good idea of what Chris Ayres' hilarious new memoir is like.
In War Reporting for Cowards, Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, recounts how he went from being the paper's Hollywood correspondent to being embedded with a group of Marines who called themselves ``the Long Distance Death Dealers'' as they helped spearhead the invasion of Iraq. His book reads as though Larry David had rewritten M*A*S*H or Evelyn Waugh's Scoop as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the peculiar experience of being an embedded reporter.
By his own account, Ayres is a thoroughly unlikely war correspondent. At 27, he's a full-blown hypochondriac, suffering from panic attacks, a queasy stomach and lingering bouts of anxiety and dread.
So why did Ayres trade his cushy post covering celebrities in Los Angeles for a seat in a Humvee in the mine-laden marshlands of Iraq? He claims it was cowardice that led him to accept the assignment. Half asleep and hung over from the night before, he'd blurted out an automatic ``Love to!'' when his editor phoned to ask him if he wanted to go to war.
``Respond in the positive, my brain remembered. Be enthusiastic. Foreign correspondents are supposed to love wars, after all.''
By the time that Ayres realized his editor was serious, it was too late, he says, to back out without losing face. He felt woefully unprepared. His only references for war were movies, and he was equally unprepared for the physical rigors. A general describes his coming ordeal as ``the worst camping trip of your life,'' and Ayres thinks, he wasn't only a ``war virgin'' but a ``camping virgin'' as well.
Ayres starts worrying about being shot, kidnapped or beheaded. He worries about Gulf War Syndrome. He worries about anthrax and smallpox vaccinations, his ability to don a gas mask, land mines and scorpions and spiders. The ``Surviving Dangerous Countries'' course he takes gives him even more things to worry about: He and the other reporters are advised ``to carry a Ziploc bag in our backpacks, for severed fingers or toes.''
In an effort to fill a things-to-buy list sent to him by the Marines, Ayres goes to a trendy mountaineering shop and ends up buying a bright yellow two-man tent emblazoned with a fluorescent red cross -- he later realizes it will make him a perfect Day-Glo target. Along with more than $5,000 worth of recommended gear, he also packs his electric toothbrush, his badger-hair shaving brush, toilet paper, dozens of tubes of sun block, the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East, a dozen canisters of nerve gas antidote, and 20 times the recommended number of boxer shorts.
In country, things live up to many of Ayres' worst expectations. The Marine unit he's attached to traverses perilous mine-laden wastelands, gets lost in a storm and is faced with an assault by Iraqi tanks.
Although Ayres leaves the front lines after only nine days, he gives us some indelible snapshots of the war, capturing that gruesome elixir of boredom and fear that permeates a military campaign.
Having his own fate so intimately wedded to that of the soldiers he's covering, Ayres said, turned him into a kind of a gung-ho Marine, though he realized that he had no idea of the actual progress of the war. ``My mum knew more about the war more than I did,'' he writes. ``Sometimes I felt as though all I could do was stand next to the guns and describe how loud they were. Was that worth dying for?''
And so, when his satellite phone is confiscated by the military, Ayres takes the opportunity to leave. He notes that his experience had at least one positive consequence: It cured him of his anxiety.
Needless to say, it's a luxury still unavailable to many of the soldiers Ayres and other reporters covered.
Ellie
Anxious correspondent finds himself embedded with U.S. Marines unit
By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times
WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS
By Chris Ayres
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 280 pages, $23)
Imagine George Costanza from Seinfeld or one of Woody Allen's hypochondriacal heroes being sent off to cover the Iraq war, and you have a pretty good idea of what Chris Ayres' hilarious new memoir is like.
In War Reporting for Cowards, Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, recounts how he went from being the paper's Hollywood correspondent to being embedded with a group of Marines who called themselves ``the Long Distance Death Dealers'' as they helped spearhead the invasion of Iraq. His book reads as though Larry David had rewritten M*A*S*H or Evelyn Waugh's Scoop as a comic television episode, even as it provides the reader with a visceral picture of the horrors of combat and the peculiar experience of being an embedded reporter.
By his own account, Ayres is a thoroughly unlikely war correspondent. At 27, he's a full-blown hypochondriac, suffering from panic attacks, a queasy stomach and lingering bouts of anxiety and dread.
So why did Ayres trade his cushy post covering celebrities in Los Angeles for a seat in a Humvee in the mine-laden marshlands of Iraq? He claims it was cowardice that led him to accept the assignment. Half asleep and hung over from the night before, he'd blurted out an automatic ``Love to!'' when his editor phoned to ask him if he wanted to go to war.
``Respond in the positive, my brain remembered. Be enthusiastic. Foreign correspondents are supposed to love wars, after all.''
By the time that Ayres realized his editor was serious, it was too late, he says, to back out without losing face. He felt woefully unprepared. His only references for war were movies, and he was equally unprepared for the physical rigors. A general describes his coming ordeal as ``the worst camping trip of your life,'' and Ayres thinks, he wasn't only a ``war virgin'' but a ``camping virgin'' as well.
Ayres starts worrying about being shot, kidnapped or beheaded. He worries about Gulf War Syndrome. He worries about anthrax and smallpox vaccinations, his ability to don a gas mask, land mines and scorpions and spiders. The ``Surviving Dangerous Countries'' course he takes gives him even more things to worry about: He and the other reporters are advised ``to carry a Ziploc bag in our backpacks, for severed fingers or toes.''
In an effort to fill a things-to-buy list sent to him by the Marines, Ayres goes to a trendy mountaineering shop and ends up buying a bright yellow two-man tent emblazoned with a fluorescent red cross -- he later realizes it will make him a perfect Day-Glo target. Along with more than $5,000 worth of recommended gear, he also packs his electric toothbrush, his badger-hair shaving brush, toilet paper, dozens of tubes of sun block, the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East, a dozen canisters of nerve gas antidote, and 20 times the recommended number of boxer shorts.
In country, things live up to many of Ayres' worst expectations. The Marine unit he's attached to traverses perilous mine-laden wastelands, gets lost in a storm and is faced with an assault by Iraqi tanks.
Although Ayres leaves the front lines after only nine days, he gives us some indelible snapshots of the war, capturing that gruesome elixir of boredom and fear that permeates a military campaign.
Having his own fate so intimately wedded to that of the soldiers he's covering, Ayres said, turned him into a kind of a gung-ho Marine, though he realized that he had no idea of the actual progress of the war. ``My mum knew more about the war more than I did,'' he writes. ``Sometimes I felt as though all I could do was stand next to the guns and describe how loud they were. Was that worth dying for?''
And so, when his satellite phone is confiscated by the military, Ayres takes the opportunity to leave. He notes that his experience had at least one positive consequence: It cured him of his anxiety.
Needless to say, it's a luxury still unavailable to many of the soldiers Ayres and other reporters covered.
Ellie