War Reporting for Cowards
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Imagine George Costanza from Seinfeld being sent off to cover the Iraq War . . . Hilarious.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Chris Ayres is a small-town boy, a hypochondriac, and a neat freak with an anxiety disorder. Not exactly the picture of a war correspondent. But when his boss asks him if he would like to go to Iraq, he doesn’t have the guts to say no. After signing a one million dollar life-insurance policy, studying a tutorial on repairing severed limbs, and spending twenty thousand dollars on camping gear (only to find out that his bright yellow tent makes him a sitting duck), Ayres is embedded with a battalion of gung ho Marines who either shun him or threaten him when he files an unfavorable story. As time goes on, though, he begins to understand them (and his inexplicably enthusiastic fellow war reporters) more and more: Each night of terrifying combat brings, in the morning, something more visceral than he has ever experienced—the thrill of having won a fight for survival.
War Reporting for Cowards tells, with “self-deprecating wit”, the story of Iraq in a way that is extraordinarily honest and bitterly hilarious (The New Yorker).
“Heartbreakingly funny.” —Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead
“Chris Ayres has invented a new genre: a rip-roaring tale of adventure and derring-don’t.” —Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
“Darkly entertaining.” —Los Angeles Times
“Ayres’s stories of life with Marines are gripping—in part because he’s the perfect neurotic foil.” —People
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of view on the war, yet the tone of his story is highly uncritical of the war, and his epilogue (alas, now hopelessly out of date) puts the U.S. firmly in control of the battlefield and describes the insurgency as on the wane.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."
