War Reporting for Cowards

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The late British satirist Peter Cook had some excellent advice for reporters willing to write risky stories: publish and be absent. Hence Cook went to Tenerife after naming the Kray twins as London’s most feared gangsters in Private Eye magazine; and hence I found myself holed up in a Cotswolds hotel after writing an article for The Times entitled “I Made My Excuses and Left,” which explained why I ran away from the Iraq War. There is nothing necessarily wrong, of course, about running away from a war. Unless, that is, you’re a Marine. Or a war correspondent.

The Times should probably have fired me for giving up my embedded position with the U.S. military. Instead, the paper made the best of a difficult situation and turned my incoherent 5,000-word confessional, rattled out on an IBM in the business center of Kuwait City’s JW Marriott Hotel, into a 2,500-word cover story for its Times 2 section. If it wasn’t for the executives and editors who agreed to publish it—Robert Thomson, Ben Preston, Sandra Parsons, Anne Barrowclough, and Jonathan Gornall, who kindly compared my stint in Iraq to his transatlantic rowing career—War Reporting for Cowards might not have been written. They probably have mixed feelings about that now. But I’d like to thank them all nevertheless.

It’s worth mentioning that The Times has treated me exceptionally well during my eight years as a staff reporter; and that I’m hugely indebted to all those editors, particularly Robert Thomson and Ben Preston, who have given me the freedom to write bad jokes in the first person. It also says a lot about the culture of The Times that my decision to leave the front lines was treated with sympathy, in spite of the short-term consequences for the paper’s war coverage. I must also thank Martin Fletcher, The Times’s foreign-news editor, for taking the risk of sending his Hollywood correspondent to cover an invasion; and to Martin Barrow, for his soothing sarcasm throughout the war. The “two Martins,” who still wake me up at 6:30 A.M. every day with bizarre requests (“Chri-is? We need you to buy an AK-47 in Las Vegas,” was a recent Barrow classic), have been supportive, patient, and, most important, forgiving editors. They were particularly understanding while I was neglecting my day job to write this book. At least, I’m sure they would have been if I’d answered any of their calls. Thanks must also go to my early mentors at The Times, Patience Wheatcroft and Robert “Lunch Tutorial” Cole (formerly of the London Evening Standard), who were probably as shocked as I when they saw my face next to an Iraq dateline.

All of the aforementioned Times editors, particularly Martin Barrow, have been extremely good sports about their descriptions in the book, as was Oliver Poole of the Daily Telegraph (who wrote his own account of being embedded, entitled Black Knights: On the Bloody Road to Baghdad). Similar tolerance was shown by Joanna Coles, now executive editor of More magazine in New York; Toby Moore, the novelist; and Glen Owen, now at the Mail on Sunday.

Thanks must also go to my parents, Peter and Jenny Ayres; my sister, Catherine Newton, and her husband, Tom; and my grandparents Ross and Florence Taylor, for their overwhelming love and support during all the difficult times mentioned in this book. It’s also about time I apologized to Tom for nearly giving him anthrax. Special thanks must go to my grandfather for letting me interview him about his capture during World War II. Those conversations inspired me to write this book, because I wish he’d written a book.

War Reporting for Cowards could not have been written, of course, without the U.S. Marines. I will always be grateful to them for looking after me in Mesopotamia. My own experiences in Iraq are trivial compared with those of the Marines; but warriors are rarely writers (when they are, they win Pulitzers), and I hope that my memoir helps readers understand what these men’s daily lives are like. My own wimpish performance under Iraqi mortar fire should give some idea of the immense bravery required to stay on the front lines for months, or years, at a time.

Neither could this book have been written without the help of George Lucas, my brilliant agent at Inkwell Management in New York, and Mark Lucas, my agent in London at Lucas Alexander Whitley.

I would also like to thank the many others who gave me advice on the book and showed early, morale-boosting enthusiasm for it. These include Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Graham Broadbent at Blueprint Pictures, and Basil Iwanyk and Tobin Armbrust at Thunder Road Entertainment in Los Angeles. The efforts of all these people would count for nothing, of course, unless someone had agreed to publish the book, and I couldn’t have found sharper or more encouraging editors than Morgan Entrekin and Brando Skyhorse at Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Grove’s interest in War Reporting for Cowards was enormously flattering, as was the enthusiasm of Roland Philipps at John Murray, who published the book in the UK.

I used many reference materials during the research for this book. Some of the most helpful books were Ernie Pyle’s War, by James Tobin; Trying Not to Go Deaf on the Gun Line, by Scott Bernard Nelson of the Boston Globe (his report can be found in Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, edited by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson); Churchill, by Roy Jenkins; The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy; A Reed Shaken by the Wind, by Gavin Maxwell; The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story, by Leonard A. Cole; Hostage, by Chris Cramer and Sim Harris; Give War a Chance and Holidays in Hell, by P. J. O’Rourke; In Harm’s Way, by Martin Bell; Iraq: The Bradt Travel Guide, by Karen Dabrowska; Iraq: An Illustrated History and Guide, by Giles Munier; and the Lonely Planet guide to the Middle East. I found Microsoft Encarta and Wikipedia.com to be invaluable resources. I also used many newspaper and wire service reports—far too many to list.

Finally, I would like to thank my fiancée, Lucie, who agreed to marry me weeks before I disappeared into my office to write this book. I emerged, months later, exhausted, ratty, and even balder than when I began. She must have wondered what she had done. Without Lucie’s patience, support, advice, and proofreading, War Reporting for Cowards might never have been completed. She claims she was laughing with me, not at me, when she giggled over early drafts.

On several occasions, however, she couldn’t resist asking: “You didn’t really do that, did you?”

Unfortunately, I did.