War Reporting for Cowards

“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’s hilarious new memoir is like. In War Reporting for Cowards, Mr. Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, recounts how he went from being the paper’s Hollywood correspondent, used to interviewing stars and starlets, to being embedded with a group of Marines who called themselves the ‘Long Distance Death Dealers’ as they helped spearhead the American invasion of Iraq. The book he has written reads as though Larry David had rewritten M*A*S*H and 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.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“No one would confuse Ayres, a reporter for The Times of London, with a stolid war correspondent. Instead, he’s a pasty-faced hypochondriac who gets transferred from L.A., where he hoped to ‘sink vodka martinis in the Sky Bar,’ to the front lines of Iraq as a reporter with a Marine battalion who call themselves the ‘Long Distance Death Dealers.’ Ayres’s often wry descriptions of preparing to be an embed are imbued with a refreshing Gen-X view of the world. When he buys a tent, it isn’t until he practices setting it up that he realizes it’s the wrong color: ‘I imagined a huge yellow blob appearing on an Iraqi radar screen and a Republican Guard… officer pointing excitedly.’ When the military gives him ‘auto-injectors’ to counteract chemical attacks, ‘along with the canisters The Times had given me,’ he writes, ‘I now had enough liquid narcotics to fuel a Hollywood rave.’ Ayres’s stories of life with the Marines are gripping—in part because he’s the perfect neurotic foil.”

—People

“It’s a book I was prepared to hate. It was messy and nasty and you were scared? Well, we chose to go into a war zone, after all. Nobody claimed it would be like covering the Academy Awards. But a funny thing happened on the way to fulmination. The more I read the book, the more I liked it. The closest comparison I can come up with is P. J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell…. [War Reporting for Cowards is] a helluva book, which is more than most embeds can say.”

—Scott Bernard Nelson, The Oregonian and former “embed” for The Boston Globe

“Antiwar only in the sense that it presents an unvarnished (and nauseating) picture of combat, War Reporting for Cowards provides details of conflict journalism that a more daring or combat-seasoned writer might never have thought to record, or would have been ashamed to admit…. There is a thin yellow line between functional cowardice—what we more leniently call self-preservation—and the sort of bug-eyed, lip-gnawing panic that makes this book so darkly entertaining. Ayres’s reports from the front lines of the invading force appeared as lead stories in the [London] Times, and on his return, he was nominated by his peers in the British press as foreign correspondent of the year. From his memoir, it is easy to see why. Beyond the laughs, he powerfully conveys the physical miseries of combat life, the terror of being under bombardment and the ethical impasse of wanting desperately to survive, even if it means the deaths of those on the other side of the battlefield.”

—Regina Marler, Los Angeles Times

“Ayres writes in a breezy, cheeky style that is often very funny. The style fits the book’s central motif of the combat-averse Gen-X reporter forced to make his way in the vast bureaucratic and technological world of death and destruction that is the modern army. Indeed, Ayres’s prose is best whenever he describes the machinery of war; the descriptions crackle and vividly call to mind the awesome menace of 20,000-pound trucks, hundreds and hundreds of artillery cannons and massive tanks. Excellent… among the best of the growing number of accounts of the Iraq War.”

—John Brady, San Francisco Chronicle

“Ayres’s book is exciting, revealing, and very, very, funny. Ayres knows his own limitations and never tries to paint his adventure as anything other than it is: a harrowing yet empowering journey for a young man learning he has more about him than he thinks. Ayres makes no attempts to protest or proselytize, and the book is all the better for it. He simply tells his experiences, and tells them delightfully well. And while the book is humorous, Ayres doesn’t dodge reality. His experiences at Ground Zero on 9/11 are suitably horrifying and unashamedly gripping. Even the comic absurdity of Ayres’s presence on the battlefield (a fleshy young man in a bright blue Kevlar vest—a natural target, his military handlers gleefully point out) does not lessen the severe reality of the war. War, like life, is full of contradictions. Gung ho Marines can come to appreciate nervous journalists, and a self-professed coward can find within himself his own measure of courage.”

—Howard Shirley, BookPage

“I laughed out loud at Chris Ayres’s account of his tour in Iraq for The Times of London, recounted in his new book, War Reporting for Cowards. To begin with, Ayres was a foreign correspondent of a different sort—assigned to Los Angeles and fully expecting his toughest logistical assignment to be getting a seat at the right table at the right restaurant. But, hung over and half asleep, he offered up an ill-considered ‘Love to!’ when his editor called one morning and asked if he wanted to cover the war in Iraq. His is the kind of truth and honesty we need more of in journalism: reporters who cheerfully admit that their idea of a hazardous assignment is one in which the pressroom does not have an open bar.”

—Susan Reimer, The Baltimore Sun

“British journalist Chris Ayres, who covers the U.S. West Coast for The Times of London, never aspired to be a war correspondent, to say the least. But a few twists of fate found him with a notepad on the front line in Iraq, where he almost died… of anxiety. He recalls his brief, brief stay in the war zone in his new, laugh-out-loud memoir, War Reporting for Cowards.”

—Andrea Sachs, Time

“From Falstaff to Bob Hope, Woody Allen to Yossarian, Flashman to Barney Fife, the comic coward has a great, if cowering, lineage. A reminder that we are flesh and blood, that life is worth living, the chick-enhearted soul embodies the reality principle in action—the action, mostly, of escaping death. Chris Ayres’s War Reporting for Cowards is the frazzled, initially hilarious account of his efforts as a London Times journalist determined not to get the inside story of 9/11, the anthrax attacks, or the Iraq War…. Much of the book’s setup—its immediate plunge into the Iraq War and then its flashback to fill in how the poor schmo got there—is wonderfully funny, perfectly pitched. And one of the more accurate reports of reporting today… In [Evelyn Waugh’s] Scoop…[John] Boot winds up the hero but fails even to show up for his own awards dinner. Mr. Ayres doesn’t manage all of that as his stint under fire is halted. His book turns rather touching, though, as he tries to assess what it has meant. The lamb may not become a lion, perhaps, but he does toughen up. His wool, as it were, gets a bit steelier.”

—Jerome Weeks, The Dallas Morning News

“Ayres is embedded with a force of invading Marines on the front lines, and this hilarious and disturbing account of a man who wants nothing more than Starbucks in the morning is the result.”

—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“No American war correspondent would have dared to write War Reporting for Cowards. His account is seething with fearful (and very funny) thoughts…. [Ayres also] has a keen sense of the ridiculous—he sees the bleak humor in the military guidelines on ‘How to Deal with a Dead Media Representative.’ One of the most powerful chapters deals with the terror attacks of September 11. Ayres was in New York that day, and his descriptions are wrenching, sympathetic, and somehow wry. Much has been written about that day, but here truly are some fresh views. On September 11 and on the battlefront, Ayres demonstrates he is not an adaptable man, and perhaps that is the best thing about his perspective. He never really accepts his circumstances, stubbornly refusing to create what is sometimes called a ‘new normal.’ He just wants the old normal back. Don’t we all?”

—Jeanne A. Leblanc, The Hartford Courant

“Wildly entertaining… Ayres is at his best once he gets to Iraq, hyper-alert, borderline hysterical, and evisceratingly self-aware. He’s said in interviews that more than anything he wanted to convey the day-to-day life of the troops on the ground—the shitty food, the smelly underpants, the hours of mind-numbing tedium relieved by terrifying bursts of violence. But War Reporting for Cowards is also an excellent primer on the peculiar pathology of journalism. It’s Ayres’s ego—his fear of being scooped—that gets him into this mess in the first place and, recognizing that, he goes on to lampoon the macho mythology of war correspondence.”

—Martha Bayne, Chicago Reader

“[Ayres’s] memoir would seem endlessly whiny if it weren’t so dramatic and funny.”

—The Arizona Republic

“Seriously good and hysterically funny. More importantly—a refreshing read amid some of the other B.S. written about the media in hostile environments.”

—Chris Cramer, CNN

“Ayres delivers this book with a humble sense of accomplishment. He writes in a way that offers both brutal honesty and situational question marks that entice the reader to have a laugh at his expense.”

—Jesse Haberman, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“The most honest rendering we’ve seen of embedded life, hands down, comes from Chris Ayres.”

—Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post

“Ayres’s book about his war-time experience—a rich and penetrating black comedy of fear never beaten and of flight to safety at the first opportunity—takes readers into a personal realm where traditional hairy-chested war correspondents rarely venture. And because Ayres weaves this with comic vignettes highlighting farcical and offbeat aspects of conflict, War Reporting for Cowards may become a war-reporting classic, perhaps even a nonfiction version of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.”

—The Australian (Sydney)

“A twenty-seven-year-old hypochondriac, Ayres managed just nine days as an embed in Iraq before retreating to a luxury hotel in Kuwait, and his book is principally about the serendipitous career path that landed him in the back of a Humvee. With self-deprecating wit, he recollects his days as a newsroom intern and then as a reporter covering the dotcom boom for an English paper. He dates his vocation as a war correspondent to the collapse of the Twin Towers and the receipt of an e-mail from London requesting a ‘thousand wds please on “I saw people fall to death,” etc.’ When the Iraq invasion began, his editors dismissed embedding as a diversionary ruse by the U.S. Army, and put their veteran correspondents far from the front lines, leaving Ayres with an American artillery unit nicknamed ‘Long Distance Death Dealers.’ Facing his own death during an ambush by Iraqi tanks, Ayres admits that he feels like a coward not ‘for being scared of war’ but, rather, ‘for agreeing to go to war’ and letting ‘my journalist’s ego get the better of me.’”

—The New Yorker

“The bobbling British dork in the midst of stoic, commanding Marines is a refreshing reprieve from the self-important, flak jacket-clad, hotel roof-inhabiting war correspondent.”

—John Dicker, Rocky Mountain News

“Outside Baghdad, waiting to die as Iraqi tanks bear down on his storm-stuck Humvee, Ayres berates himself for the cowardice of letting his journalist’s ego get the upper hand, for a selfishness that would cause his loved ones great and lasting pain. While these moments of bitterness claw at his soul, he delivers a first-rate glimpse of how terrifying are the wages of war, and not just the carnage and doom: the first time he needs to use the field as a toilet, he squats directly over a tarantula’s nest. Ayres a coward? Come on, give the guy a medal.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“An excellent read.”

—The Observer

“The sections on 9/11 are among the book’s best. Even if every other writer had kept a level head, Ayres’s crisp sentences would have been in a class of their own. Fortunately Ayres also has laughter in his belly. Ayres would never have cut it in the military, but he need not think meanly of himself. Going to war may or may not have made a man of him, but it certainly made a reporter of him.”

—The Sunday Times

“Ayres’s rookie fear and unique observations make a memorable new voice.”

—The Independent

“It’s an unlikely, even incredible story, how the Hollywood correspondent of The Times came to be embedded with the Marine Corps, the roughest and toughest of the American military. It tells the truth about war in a way that most memoirs don’t. Chris Ayres is actually a very good war reporter. He’s brilliant.”

—Martin Bell, BBC

“Ayres is a much better journalist than he gives himself credit for in War Reporting for Cowards, his engaging account of his crazier-than-fiction antics. He knows full well that, with a well-turned phrase, he can extract the most humour from his anecdotes by not letting up on himself for a minute. The result is at once hugely entertaining and, suprisingly, a better insight into the sheer awfulness of war than any gung ho adrenaline junkie could ever achieve.”

—Metro (London)

“Brilliant. 5/5.”

—Nuts magazine (London)

“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

“Hilarious… Ayres’s heightened sense of self-preservation and aversion to discomfort combined to ensure I will never think of war reporting the same way again.”

—The Bulletin (Australia)