Patrick+K

= Live from the Battlefeild = = By Peter Arnett = = 35 Years in the Worlds War Zones ** ﻿ ** =

Publishers Weekly Review
media type="youtube" key="dii4ViTELS0?fs=1" height="385" width="640"

** ﻿ ﻿ **
== In 1966 I was caught up in the war's momentum. I never asked myself wether it was right or wrong, and the question did not come up in conversation, not with the soliders or my colleauges because we were all of us too close to the action. Too many of our freinds had died; we were unwilling to write off thier sacrifice.- Peter Arnett == AP ( Associated Press) President Wes Gallagher had backed my controversal Vietnam war reporting style despite strong criticisim from the lyndon Johnson White House and the U.S. Millitary high command. He took particular pleasure in my successes.- Peter Arnett

The secert police attacked me during a Buddhist antigovernment demonstration in Saigon on July 7,1963 New York Times reporter David Halberstam dragged me to my feet and confronted my attackers.- Peter Arnett ==Arnett who reports for CNN, is one of America's great news correspondants and in this book he manages not only to provide the details of war, but also to illimuinate the problems of reporting the action to the folks back home.- thefreelibrary.com == ===﻿The CNN staff was scared stiff, says Arnett, in his compelling account of how the January 19, 1991, Allied air attack on Baghdad got reported. Even so, the extraordinary episode makes Walter Cronkite's advice to Arnett (before leaving for Iraq) all the more ironic: "Peter, you're a very valuable asset to courageous reporting around the world. . . . Don't grandstand this one." Yet Arnett never seems like a grandstander; he's simply a tenacious, unflappable reporter. In his early career, as the American war in Indochina was warming up, he published a one-man newspaper in Vientiane--and served as a stringer for AP, UPI, and Reuter's. When a coup toppled the government, soldiers blocked access to the wires, so Arnett swam the Mekong and filed his stories in Thailand. Not long after, he became one of the fiercest among that young cadre of reporters in Vietnam that included David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Stanley Karnow--who, in effect, are characters in this memoir. Arnett stayed through the fall of Saigon in 1975, often offending American official interests in his behind-the-lines reporting--as he was to do again, of course, in Baghdad. Arnett offers a refresher course on war and political intrigue since the 1950s, from Sukarno's Indonesia through the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan. But his is also a brilliant, often ironic memoir of a single-minded man who--even as a child growing up at the southernmost tip of New Zealand, hearing tales of his Maori and seagoing British ancestors--always knew he wanted to be a reporter. He became a good one. John Mort-Booklist===

-Kirkus Reviews
media type="youtube" key="yIE2QSVJIdo?fs=1" height="385" width="480" align="center"

Why I Chose
===Quote #1. I feel that this quote represents a number of things about Arnett and his reporting style. In the book after this quote is stated he talks about all of his freind and fellow reporters who were killed or seriousley injured in the war while reporting. It also shows that through the whole war Arnett was focused on one thing and that was clear and unbiased journalisim. He was criticized by the Johnson Whitehouse and by American Generals for his straight forward reporting style by them saying that he was too negative and that the american people did not need to hear this negative side of the war. Througought the war Arnett was un-influenced and told the war to the people like it was.===

===﻿Quote #2. I feel that this quote shows how Arnett's Reporting style was controversal to the United States. Arnett would report things that were not always the things the Pentagon and the White House and the High Commanders of the Millitary always wanted to hear. He was so controversal that at one point during Vietnam the CIA spent a month investigating him and trying to link him to communist organizations. They found nothing showing that Arnett was just a Reporter that sometimes shook things up a bit to the pleasure of his Higer Ups at the AP.===

===﻿Quote #3. I think that this quote shows how governments sometimes suspected him to be a communist because of his reporting and the pictures he sent back that were then printed in newspapers world wide. It was not always what governments wanted other people seeing about their country.===

===﻿Video #1 I chose this video because i think it was a good compliment to Arnett after spending the better part of Ten years in Saigon reporting the war. He goes back 25 plus years later to see what things are like there now and discovers how much the war has changed it. It also shows how much the war changed their country.===

===﻿Video #2. This video is a good pick because it talks about the begenning of the gulf war. Arnett was there holed up in a hotel room while bombs and anti-aircraft guns raged and exploded as the U.S. bombed Iraq. It is good representation of the book because it is a video of a report that was vividly acounted in the book.===