Pulitzer winner Peter Arnett, who reported on Vietnam and Gulf wars, dies at 91

Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who dodged bullets to create eyewitness accounts of war from Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died.

LOS ANGELES — Peter Arnett, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent decades dodging bullets and bombs to bring the world eyewitness accounts of war from the rice paddies of Vietnam to the deserts of Iraq, has died. He was 91.

Arnett, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Associated Press, died Wednesday in Newport Beach and was surrounded by friends and family, said his son Andrew Arnett. He had been suffering from prostate cancer.

“Peter Arnett was one of the greatest war correspondents of his generation — intrepid, fearless, and a beautiful writer and storyteller. His reporting in print and on camera will remain a legacy for aspiring journalists and historians for generations to come,” said Edith Lederer, who was a fellow AP war correspondent in Vietnam in 1972-73 and is now AP’s chief correspondent at the United Nations.

As a wire-service correspondent, Arnett was known mostly to fellow journalists when he reported in Vietnam from 1962 until the war’s end in 1975. He became something of a household name in 1991, however, after he broadcast live updates for CNN from Iraq during the first Gulf War.

While almost all Western reporters had fled Baghdad in the days before the U.S.-led attack, Arnett stayed. As missiles began raining on the city, he broadcast a live account by cellphone from his hotel room.