P. J. O'Rourke Quotes

I was working in the same building as U.S. News & World Report, and I banged on the door and said, "I'm ready to go." And they said, "What's your combat experience?" I said, "Does my parents' divorce count? It was pretty rough." Then they said, "What's your reporting experience?" And I said, "I covered the women's volleyball team in college exceptionally well." The guy was like, "You are so not ready to be a war correspondent."

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

My life isn't always at risk, even if I'm in a war zone. A lot of these places have areas of calm, so covering war doesn't necessarily mean being shot at all the time.

I think it's very important to have a sense of balance in covering the war, but you don't have to be morally neutral about terrorism.

There was a time when I first started when I made a fake press pass and borrowed a camera and headed into wars, and for three years, that was the only kind of story I was interested in doing.

I don't like the definition 'war correspondent'. It is history, not journalism, that has condemned the Middle East to war. I think 'war correspondent' smells a bit, reeks of false romanticism: it has too much of the whiff of Victorian reporters who would view battles from hilltops in the company of ladies, immune to suffering, only occasionally glancing towards the distant pop-pop of cannon fire.

Some day I'd like to cover a war in a country as ugly as war itself.

Historically, war journalists have embedded themselves with one side, which means the greatest threat comes from the clearly delineated enemy of that side.

I've covered a couple wars and a lot of breaking news and a lot of cops-and-robbers situations.

We didn't see what happened after mortars landed, only the puff of smoke. There were horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism? Or was this coverage?

I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay, and greater freedom than the soldier, but at this stage of the game, having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it is his torture.

For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a date with Lana Turner.

War coverage should be more than a parade of retired generals and retired government flacks posing as reporters.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that's meaningful and important to people, but that's not my area of coverage.

Journalists dedicate their lives to covering war - they make many personal sacrifices, and it's not something that's gender-based. In a place like Libya where there's heavy fighting, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman.

On the flip side, I enjoy covering the Arab world, I've spent my entire career here in the Middle East, but I would never call myself a war correspondent.

Vietnam was the first war ever fought without any censorship. Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things.

I went to Vietnam; it was my first assignment as a reporter for the UPI, and I never could get away from the war.

In Iraq, embedding allows us to put reporters in situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for them.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'

The media is not at all homogeneous in the way it tells us about war.

The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.

One big, glaring difference I can think of between Iraq and Vietnam is the news coverage. During the Vietnam War era, you had TV coverage of the war saturating the airwaves every night, and that coverage wasn't put through a military filter at all.

There's a lot of peer pressure to not do positive stories out of Iraq... I think there's a sense that the administration got a pass during the hot days of war and now that the war is over it's time to even out the deck somewhat.