Modern Adventurers in War Zones; war correspondents and mercenaries

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Moorehead was an Australian. He lived an adventurous life and Desert War is a travel log as well as war memoir. Pyle was an American as was Lowell Thomas. Claire Booth Luce was also an American as was Sulzberger who wrote Long Row of Candles.

I'm quite interested in memoirs and books by war journalists, as they are excellent sources of local colour for roleplaying (Michael Herr's Dispatches is also a brilliant read, albeit about a different war).

I can't recall the name of the Iraqi War journalistic memoir I read by a young female reporter on her first trip abroad as a journalist, but it was heavily focused on daily life, loves and partying of the foreign journalism corps in Baghdad's Green Zone. In any case, in that memoir, as well as quite a few articles and other books I've read, there always seem to be Australian freelance photographers, photojournalists and foreign correspondents hanging around in every war zone. There's Michael Ware in Iraq, but I got the impression that Australians and New Zealanders are, in general, overrepresented in the field. I'll admit that could be confirmation bias, due to the cinematic trope of the devil-may-care Aussie or Kiwi war correspondent*.

*Not only the Year of Living Dangerously, but in general, in modern movies (such as Blood Diamond or Live from Baghdad, were there is always an Aussie or Kiwi (or three) in any foreign press corps in a danger zone.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Other possibilities besides journalists are general information vendors like cartoonists(Maudlin) or writers(Rebecca West). I don't remember whether she actually covered an ongoing war; she is most famous for a travel log about a dormant rather then active war zone.

In 2011, there is little active fighting in Iraq and almost none at all where the PCs find themselves. There is seething unrest under the surface and a lot of fault lines in politics and governance, but there are no actual battles in the streets.

Well, until one PC walked into a suicide bombing and another PC gunned down some eight to nine people in two cars in the street where it happened.* That was a battle in the streets, albeit a short-lived one.

*They were racing to the scene, armed with AKs and RPG-7s. He felt fairly confident that they were not innocent bystanders and was disinclined to allow them to start firing at him and his boss (potentially seriously wounded by an explosion and collapsing house).