LOS ANGELES (AP) — 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.

“There was an explosion right near me, you may have heard,” he said in a calm, New Zealand-accented voice moments after the loud boom of a missile strike rattled across the airwaves. As he continued to speak air-raid sirens blared in the background.

“I think that took out the telecommunications center,” he said of another explosion. “They are hitting the center of the city.”

Reporting from Vietnam

It was not the first time Arnett had gotten dangerously close to the action.

In January 1966, he joined a battalion of U.S. soldiers seeking to rout North Vietnamese snipers and was standing next to the battalion commander when an officer paused to read a map.

“As the colonel peered at it, I heard four loud shots as bullets tore through the map and into his chest, a few inches from my face,” Arnett recalled during a talk to the American Library Association in 2013. “He sank to the ground at my feet.”

He would begin the fallen soldier’s obituary like this: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer and a battalion commander. But Lt. Colonel George Eyster was to die like a rifleman. It may have been the colonel’s leaves of rank on his collar, or the map he held in his hand, or just a wayward chance that the Viet Cong sniper chose Eyster from the five of us standing in that dusty jungle path.”

Arnett had arrived in Vietnam just a year after joining AP as its Indonesia correspondent. That job would be short-lived after he reported Indonesia’s economy was in shambles and the country’s enraged leadership threw him out. His expulsion marked only the first of several controversies in which he would find himself embroiled, while also forging an historic career.

At the AP’s Saigon bureau in 1962, Arnett found himself surrounded by a formidable roster of journalists, including bureau chief Malcolm Browne and photo editor Horst Faas, who between them would win three Pulitzer Prizes.

He credited Browne in particular with teaching him many of the survival tricks that would keep him alive in war zones over the next 40 years. Among them: Never stand near a medic or radio operator because they’re among the first the enemy will shoot at. And if you hear a gunshot coming from the other side, don’t look around to see who fired it because the next one will likely hit you.

Arnett would stay in Vietnam until the capital, Saigon, fell to the Communist-backed North Vietnamese rebels in 1975. In the time leading up to those final days, he was ordered by AP’s New York headquarters to begin destroying the bureau’s papers as coverage of the war wound down.

Instead, he shipped them to his apartment in New York, believing they’d have historic value someday. They’re now in the AP’s archives.

A star on cable news

Arnett remained with the AP until 1981, when he joined the newly-formed CNN.

Ten years later he was in Baghdad covering another war. He not only reported on the front-line fighting but won exclusive, and controversial, interviews with then-President Saddam Hussein and future 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

In 1995 he published the memoir, “Live From the Battlefield: From Vietnam to Baghdad, 35 Years in the World’s War Zones.”

Arnett resigned from CNN in 1999, months after the network retracted an investigative report he did not prepare but narrated alleging that deadly Sarin nerve gas had been used on deserting American soldiers in Laos in 1970.

He was covering the second Gulf War for NBC and National Geographic in 2003 when he was fired for granting an interview to Iraqi state TV during which he criticized the U.S. military’s war strategy. His remarks were denounced back home as anti-American.

After his dismissal, TV critics for the AP and other news organizations speculated that Arnett would never work in television news again. Within a week, however, he had been hired to report on the war for stations in Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and Belgium.

In 2007, he took a job teaching journalism at China’s Shantou University. Following his retirement in 2014, he and his wife, Nina Nguyen, moved to the Southern California suburb of Fountain Valley.

Born Nov. 13, 1934, in Riverton, New Zealand, Peter Arnett got his first exposure to journalism when he landed a job at his local newspaper, the Southland Times, shortly after high school.

“I didn’t really have a clear idea of where my life would take me, but I do remember that first day when I walked into the newspaper office as an employee and found my little desk, and I did have a — you know — enormously delicious feeling that I’d found my place,” he recalled in a 2006 AP oral history.

After a few years at the Times, he made plans to move to a larger newspaper in London. En route to England by ship, however, he made a stop in Thailand and fell in love with the country.

Soon he was working for the English-language Bangkok World, and later for its sister newspaper in Laos. There he would make the connections that led him to the AP and a lifetime of covering war.

Arnett is survived by his wife and their children, Elsa and Andrew.

“He was like a brother,” said retired AP photographer Nick Ut, who covered combat in Vietnam with Arnett and remained his friend for a half century. “His death will leave a big hole in my life.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration announced Tuesday it was expanding travel restrictions to an additional 20 countries and the Palestinian Authority, doubling the number of nations affected by sweeping limits announced earlier this year on who can travel and emigrate to the U.S.

The Trump administration included five more countries as well as people traveling on documents issued by the Palestinian Authority to the list of countries facing a full ban on travel to the U.S. and imposed new limits on 15 other countries.

The move is part of ongoing efforts by the administration to tighten U.S. entry standards for travel and immigration, in what critics say unfairly prevents travel for people from a broad range of countries. The administration suggested it would expand the restrictions after the arrest of an Afghan national suspect in the shooting of two National Guard troops over Thanksgiving weekend.

People who already have visas, are lawful permanent residents of the U.S. or have certain visa categories such as diplomats or athletes, or whose entry into the country is believed to serve the U.S. interest, are all exempt from the restrictions. The proclamation said the changes go into effect on Jan. 1.

In June, President Donald Trump announced that citizens of 12 countries would be banned from coming to the United States and those from seven others would face restrictions. The decision resurrected a hallmark policy of his first term.

At the time the ban included Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen and heightened restrictions on visitors from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

On Tuesday, the Republican administration announced it was expanding the list of countries whose citizens are banned from entering the U.S. to Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria. The administration also fully restricted travel on people with Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents, the latest U.S. travel restriction against Palestinians. South Sudan was also facing significant travel restrictions already.

An additional 15 countries are also being added to the list of countries facing partial restrictions: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Ivory Coast, Dominica, Gabon, Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The restrictions apply to both people seeking to travel to the U.S. as visitors or to emigrate there.

The Trump administration said in its announcement that many of the countries from which it was restricting travel had “widespread corruption, fraudulent or unreliable civil documents and criminal records” that made it difficult to vet their citizens for travel to the U.S.

It also said some countries had high rates of people overstaying their visas, refused to take back their citizens whom the U.S. wished to deport or had a “general lack of stability and government control,” which made vetting difficult. It also cited immigration enforcement, foreign policy and national security concerns for the move.

The Afghan man accused of shooting the two National Guard troops near the White House has pleaded not guilty to murder and assault charges. In the aftermath of that incident, the administration announced a flurry of immigration restrictions, including further restrictions on people from those initial 19 countries who were already in the U.S.

The news of the expanding travel ban is likely to face fierce opposition from critics who have argued that the administration is using national security concerns to collectively keep out people from a wide range of countries.

“This expanded ban is not about national security but instead is another shameful attempt to demonize people simply for where they are from,” said Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president of U.S. Legal Programs at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Advocates for Afghans who supported the United States’ two-decade long war in Afghanistan also raised alarms Tuesday, saying the updated travel ban no longer contains an exception for Afghans who qualify for the Special Immigrant Visa. That’s a visa category specifically for Afghans who closely assisted the U.S. war effort at great risk to themselves.

No One Left Behind, a longtime agency advocating for the Special Immigrant Visa program, said it was “deeply concerned” about the change. The organization said it appreciated the president’s commitment to national security but allowing Afghans who’d served the U.S. to enter the U.S. — after extensive vetting — also contributes to the country’s security.

“Though intended to allow for review of inconsistent vetting processes, this policy change inadvertently restricts those who are among the most rigorously vetted in our history: the wartime allies targeted by the terrorists this proclamation seeks to address,” the organization said in a statement.

Countries that were newly placed on the list of banned or restricted countries said late Tuesday that they were evaluating the news. The government of the island nation of Dominica in the Caribbean Sea said it was treating the issue with the “utmost seriousness and urgency” and was reaching out to U.S. officials to clarify what the restrictions mean and address any problems.

Antigua and Barbuda’s ambassador to the United States, Ronald Saunders, said the “matter is quite serious” and he’ll be seeking more information from U.S. officials regarding the new restrictions.

The Trump administration also upgraded restrictions on some countries — Laos and Sierra Leone — that previously were on the partially restricted list and in one case — Turkmenistan — said the country had improved enough to warrant easing some restrictions on travelers from that country. Everything else from the previous travel restrictions announced in June remains in place, the administration said.

The new restrictions on Palestinians come months after the administration imposed limits that make it nearly impossible for anyone holding a Palestinian Authority passport from receiving travel documents to visit the U.S. for business, work, pleasure or educational purposes. The announcement Tuesday goes further, banning people with Palestinian Authority passports from emigrating to the U.S.

In justifying its decision Tuesday, the administration said several “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip and have murdered American citizens.” The administration also said the recent war in those areas had “likely resulted in compromised vetting and screening abilities.”