BOOK REVIEW / NONFICTION : A Savvy Reporter’s Controversial and Gritty Tour of Duty : LIVE FROM THE BATTLEFIELD, From Vietnam to Baghdad: 35 Years in the World’s War Zones, <i> by Peter Arnett</i> . Simon & Schuster: $23, 463 pages

The war correspondent seems to be an impossibly romantic figure--a hard-drinking, high-living, devil-may-care rogue who cares only about getting the story out. But Peter Arnett is the real thing.

“They say you’re bulletproof,” said one young Cable News Network staffer in explaining why she followed Arnett into Baghdad during the Gulf War.

As we discover in “Live From the Battlefield,” Arnett’s grit-and-glory memoir, he has come out alive (but not quite unscarred) from the 17 wars he has covered since the early ‘60s. And we begin to understand how Arnett acquired the near-mythic reputation that makes him seem, at times, a kind of journalistic Indiana Jones.

For example, Arnett’s first dispatch from a war zone was a scoop on a coup d’etat in Laos in 1960. When tanks blocked the telegraph office in Vientiane, Arnett dived into the Mekong River and swam to Thailand to find an open wire to the Associated Press.

“The typed AP story, my passport and 20 $10 bills were clamped in my teeth,” Arnett recalls. “They thought me mad to swim the river, but at the time it made sense to me. I had to get the story out as fast as I could.”

Nowadays, of course, Arnett is best remembered as CNN’s man in Baghdad, an audacious and intrepid reporter who stayed in Iraq when the smart bombs began to fall--and was rewarded with a one-on-one interview with Saddam Hussein. As an aside, Arnett reveals that he was ordered to wash his hands with disinfectant before meeting the Iraqi dictator.

“I was not required to use mouthwash,” he cracks, “which led me to believe I wouldn’t have to kiss him.”

Arnett’s account of his wartime reporting from Iraq is almost a coda to “Live From the Battlefield,” which is devoted mostly to Arnett’s long, dangerous, colorful and controversial tour of duty as a wire service correspondent in Vietnam. Thanks to the stubborn honesty of his war reporting, both in Vietnam and Iraq, Arnett has always drawn as much fire from domestic politicians and generals as he did from the enemy troops.

“You may want to bring up the problem of Peter Arnett,” wrote Jack Valenti, a presidential aide to Lyndon Johnson, in briefing the President for a meeting with AP executives during the Vietnam war. “He has been more damaging to the U.S. cause than a whole battalion of Viet Cong.”

Arnett was born in 1934 near a place called Bluff, a whaling town “at the bottom end of New Zealand, which is at the bottom end of the world.” He is descended from both Maori and English ancestors--”our Polynesian blood (is) enfeebled by intermarriage”--and the reader is invited to speculate that his restlessness, his wanderlust and a certain crankiness in dealing with authority owe something to a sense of being “culturally unanchored, disoriented by (his) mixed heritage.”

But, as it turns out, Arnett has single-mindedly defined himself as a rough-and-ready reporter, a man who paid his dues covering ax murderers and “back-yard brush fires” in New Zealand and went on to distinguish himself as the hardiest--some would say foolhardiest--battle correspondent of his generation.

Some of the most entertaining stuff in “Live From the Battlefield” are the war stories from Arnett’s early days as a correspondent in Southeast Asia. Condoms, he writes, were especially useful in jungle combat as a way of protecting matches, film and identity papers from the elements.

And, perhaps ironically, his favored drink in Vietnam was 33 beer, “a local potion that many believed was laced with formaldehyde, a preservative with the side effect of diminishing the sex drive.”

But Arnett never shrinks from showing us the futility, hypocrisy and sheer brutality of war. He describes a conversation with a gung-ho army colonel on a helicopter returning from particularly bloody skirmish with the Viet Cong--”Look, son,” says the colonel, “we’re going to get better at this and the VC worse”--and then Arnett pauses to give us a chilling aside.

“My trousers were wet,” he writes. “I discovered that we were sitting in two inches of blood . . . from the dead and wounded of earlier flights.”

Arnett goes on to describe other assignments--Cyprus, Lebanon, El Salvador, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union--and his memoir is, in a sense, a story of how an aging wire service reporter reinvented himself in an entirely new medium. Arnett reminds us that CNN was once dubbed “Chicken Noodle News,” and he shows us how the Cable News Network made itself into a vital force not only in journalism, but in diplomacy and even world history.

But Arnett’s book is, above all, a sharp reminder that the technology of journalism may change, but the qualities that make for good journalism do not. What really counts, Arnett shows in “Live From the Battlefield,” are hustle, savvy, imagination, ingenuity and sheer physical courage, all of which Arnett possesses in abundance.

Still, there’s a bittersweet quality to Arnett’s book. We live in a world where the blow-dryer and the makeup kit are a television reporter’s most important tools, and “Live From the Battlefield” forces us to consider that a man like Peter Arnett is, quite literally, an endangered species.