Veteran BBC war correspondent Brian Barron, who covered conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq, has died of cancer aged 69, the corporation said Wednesday. Barron, whose unflappable authority on the battlefield made him a household name, was described as "the most distinguished BBC correspondent of our age" by the BBC's world news editor Jon Williams.
He joined the BBC in 1965 and his first posting was in what was then Aden in the run-up to its independence from Britain. It later became South Yemen. Stints in Egypt, South East Asia - where he witnessed the fall of Saigon in 1975 during the Vietnam war - and Nairobi followed.
In the 1980s, he covered the Falklands war between Britain and Argentina and the bloody civil unrest in Northern Ireland. Barron, who won several awards for his journalism, also worked in the United States and covered the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 Iraq conflict.