At the preposterous age of 27, Chris Ayers found himself squashed into a Humvee crossing into Iraq from Kuwait. It was March 2003, and the young Brit was on the Shock and Awe beat for the London Times, embedded with a Marine artillery unit affectionately known as the Long Distance Death Dealers.

Born and bred in northern England, Ayers yearned to be a journalist because "it seemed like the closest thing to being a rock star without having to be either good-looking or talented." He never wanted to be a war correspondent.

If you're to believe the author's version of events, he didn't really understand what his editor was asking when he woke him one morning in Los Angeles and said, "How would you like to go to war?" Ayers was groggy, and reflexively inclined to answer "yes" to his editors before pondering the consequences. And so, a few months after hanging up, he was eating MREs in the desert and greeting every airstrike with a stoic cry of: "WHAT THE &*&K WAS THAT?"

In War Reporting For Cowards, Ayers crafts a reluctant war reporter persona into something of a shtick. In many ways, the bobbling British dork in the midst of stoic, commanding Marines is a refreshing reprieve from the self-important, flak jacket-clad, hotel roof-inhabiting war correspondent.

Ayers provides both the self-doubting inner turmoil of Woody Allen with the madcap antics of Benny Hill. Before arriving "in country," he buys a blue Kevlar vest that reads "Press." However, in the desert this makes him a moving target. His yellow tent with a black spot on its top is no better.

War Reporting for Cowards is an entertaining but ultimately disingenuous book for a reason that becomes hard to ignore around page 200, when we learn that Ayers spends all of nine days in Iraq. Whether or not he's a coward is another debate, but by getting his thin experience published, he's certainly not a deserter in the struggle for self-promotion.

This is no crime. If Pamela Anderson gets a sitcom, Ayers can write a trilogy if he so pleases. Of course, one quickly get the sense that Ayers finds his own ambition somewhat vulgar, as he both apologizes for it and obfuscates it at the same time. Perhaps this is a British class taboo we Americans don't understand. Nevertheless, to make up for the lack of war in his reporting, Ayers treats us to a mini-autobiography that starts with his journalistic education.

It took Ayers only a few years to move from rewriting press releases on the business desk to interviewing Internet tycoons. He was covering the New York business world, which he shamefully confesses was little more than cribbing from The New York Times, when Sept. 11 happened. However accidental, this was Ayers' baptism as a war correspondent.

Ayers is a competent and funny writer. Like many journalists turned memoirists, his observations of others prove more interesting than his personal reflections. As a storyteller, he has a great instinct for ambivalence: the fact that the Marines he's with don't particularly want to debate the war's politics, for example. One denies the opportunity to use Ayers' satellite phone to call his wife because he fears the sound of gunfire would only upset her.

Closer to his own profession, Ayers' rendering of his cynical editors fluctuates between humor and horror. After he witnessed people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, he received this charming assignment from an editor: "Thousand wds please on 'I saw people fall to death, etc . . .' "

While reluctant to weigh in on the debate surrounding the war, Ayers is forthright as far as war journalism is concerned. Being embedded with the Marines, he writes, served the purpose of turning him into one - no surprise, considering that being sympathetic to the welfare of his unit was synonymous with not wanting to die. But being a war correspondent, he notes, involves writing about both sides of the conflict.

However, too often he doesn't have a lot to say, and the elaborate setups for coward-in-combat shtick grow repetitive. There's one, or maybe it's five, too many instances in which the author's bowel movements occupy center stage. I'm all for good scat humor, but Ayers overplays his poop card.

Beyond "war is scary," and "being a craven careerist can mean risking your life," there's not a lot to his story. Ayers could have written an amazing book on Iraq had he opted to stay a bit longer. It's hard to fault him for opting for an early exit strategy but, not unlike a war sold on false pretenses, Ayers' book promises something it never had hopes of delivering.

John Dicker's book, "The United States of Wal-Mart," was recently released from Tarcher. He lives in Denver.