After months of waiting for an entry-level job at ABC News, Cooper decided to stop waiting. He wanted to be a war correspondent, so he simply started going to wars — first sneaking into Burma, then covering the famine in Somalia. He figured that going to dangerous places meant less competition, and because he was willing to sleep on rooftops and live on a few dollars a day, he could charge very little for his stories. Two years later, ABC hired him as their youngest correspondent in years.