In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin

by Lindsey Hilsum

She had thought it would be great to interview people at length, to spend time and understand things in detail. But the need to be first with the news was now replaced by the pressure to be original.

Amal and Hezbollah both said their main enemy was Israel, but they were too busy fighting each other to take on the Israelis effectively.

She remembered David Blundy, late at night in Tripoli, scribbling the structure of his piece in his notebook. She envied the lightness of touch with which he wrote.

The moment they saw Marie and the other female journalist in the group, the gunners in the heavy-machine-gun division, who had been sitting quietly in their fixed positions watching battery-powered TVs and smoking, started firing. The Iranians, a few hundred yards away, fired back, and for a few minutes it appeared that the presence of two women had reignited the war in an area that had been quiet for months.

Lamis explained to Marie that the Middle East was a land of families and tribes, where a lone woman was regarded as a curiosity. “They think I’m just a cutie-pie going around. Arab women have to work harder to get respect,” she said.

THE SUNDAY TIMES, BASRA, JANUARY 25, 1987 In Basra, they say the day belongs to Iraq; the night to Iran. Iraq’s second city is under siege, and Iranian shells slammed into houses for the 17th successive day yesterday … Everywhere there are tales of tragedy. One soldier was crying as he described how three friends had gone out to telephone home when the bombardment appeared to ease on Wednesday. All three were killed by a shell.

THE SUNDAY TIMES, BASRA, FEBRUARY 1, 1987 When the shells started falling in Basra and I had no cover, I just felt stupid for getting myself into yet another mess—that this time I might have gone too far. The fear hits later, you really do get weak in your legs. But we got the story that the town was besieged but not falling. And we got into the city because we were women, and routinely subject to less scrutiny … Lamis and I were congratulated on our return by the male members of the press corps. We had got a good old-fashioned scoop, and there’s no question, you use any means you can to do so.

internecine

THE SUNDAY TIMES, BEIRUT, APRIL 5, 1987 Their terror broke the stalemate. It is the women who are dying and it was women who tired of men’s inaction. Two raced from cover, plucked Achmed Ali from the dust and hauled her to safety. She was tumbled onto a stretcher and carried through the streets to the camp hospital … a man ran alongside the stretcher, with his hand on her face to staunch the blood flowing from the bullet hole near her nose.

While Pauline had been trying to save the young woman’s life, Suzy had been writing a letter to Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. “Every day we hope that this day there will be no more injured, but already before 7:30 am one woman was shot in both legs.

Marie interviewed more patients in the hospital, including a woman with a broken femur who was speaking vehemently and gesturing with her arms. “What’s the matter with her?” Marie asked Pauline, who was translating from the Arabic. “She wants you to tell the world her story,” Pauline said.

THE SUNDAY TIMES, BEIRUT, APRIL 5, 1987 She lay where she had fallen, face down on the dirt path leading out of Bourj al Barajneh. Haji Achmed Ali, 22, crumpled as the snipers’ bullets hit her in the face and stomach. She had tried to cross the no man’s land between the Palestinian camp and the Amal militiamen besieging it to buy food for her family.

“I think it was the most important story I ever did,” says Tom, who in a career of nearly five decades went on to take pictures in Bosnia and many other war zones. “Those six frames of the girl lying on the path made a huge difference. It was one of the few times where being in the right place at the right time with a great reporter convinced people. It was tangible. It stopped the siege and saved lives.”

As a Sunday newspaper journalist, she had the time to get right into the middle of whatever situation she was reporting on, a variation on the famous war photographer Robert Capa’s maxim, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

She would not write about herself, but her journalism would be distinguished by the intensity of her personal experience.

It was liberating for Marie to be with someone who shared her sense of adventure but with whom she felt secure.

A fight followed by a passionate reunion answered Marie’s desire for drama and excitement, as if theatrics made for a life less ordinary. For Patrick, it was a Catholic ritual: sin, remorse, confession, repentance, and redemption. A pattern had been set.

While Patrick saw himself as a writer on military matters, she wanted to follow in the tradition not just of John Hersey and Martha Gellhorn, both of whom drew out the stories of the victims of war, but also of Oriana Fallaci, who had made a career of in-depth interviews with world leaders.

Arafat had five days’ beard growth under a prominent lower lip. It was hard to see what made him so powerful, as he had no apparent charisma.

She noticed that he always traveled with four cheap leather suitcases: one for the crisply laundered uniforms, the second for his fax machine, the third for documents, and the final one for a blanket, so he could curl up for a catnap whenever he needed.

Arafat had a nap in the afternoon while his guards lounged around the TV, weapons dangling, watching The Muppets in Arabic.

He took off his uniform, donned a tracksuit, and even let them film as he removed his keffiyeh, exposing a totally bald head, and settled down under his pink woolly comfort blanket for an onboard snooze.

“She would see the leaders as men, individuals with emotions and quirks,” says Bob Tyrer, who held several editorial roles on The Sunday Times over the years. “It was a strength of her reporting. She got inside them, showing that they weren’t identikit monsters, but real people.” Despite her news agency training, at first her writing could be jumbled and at times almost incomprehensible. “Marie was addicted to getting another quote and then she’d write in a terrible rush from her notebook in no order whatsoever,”

Her editors realized that she had an extraordinary ability to persuade people to talk to her. They never saw her as a great stylist; it was the reporting that was exceptional.

One of his obituarists wrote that he was “chronically reluctant to write about anything he hadn’t seen for himself.”

Marie felt sick. Patrick’s elusiveness was not a trick of the light, but the truth.

But she did not leave Patrick. She knew that somewhere in his mixed-up, faithless, battered Catholic soul, he still loved her. More to the point, she still loved him. Salvation of a kind came from an unexpected quarter: Saddam Hussein.

A group of about forty journalists defied all warnings and remained in the Al Rasheed Hotel. Several prominent broadcast journalists and their teams remained, and this became the first war to be shown live on TV.

Operation Desert Storm began in the early hours of January 17, 1991, and continued for forty-two days and nights. The United States and its allies dropped 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq’s military and civilian infrastructure in the most intensive air bombardment the world had ever seen.

With propaganda echoing from all sides, Marie wanted to explain why so many Arabs looked on this war differently from Europeans and Americans, so she quoted Khalil: “A year ago I would have told you I hated Saddam and his regime. But he has become a symbol for us. Saddam is the result of the humiliation of the war of 1967 and of all the humiliations we have suffered from the West … it is a question of dignity. Saddam came along with his rockets and stood up to you.”

February 8, 1991. The life of children and a house with light in France is a dream I leave behind, a dream that no longer has anything to do with me. I go on.… I go back to myself as independent, a brave woman going through the world alone.…

Displacement was more addictive than danger—she wanted to put off as long as possible deciding what to do about her marriage and where to live, and to ignore the dull demands of filing her expenses and paying taxes.

“Well fed Americans,” she noted. “Feeling I can never go home; they grate on me. They are too open, too loud, too simple.”

As they drove across the dried-out flatlands, guided by a tribal elder, Marie thought again of Gertrude Bell, who had spent time with the Marsh Arabs seventy-five years earlier and who, unlucky in love, had devoted her life to travel. Iraqis always invoked Bell as an example of foreign female courage.

Families invited her to their homes where they could talk more freely—she loved the Iraqis’ hospitality, and their openness toward trusted foreigners, even more prized after the imposition of sanctions that turned so many against the West. The longer she stayed, the better she understood and loved Iraq and the clearer her sense of mission.

August 26, 1992. What we as Western journalists should do in Iraq, as anywhere else, is try to make it understandable. It is now a place of mystery and violence to most Americans. Always my family is worried when I say I’m here and doesn’t believe me when I say Baghdad is one of my favorite cities in the world. But you are a difficult people to explain, people of extremes, capable of extreme toughness and extreme sentimentality.

The less it seems possible to capture in words anything that makes any sense, the more I want to just quit and live out whatever it is that attracts me, obsesses me, makes everything I left behind which seemed so important fade. Not even desire to escape what I left behind, just to shed it.

They visited the General People’s Committee for Social Work and, on May Day, the gathering to mark what Gaddafi had dubbed “International Day of Cheating and Lying to the Workers.”

It was hard to get him to say anything newsworthy, as all he wanted to talk about was The Green Book, a collection of his sayings outlining his Third Universal Theory of government. (An aide had told Marie that Gaddafi came up with the idea while lying in a darkened room for weeks with a blanket over his head.)

“She gave you permission to be yourself,” says Alan Jenkins. “What I absolutely loved immediately was this feeling that she liked you unconditionally—you had a sense that her affection would never be withdrawn. She was with you and behind you in some way. There was a sharpness, an immediate checking onto the wavelength. She made you feel you had something to give and she was always interested.”

quislings,

August 23, 1994. Finally after a long despair, a long blackness, I now live with that blackness at the edge but no longer everything for me.

“Perhaps in all barracks in a war there is a camaraderie that—intensified by the ever-present possibility of sudden death—thrives on deep and immediate intimacy, that removes the need for formalities, and that, once established, is only broken by death,” she wrote.

Having no ideology, she never flinched from reporting stories that cast a bad light on people for whom she had sympathy. She was simply drawn to the underdog.

“When you’re physically uncovering graves in Kosovo, I don’t think there are two sides to the story,” she said. “To me there is a right and a wrong, a morality, and if I don’t report that, I don’t see the reason for being there.”

Patrick, by contrast, described Kosovo as “a blighted land of blighted people”—like many journalists who have been through several wars, he didn’t see good guys and bad guys but history and politics.

Marie had Martha Gellhorn’s derision for “the big picture.” For her, context mattered, but the experience of individuals in war, whether fighters or victims, was the essence of the story.

“I just couldn’t leave. We’d been living with these people for four or five days, sleeping next to them, getting rice from them,” Marie told Denise Leith. “In a way it was a hard decision, because you had to think, I could die here. But equally I just didn’t feel I could live with myself if I left. It was morally wrong, the idea that we would walk out, say good-bye and all those people knew they were going to be killed. It was not a decision I could have made the other way.”

Clare Hollingworth, who reported the German invasion of Poland in 1939; the Sunday Times Second World War correspondent Virginia Cowles; and of course Martha Gellhorn.

“From experience I know men think differently from women, but since I’ve never been able to figure out their behaviour in other walks of life, I find it just as impossible to explain why they think differently in wars,” she wrote.