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

by Lindsey Hilsum

Marie had found her voice and her method—it was all about making readers care.

“Getting at the truth is why we all entered journalism,” she said. “We have to bear witness. We can make a difference.”

Undated, 2000. Middle age has inevitable disappointments. A time of reckoning. Love is only thing with redeeming capacity. You’re still not out of the theoretical stage—always something over the horizon.

“She always loved kids but was very philosophical about the fact that she had led a life that made it very difficult to have them herself,” says Katrina. “She was an older woman, and the window was closing. She didn’t say she wished she had led her life differently.”

The rhythm of her life gave Marie comfort and security, with female friends as her primary source of support and love.

Why do I cover wars? I have been asked this often in the past week. It is a difficult question to answer. I did not set out to be a war correspondent. It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars—declared and undeclared.

Worse, without the patch, when I looked at my left eye nothing looked back.… I’d lived a life where I stayed one step ahead of my nightmares. Now something had happened to me that was irrevocable.

She worried that people might think her vain, but then again, she couldn’t stop caring how she looked just because in Chechnya or Kosovo worse things had happened to other people.

After seeing pictures of her in the hospital in Sri Lanka, an editor asked her to write an article about her “lucky red bra.” The bra was originally cream, she pointed out drily; it was red only because it was drenched in her blood.

Packing for Spain, as I tried on the lacy edged cardigans, the flimsy silk Tracy Boyd sundress, the clothes of other summers, I realised that nothing in my wardrobe worked. The black eye-patch somehow unbalanced and dominated everything. I looked like I was in someone else’s clothes.

The patch had become part of me in a way, something that would make a clear division between life before and after, which is how I felt.… I think the process of rethinking my wardrobe in some way mirrored rethinking my life and was just as effective (fingers crossed) as the psychiatric counselling some advised. After surviving the trauma, I found there were dark places that were too difficult to go for a while. It was easier to think about the surface until the nightmares become just memories.

She had been forced to accept the fragility of her body, but she was not ready to acknowledge the fragility of her mind.

There’s the adrenalin rush of life-and-death situations. There are the boring details of life you can leave behind. Face up to everything, McCullin says. I have.

“The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that someone will care,” she said.

Martha and she reported as they did, Marie says, because brutal images of war “are the strongest argument against war.”

Many years later, she wrote to a friend, “It is as if I walked into Dachau and there fell over a cliff and suffered a lifelong concussion.… I have never again felt that lovely, easy, lively hope in life which I knew before.”

Always had a façade—never ever really me. Learned late I love you.

She couldn’t give all of herself like that again, she thought. She was tired of being Marie for the entertainment of others.

can’t be there all the time with fireworks that make them look out of themselves and smile. I can always see how to make people happy—so I do it and then it takes so much time and energy I let them down. Nobody wins except maybe they have had a moment when they see the world differently.

“She’d constructed an entire world of possibility around this man that really didn’t include him,” recalls Rosie.

Marie told him that after they were married, he would be allowed to live a twenty-minute walk away and could visit two nights a week. “That was better than her original idea, which was that I should live in Italy and she’d drop by on her way to and from war zones,” he recalls.

“I think that’s a really bad idea,” Rosemarie said. “My daughter is unmarriageable. You’re not going to have a house with a picket fence, John.”

Her yen for the picket-fence life was a whisper from her upbringing that she could not quiet. It was as if she were rummaging around in her past to come up with something, or someone, to answer the questions that wouldn’t go away.

She floated between the spheres of her life, like a sailing boat in a gusting wind, tacking to one side or the other, at times steering with purpose, at others drifting, trying to avoid the whirlpool.

Marie was easy to love and hard to help.

When he stroked her, Richard would sometimes feel tiny sharp objects, pieces of shrapnel working their way out through Marie’s skin. It was as if her body were trying to expel the painful memories and feelings she had absorbed in two decades of war reporting.

It was as if she were walking around London with her skin peeled off.

“She was in a terrible state,” Jane recalls. “I would find an empty bottle of wine under her bed in the morning.” Marie was inconsolable. “It was as if her whole basis, her relationship with herself, who she was, what she believed in, her trust in herself and her judgment—all those things were gone.”

She was the champion of bearing witness so that even if no one stopped the wars, they could never say they had not known what was happening.

When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid just before Christmas 2010, no one knew it would trigger revolution across the region.

sclerotic

According to Uzi, she said, “Listen. I would rather jump off the balcony than not get my story.” In her diary she wrote, simply, “Uzi confrontation.”

The Sunday Times executive editor, Bob Tyrer, commissioned a long historical piece on Gaddafi, but Marie was focused on the news. “Tyrer wants profile,” she wrote in her diary. “I ignore.”

“It is a new era in the Middle East,” she wrote in a live internet text chat from Tripoli with Sunday Times readers. “These rebellions are not about power, they are about individual rights in the face of political repression, corruption and hopelessness. They are the first demonstrations I have seen in years in the Middle East where not one American or Israeli flag has been burned. They are about the desires of people in their own countries.”

“I respected her because she could overcome her fear,” he says. “You wouldn’t want to be with someone who wasn’t scared.”

She could still endure life under fire, in extreme hardship, and for far longer than most journalists, because she was so motivated.

But when I hear a chorus of “allahu akbars” (God is great) shouted from the doctors, medics and rebels in the parking lot I know a body or a severely injured person has arrived and I head down. There is always a story at the end of a rocket.…

Gaddafi’s folk have mined the port, so not sure there is a way out even if I wanted to leave. Extraordinary story and leaving means deserting these people to a terrible fate.

In Misrata, all her contradictions came together: She could survive seven weeks in a war zone without alcohol even though, by many measures, she was an alcoholic. She had suffered PTSD because of her conflict experiences, yet she was in her element in a place where death was a constant danger. Personal pain could blind her to the needs of others, yet she thought of her friends in London while under extreme stress and when communication was difficult. She identified too closely with those she saw as victims of war, and yet her reporting was calibrated and contextualized.

Then I decided it was too low and crawled to a rock. I had a pistol, a notebook and a pen.

“She was only focused on human suffering, on children dying. I thought I could work with this person because she has no ideology, she’s just concerned with human beings.”

“The reason I’ve been talking to all you guys is that I don’t want my daughter’s legacy to be ‘no comment’ … because she wasn’t a ‘no comment’ person,” she said. “Her legacy is: be passionate and be involved in what you believe in. And do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can.”

“You were utterly, sublimely defenseless against the laughter,” said Katrina. “Marie came by her impracticality honestly, but she fed the aura of joie de vivre that wafted around her—it gave cover to another side of her, no more authentic but intensely more private. Here was the tremulous, self-taxing writer, the aspiring scholar of history, the student of prose and poetry, and the fragile woman who would have loved to be happy in love.”

The attack on the Baba Amr Media Center was evidence of the extremes to which a ruthless government would go to silence independent eyewitness journalists like Marie.

It’s easy to imagine Marie in her final moments, rushing out of the shattered building in her warm, dark clothes, caught in flight in a freeze-frame, forever pushing forward, notebook in hand.

Pink and orange glowed through the gray March clouds as the tide rose. Alan read Emily Dickinson’s poem “Exultation Is the Going” and they stepped out onto a pontoon to cast handfuls of ashes and petals over the wide, brown river as it flowed inexorably to the place Marie loved best in the world: the sea.