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

by Lindsey Hilsum

The Sri Lankan government insisted that the Tamils who had accompanied Marie were armed Tigers who had shot at the soldiers, and that she had been caught in cross fire. After she recovered, they planned to arrest her. The U.S. ambassador, who had visited her in the hospital, dealt with that. “He spoke to them and said, you can do what you want, but do you want to arrest a badly wounded woman who can put her story on the front page?” Steve Holgate recalls. Marie was well enough to be amused by the contrast between the American and British response to her situation. The British High Commission, she told Farrell, had sent a diplomat in a Laura Ashley skirt, carrying a parasol, who told her there was nothing they could do—after all, Marie had gone to the north illegally. “Marie said she had never been more grateful to be an American,” he recalls.