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

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In memory of Sarah Corp, another companion on the road

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.

MARIE COLVIN, 2001

Fair Weather

This level reach of blue is not my sea;

Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,

Whose quiet ripples meet obediently

A marked and measured line, one after one.

This is no sea of mine, that humbly laves

Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.

I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;

They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

So let a love beat over me again,

Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;

Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;

Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide

That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,

Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds.

DOROTHY PARKER

The way we are living,

timorous or bold,

will have been our life.

SEAMUS HEANEY

There was only one topic of conversation over dinner in Beirut that night: whether to find people smugglers to sneak us over the border into Syria and the besieged town of Homs. It was February 2012, and revolution was turning into civil war. The rebels who had hoped to overthrow the Syrian government were holding out in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs as President Bashar al-Assads forces pounded it with artillery.

The four of us had taken plenty of risks in our reporting lives. Jim Muir had been a BBC correspondent in the Middle East since the early 1980s, staying for years in Lebanon despite the threat of kidnap. Neil MacFarquhar, who had been brought up in Libya, reported from the Middle East for The New York Times . I had covered conflicts in Rwanda, Iraq, Libya, and a dozen other countries. And then there was Marie Colvin of The Sunday Times . She wore a patch over her left eye, having lost the sight in it to a grenade fired by a government soldier in Sri Lanka a decade earlier. In 1999, as militiamen armed with guns and machetes threatened the United Nations compound in East Timor, Marie had refused to leave even though most other journalists had taken the last plane out. In the winter of the same year, she nearly perished in the freezing mountains of Chechnya as the Russians bombed the roads. She always went in farther and stayed longer.

Not only was the bombardment of Baba Amr relentless, but the smugglers might kidnap us for ransom or to sell on to jihadists. For three of us, this was beyond our danger threshold, but Marie shrugged. Anyway its what we do, she said. And that was that. She would go in.

Fifteen months earlier, I had been in London at St. Brides, the journalists church on Fleet Street, when Marie gave an address at the annual service to commemorate those of our number killed during the year. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story, she said, standing tall at the lectern, her rail-thin body encased in a black jersey dress, glasses on the end of her nose so she could read with her sole functioning eye. What is bravery, and what is bravado?

Returning to my hotel after dinner that evening in Beirut, I wondered uncomfortably whether Marie was reckless or I was a coward. I had my reasons for not going to Homsbad knees, an editor who thought the trip too dangerous, a book to writebut they were just excuses. Marie knew where the story was, and would stop at nothing to get it. My reporting on Syrian refugees in Lebanon was done, and I flew back to London. Marie spent a few more days organizing her trip before she and photographer Paul Conroy set off on the perilous journey by foot, motorbike, and jeep, at one point crawling through a storm drain.

A few days later I got an email, sent by satellite phone. Made it to Baba Amr. Nightmare here but so anger making its worth it. Im supposed to be applying for an Iranian visa, but I have left my Iran contacts at home. Have you got a number for that nice (relatively!) woman in the Islamic Guidance office? Marie was already planning her next trip.

That Sunday, I read Maries story about the widows basement, as powerful a piece of war reporting as any by her famous role model Martha Gellhorn, who had covered the Spanish Civil War and the D-day landings. It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass, she wrote. On the lips of everyone was the question: Why have we been abandoned by the world?

I had presumed that she was on her way home, but two days later, I heard that she had returned to Baba Amr. I was angry with her. Why take the risk a second time? She sent me an email saying she had regretted leaving, and other European journalists were also in Homs, so she felt she had to be there, too. The story was urgent. She could not hold it for her paper on Sunday but had to get it out immediately. We arranged a Skype call so she could do an interview for Channel 4 News, where I work. We spoke before she started the interview.

Lindsey, this is the worst weve ever seen.

I know, but whats your exit strategy?

Pause.

Thats just it. I dont have one. Im working on it now.

The following morning, I woke thinking of a friend who had been kidnapped and murdered in Baghdad. That could be Marie, I thought. I was on the bus heading for work when a message came through from a Spanish friend in Beirut whose journalist husband was also in Baba Amr.

I think something terrible has happened to your friend Marie. Have you heard?

* * *

The days that followed Maries death merged into one another. A young French photographer, Rmi Ochlik, had also been killed. The Sunday Times was desperately trying to get Paul Conroy outhe was badly injured, as was another French journalist, Edith Bouvier. I subsumed my grief and anxiety into talking about Marie on the radio and writing her obituary for the Financial Times .

I found myself thinking of when we first met, in 1998, after war had broken out between Ethiopia and Eritrea. A dozen or so journalists, including Marie and me, were in Djibouti, the hottest place on earth, eyeing up a rickety Ukrainian aircraft that had been ferrying out aid workers and businesspeople from the Eritrean capital, Asmara. It was the usual situationall reasonable people were scrambling to get out, but a little bunch of madmen, the journalists, were trying to get in. A pair of Ukrainian pilots agreed to turn round and take us. Marie and I found ourselves walking together across the melting tarmac. Once on board, we sat together, and as the plane taxied down the lumpy runway, we noticed two objects whipping past the window outsideour pilots sweaty shirts, which they had hung on the wings to dry out and forgotten to put back on. We peered through the open cockpit dooryes, they were flying bare-chested. The aircraft lurched upward, and the TV gear that had been piled up, unsecured, at the front of the aircraft gradually slid down the aisle. Marie and I laughed so much we nearly fell out of our seats. We were like two schoolgirls with a case of the giggles in class. Its my first memory of her. Of course, I had seen her before, and knew her by reputation, but that moment was when we became friends: the time we couldnt stop laughing, thinking we might plunge to our deaths from the skies above the Red Sea.