People: Marie Colvin

1/12/1956 - 2/22/2012

“War reporting is still essentially the same—someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you.”

Deep breath for the telling of the extraordinary woman and war correspondent Marie Colvin.

I don’t know how I missed knowing the compelling story of war correspondent Marie Colvin. She was about my age, we both grew up in Nassau County, Long Island, and I, like her, had a desire to write and to tell the story. The vast difference is that I never got to tell the story - any story. I went into the medical world and telling the story remained an unrealized dream for decades. Marie Colvin had the fire lit within from the beginning of time and rolled continuously forward in the living and breathing of writing and telling the important stories. She pushed and pulled, chasing the story, sacrificing all things personal and otherwise, and then ultimately died in the telling of the story in all its raw truths.

A quote by Linsey Hilsum, longtime friend, colleague and biographer: “I will never forget my last conversation with Marie, who was speaking on Skype from Baba Amr in Homs. President Bashar al-Assad had said only terrorists remained there, but she told me about the injured children she had seen cowering under the terrifying, relentless bombardment by the Fourth Armored Division of the Syrian army. Marie and I had reported from many war zones, but I had never heard her sound so desperate.”

Marie Colvin was a complex individual. She was brilliant, witty, sharp, determined, and beautiful. She struggled with alcoholism and depression intermittently. She was married twice, but in both cases it didn’t stick. She worked as a foreign affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times in London from 1985 until her tragic and untimely death in 2012. During this period she covered wars in Chechnya, the Balkans, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Libya and Syria. She lost the sight in her left eye in 2001 to a rocket propelled grenade in the Sri Lankan civil war. After this she was famously known for wearing a black pirate-like eye patch, which became her trademark of sorts. She was tragically murdered in the Syrian city of Baba Amr while trapped in a building under a targeted attack by the Syrian government on February 22, 2012. This happened virtually minutes after a live interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN. This was her last courageous act of many and her gift to to the world as she reported the truth of the Homs atrocities.

She is my superhero. She brought her brutally honest reporting to the world so that we, it’s citizens, could hear the voices of truth in war zones while remaining in our safe places. Understandably there were times when she resisted returning to report in war zones but ultimately, she would return over and over again to report the atrocities born and bred in places of conflict and to report the unspeakable things that happen in the places where we find the innocent victims in the brutal fallout of war. They are at the very heart of her reporting, the blameless and voiceless victims. They are the casualties, the fallout of both the war mongers and the resulting resistance. Where is the humanity in any of this? I believe Marie’s mission and her gift was to reveal the horrid, naked truths of war, hidden from the world at large. She exposed them in her reporting and brought them into the light of truth for all to see.

To say Marie Colvin was just extraordinary is a gross understatement. She was extraordinary and more. She was brave. Her courage knew no limits. She was fiery, passionate, and brilliant. It has been said that she was the greatest war correspondent of her generation. She was driven by a burning desire to bring the stark realities of war to all of us, hoping someone was reading and listening. She reported on those things we did not know, and possibly of those things we did not want to know. She told the story of the voiceless victims caught in the cross hairs of war, trapped within the borders of conflict zones through no fault of their own. She revealed the horrors of war that can only be exposed by bravely reporting from within. This was her true north and her gift to us.

RIP extraordinary and beautiful Marie Colvin

For a deeper dive into all things Marie Colvin I recommend that you read In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum, watch Christopher Martin’s documentary film based on the memoir of war photographer, Paul Conroy, Under the Wire and view the Netflix film, A Private War.