In Extremis

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  A Note About the Author

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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

  PREFACE

  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-Assad’s 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 it’s what we do,” she said. And that was that. She would go in.

  Fifteen months earlier, I had been in London at St. Bride’s, 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 Homs—bad knees, an editor who thought the trip too dangerous, a book to write—but 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 it’s worth it. I’m 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 Marie’s 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 we’ve ever seen.”

  “I know, but what’s your exit strategy?”

  Pause.

  “That’s just it. I don’t have one. I’m 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 Marie’s death merged into one another. A young French photographer, Rémi Ochlik, had also been killed. The Sunday Times was desperately trying to get Paul Conroy out—he 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 situation—all 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 outside—our 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 door—yes, they were flying bare-chested. The a
ircraft 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. It’s 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 couldn’t stop laughing, thinking we might plunge to our deaths from the skies above the Red Sea.

  For the next fourteen years we would meet on the road or at the Frontline Club, the foreign correspondents’ hangout, near Paddington. She invited me to parties first at her flat in Notting Hill and later at the house she bought in Hammersmith, near the bank of the Thames. Elegant in a black cocktail dress, she mixed vodka martinis, the house full of actors, poets, and politicians as well as journalists. As the conflicts of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries proliferated, I felt we were partners in crime, the Thelma and Louise of the press corps. In April 2001, I heard that she had been shot in Sri Lanka. By the time I got hold of her, she was in the United States, awaiting surgery on her damaged eye. “I can’t cry,” she said. “And I need to because I keep getting messages from Tamils wanting to donate their eye to me.” The surgeon found a six-millimeter piece of shrapnel wedged against her optic nerve. The eye patch she wore from then on became her trademark, a badge of bravery.

  She was famous now, sought after and showered with awards, but she grew thin and erratic. When I saw her in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003, her face seemed more deeply lined. One evening in London we shared a platform in front of an audience of human rights activists. An earnest young woman in the audience asked how we coped with the trauma of covering conflicts. It’s a question foreign correspondents who go to war zones hate—are we really meant to bare our souls on a Thursday evening in front of an auditorium of strangers? Marie and I exchanged glances.

  “Lindsey and I, we go to bars and we drink,” she declared in the East Coast accent she’d never lost, and we got the giggles.

  Sometimes it wasn’t so funny. I was furious when she turned up two hours late and drunk for an interview with an Iranian activist in London that I had arranged. I forgave her, of course, because everyone forgave Marie—she had a charisma that made you excited to think she considered you a friend. I knew her in that easy way you know someone with whom you share adventures and the exhilaration of survival, when the bomb goes off just after you leave, or hits the empty building down the road, missing you by a few yards or minutes. I only glimpsed the dark side, the broken marriages and posttraumatic stress that I knew afflicted her.

  In the week after her death, I found a photograph from 2002, the year after she lost the sight in her eye, showing the two of us in the rubble of the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin, which had just been destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. In it, Marie is wearing a pale blue denim shirt and gray jeans, patch across her eye, notebook in one hand, pen in the other. I’m wearing a purple shirt and dark blue trousers. We look dusty and tired and happy, which is exactly what we were, united in a fierce journalistic urge to get the story and delighted to have run into each other. The pictures from that encounter are the only ones I have that show us together.

  I had known her so fleetingly—a dinner in Tripoli, a bumpy drive through the West Bank, a drink in Jerusalem—and now she was gone. There was so much I didn’t know about Marie, things she had hidden from me, or that I had chosen not to see. What drove her to such extremes in both her professional and personal life? Was it bravery or recklessness? She was the most admired war correspondent of our generation, one whose personal life was scarred by conflict, too, and although I counted her as a friend, I understood so little about her.

  As grief subsided, I thought of her no less often. She was always there, her ghost challenging me to discover all that I had missed when she was alive.

  PART I

  AMERICA

  1.

  Dead Man’s Branch

  She had lived with bad dreams for many years, but nothing prepared Marie for the recurrent nightmare that plagued her after she was shot. As she drifted into sleep, her subconscious reran what had happened, the fear and indecision never resolving, like a horror film stuck on a loop, repeating into infinity.

  In the dream, she is lying on the ground, seeing the flares, hearing the machine-gun fire and the soldiers’ voices exactly as she heard them that pitch-black night in Sri Lanka before the moon rose over the fields. These are her choices: She can stand up and shout, hoping they will see that she is white and female, obviously a foreigner. She can try to crawl away, knowing they will shoot at anything they see moving. Or she can lie still, awaiting her fate. The decision will determine whether she lives or dies, but nothing will undo what is about to happen. She cannot roll back time, nor can she push it forward. Stand up? Crawl away? Lie still? Stand up? Crawl away? Lie still? The choices repeat and repeat, a drumbeat of fear pounding louder and louder, as she lies paralyzed.

  In real life, it was hard to figure out exactly what was happening, although later, she understood that it had been quite simple. The Tamils guiding her from the rebel-held part of Sri Lanka into government territory ran into an army patrol as they crossed the front line. Marie dropped to the ground as the bullets whined past, but her escorts fled into the jungle, back the way they had come. She lay there for about half an hour, alone and petrified, before making her fateful decision.

  “Journalist! American journalist!” she shouted as she rose with her hands up. Suddenly her eye and her chest hurt with a pain so acute she could scarcely breathe. One of the soldiers had fired a grenade at her. As she fell, she realized that blood was trickling from her eye and mouth. She felt a profound sadness that she was going to die. Crawling toward them in the desperate hope that they would stop shooting and help her, she shouted, “Doctor!” Maybe they would see that she was a wounded foreign civilian and not a guerrilla fighter. They yelled at her to stand up and remove her jacket. Somehow she managed to stumble forward, hands in the air. Every time she fell, they shouted at her to get up again.

  In the nightmare, time freezes before the shot is fired and her life passes before her. Scenes from conflicts she has witnessed flicker across her mind: the old man with rasping breath in the basement in Chechnya, the back of his head blown off by a Russian rocket; the body of a peasant dressed in a worn woollen suit she came across under a bush in Kosovo; the young Palestinian woman she watched die from gunshot wounds in Beirut. The human body, fragile and broken. Her own body. The images rerun until she wakes, unrested, terrified, safe in her own bed but dreading the next night, when she must live through it all again.

  Marie Colvin went to Sri Lanka in April 2001 because no foreign journalist had reported from Tamil Tiger territory in six years. In nearly two decades of war, some 83,000 people had been killed. Barred by the government and mistrusted by the fanatical guerrillas fighting for independence, reporters had dared not cross the front line, so the pitiful situation of Tamil civilians, who bore the brunt of the violence, had gone largely unreported. That was why she went. That was why she thought it worth the risk.

  She was flown to New York for treatment. The surgeon said he couldn’t save the sight in her left eye, but he would try to save the eye itself. Frantic with worry, her mother insisted Marie come home to Long Island, where she could nurse her, cook her the meat loaf she had loved as a child, ensure that she had everything she needed to recover. Marie’s ex-husband flew in, and he and her mother agreed that this time she would have to submit to their ministrations.

  Why did she resist? To be looked after was surely exactly what she needed, but somehow it felt unbearable. As if it weren’t bad enough to lose the sight in one eye, now she would lose her independence, too. She wanted to stay at a fancy hotel in New York, to smoke, to have a cocktail, to spend time with her best friend, Katrina, who would make her laugh. She needed to recover what she could of the self she had become in two decades as a journali
st. It was sixteen years since she had left America. She had lived in Paris, London, and Jerusalem and had traveled to conflicts all over the world, taking chances, beating the odds, and earning her reputation as one of the toughest but most compassionate reporters in the world as well as the best and funniest company. That was who she was. She feared the waves closing over her, feared being subsumed by her family, by the cloying parochialism of her hometown, by a promise of safety that would crush her essence. However desperate her situation, she could not let herself be pulled back to where she had started.

  * * *

  The town of Oyster Bay, on Long Island, where Marie spent her childhood and adolescence, was quintessential suburbia. The families in the Colvins’ neighborhood were America’s new postwar middle class: teachers, small-business owners, government employees. This was the era when mothers stayed at home and fathers came back from work to a cigarette and a highball. They watched Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show, genial TV sitcoms about family life. It was Marie’s father’s claim to fame that his eldest sister, Bette, was a hostess on the quiz show Beat the Clock.

  Marie, the Colvins’ first child, was born on January 12, 1956, in Astoria, Queens, a restless baby who soon sprouted a head of thick, dark curls. America was changing fast. Dwight D. Eisenhower, reelected that year, was the last U.S. president born in the nineteenth century. Elvis Presley scandalized the nation with his hip thrusts as he sang “Hound Dog” on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Cold War was escalating: it was the year of the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Marie’s parents had more immediate concerns—Marie’s mother, Rosemarie, struggled to get her and her brother, Billy, born the following year, up and down three flights of stairs in their apartment block. Now she was expecting again. Long Island, with its beaches, fields, and potato farms, looked like a perfect solution. They found a new build in East Norwich, adjoining the more upmarket Oyster Bay. By the time Michael was born, the family was settled in the house where Marie’s parents would have another two children and spend the rest of their lives.