Few foreign correspondents will forget where they were or what they were doing when they first heard Marie Colvin had been slain by a Syrian artillery barrage in the besieged city of Homs.
In death, as in life, she could make grown men cry. Perhaps we should have known better than to be shocked. Fortunes in war, after all, are governed by nebulous rules of chance. So how could we be surprised that Marie Colvin, the wounded, one-eyed veteran of a 30-year career reporting in war, the cat who had far exceeded her nine lives, surviving innumerable scrapes with death in Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya and Sri Lanka and elsewhere, had finally been killed on assignment reporting on the merciless shelling of cold, starving civilians in a city abandoned to its fate?
The answer is simple. Marie seemed too good to die. She believed passionately in the role of the war correspondent as a means of bearing witness and giving voice to those living under the shadow of the gun.
“Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death . . . and trying to bear witness,” she said in 2010.
“It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash.”
But though her talent, courage and self-belief were recognized widely enough for her portrait to be hung in London’s National Portrait Gallery, she was never smug. Driven? Certainly. Eccentric? Very. But conceited? Never. Her humility made her a rare bird in an aviary renowned for its preening.
The list of her exploits is long and legendary. As a young woman, she famously caught the eye of Col. Moammar Khadafy, when she interviewed the Libyan dictator in Tripoli in 1986. The first she knew of his attention was when Khadafy’s personal doctor appeared at her hotel room in the middle of the night, complete with a syringe to check her blood before the colonel invested any more attention upon her. The hapless doctor was sent packing back to his master, mission incomplete.
By the time the first Gulf War occurred in 1991, she was already a seasoned veteran of conflict in the Middle East and something of a legend. I met her in Kosovo in 1999, where she was accompanying KLA insurgents on cross-border missions against Serb forces. She famously emerged from a vehicle shattered by Russian airstrikes in Chechnya in 2000, escaping through mountains into Georgia, just a year before being blinded in her left eye by a shrapnel fragment during an ambush in Sri Lanka in 2001, the midpoint in a career that was at its peak by the time the Arab Spring erupted last year.
Far from being a harridan, cardboard-cutout war correspondent, hardhearted and cynical, Marie’s natural ability to engage with people was drawn from a warm and wide heart that bore its own burden of sorrows.
Aside from the rich, throaty laugh, there were many tears. Her first marriage, to the acclaimed war correspondent Patrick Bishop, ended in divorce. Her second husband, the Bolivian-born journalist and writer Juan Carlos Gumucio, shot himself dead in 2002 at a time when Marie was already in the grip of severe depression following her wounding in Sri Lanka.
The depth of her trauma made many close friends wonder if she would emerge from the backlash of these events. But she did so, stronger and wiser, but also kinder and more empathetic than before.
“I think reports of my survival may be exaggerated,” she wrote on Tuesday in response to an erroneous comment on a Web site congratulating her for returning from Homs safely.
“In Baba Amr. Sickening, cannot understand how the world can stand by and I should be hardened by now. Watched a baby die today. Shrapnel, doctors could do nothing. His little tummy just heaved and heaved until he stopped. Feeling helpless . . . Will keep trying to get out the information.”
It was her last known correspondence, and finest epitaph.
Anthony Loyd is a foreign correspondent for The Times of London.