Paul Moorcraft, author of Shooting the Messenger, and Inside The Danger Zones, has just returned from Sri Lanka. He finally gets to pay tribute to his friend, Marie Colvin, and share some of his fondest memories of her. He also considers what it is that drives war correspondents.
Like soldiers, war hacks often think they are invincible, especially when they are young. Marie Colvin was 56 when she was killed by a Syrian government rocket in the Baba Amr suburb of Homs. Marie kept going when most other reporters gave up. She spent, for example, nine weeks in Misurata during the siege by Gaddafi forces last year. Even the bravest rival hacks rarely managed more than a few days.
In a recent moving obituary by her close friend Lindsey Hilsum, of Channel Four News, Lindsey said that ‘Marie went further and stayed longer than other reporters – it was what gave her journalism the intimacy and authenticity.’
Being a print journalist for the weekly Sunday Times, she had more time to develop a story than many broadcast journalists who are often tied to TV schedules and need to be quickly in and out of a siege situation.
I shared occasional adventures with Marie, Lindsey, and Lindsey’s producer/cameraman Tim Lambon. In 2002, the four of us were in Jenin, the West Bank town pounded by the Israeli army. Palestinians had smuggled us in. We were arrested twice by the Israelis and on one occasion we were forced to sit for hours in the blazing sun, cramped up in a Land Rover. Bored and frustrated, I decided to conduct an impromptu DJ session, putting on imaginary discs and impersonating various singers. Lindsey asked me for an Elvis number. I had a soft spot for Marie, so I decided to dedicate the next song to her. It was supposed to be The Day I Met Marie by Cliff Richard. I started warbling until I came to the bit about Marie’s ‘laughing eyes’ – plural. Trying to avoid offending Marie's eye-patch, I pretended that the record was scratched and switched into Cliff Richard’s The Young Ones.
The fact that that the vehicle’s inmates continued requesting records was less due to the quality of my Welsh baritone and more a comment on the need sometimes for levity and humour in the face of death – or boredom. War reporting is often 95 per cent tedium, interspersed with being shot at and maybe bouts of dysentery.
I had emailed Marie just before she left for Syria to ask if we could meet up on her return to talk about her time in Sri Lanka, where she lost her eye to a grenade fragment when she was with the Tamil Tigers. Ironically, I was in the same area of Sri Lanka, researching my book on their long war, when I heard of Marie’s death.
She was braver and tougher than most male war hacks, and she didn’t need to rely upon her extensive charms to make any points about females in wars.
She was very smart and very determined, and also patient with dumber and more cowardly hacks such as myself. Going that extra mile made her career edgier and more fulfilling, but it also led to her death. Deciding when not to go somewhere is sometimes a life-saver in war zones. Marie thought Syria was the worst she’d seen. ‘Worse than Sarajevo’, another hack said. In my – distant – view, it had elements of Stalingrad, with so many innocents cowering in basements, without food, water, light or heat.
Marie cared about her stories and was determined to make a difference, but she was also a traditional reporter, not an advocacy merchant. She needed to be there to see what was actually happening.
In a number of my recent war books I praised Marie. In Biteback’s Shooting the Messenger, there is a picture I took of her, in flak jacket, eye patch and smoking, as ever, a cigarette. The picture makes the hacks look casual, but it had been bloody and the atmosphere was thick with the smell of decaying flesh, buried under the rubble of Jenin.
So why take so many risks in a profession where death is a regular occupational hazard? The money isn’t good, certainly not enough to compensate for the injuries, both physical and psychological.
Allen Pizzey, of CBS, once told me: ‘If we do our job properly, we negate the age-old excuse “we didn’t know” as a way to justify inaction or indifference in the face of brutality, suffering or injustice. “You did, because we told you so.”’
Marie Colvin died trying to tell truth to power, the highest ideal of the profession. Whether her death will help to end the appalling slaughter in Syria is another matter.
Will it have much of an effect generally on war reporting? I doubt it. Too many colleagues get killed in action, burn out with post-traumatic stress disorder or succumb to depression and alcoholism. A few thrive on the chaos, learn to control fear and survive to be successful long-term hacks. Some can even pass for normal, sane human beings. Only about two per cent of journalists become full-time war correspondents, and the ones who survive have a kind of self-selecting personality. People who can do the job well have to possess a certain kind of moral and physical resilience, besides the usual news-gathering skills.
Learning to transcend fear depends not only on a robust personality, but also combat skills and experience. You have to soon learn the basics, for example, of discerning outgoing fire from incoming. You also need to develop a certain sixth sense about danger, not least about when to stop, take shelter, retreat, pack up and go home.
I mention some of the hazards of the profession when I am frequently asked by eager young wannabes. If I am teaching postgraduate journalism students at Cardiff University, or after a book promotion talk, about five or six aspiring hacks, usually women, say they want to be foreign reporters. Initially I try to put them off by mentioning the numerous hardships; and explain that it is much tougher than merely being an ‘auto-cutie’. If they are genuinely determined, I advise on two routes. Firstly, get a real practical journalism qualification, say a diploma at Cardiff, and ignore all the media studies bullshit. Then work your way up through the local and national media. Or take a short cut – go out to the most dangerous place on earth, learn the language and culture quickly, very quickly, and start freelancing as a ‘stringer’.
Like Marie, I lost the sight in one eye, largely due to wounds, and then most of the sight in the second eye (less romantically, courtesy of the NHS). But I keep going to war zones, albeit far less enthusiastically. Yet I have never figured out whether courage is like a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets. Or whether courage is akin to a small reservoir – the more you draw on it it, the less there is available. In my own case, it is probably the latter. But I would guess with Marie it was the former. I salute her courage and mourn her passing.
(Image: Marie Colvin, with Tim Lambon and Lindsey Hilsum, in Jenin, West Bank, May 2002. )