The Fearless Correspondent: Remembering Marie Colvin’s Grit and Grace

In the collective imagination, war is synonymous with virility. A state of exception where heroic violence is permitted, even desirable. A moment when all the long-repressed masculine impulses have the opportunity to unleash against the enemy.

However, on certain frontlines, a woman had paved her way for an entirely different battle. A struggle even more violent than that of the shells. An internal combat to recount the torments of war.

This was the destiny Marie Colvin had chosen.

Regarded by her colleagues as the greatest war reporter of her generation, Marie Colvin persisted in confronting death. To face it, to scrutinize it, almost to hunt it down. Her achievements were numerous. Tirelessly, she traversed the planet, seeking proximity to tragedies. To listen to them, to whisper some truth about a warring and ambiguous world.

She also sought to give a voice to the war’s victims. To those faceless ones, effortlessly and mercilessly killed, with no burial. Marie possessed that tender, feminine quality of never understanding without empathy. Of never remaining in the ivory tower of fashionable journalists.

On the contrary, she settled into the folds of war to write. She unpacked where censorship threatened the freedom to know. A freedom that was worth taking all the risks.

Yet, Marie’s youth did not foretell a life marked by danger.

In reality, her journalism career was the result of fortuitous circumstances. A chance encounter on the campus of Yale University transformed a passing desire for journalism into a definitive passion. As an anthropology student at the time, Marie attended the class of John Hursey, the recipient of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.

A venerable figure in journalism, John Hursey was the first to interview survivors of the atomic attacks on Japan. From that experience, he wrote his classic “Hiroshima,” which depicted the bomb’s impact with starkness.

Influenced by this man, she decided to embrace a journalism career.

Specializing in the Middle East, she covered conflicts on all continents for the Sunday Times. From Chechnya to East Timor, Marie Colvin traversed the world with an insatiable thirst for information.

With a deep desire to shed light on the tragedies that executioners concealed.

For her courage, she won prestigious awards. But her greatest victory was evading death. To constantly approach it without the Reaper being able to grasp her for the last time.

Yet, one day, death issued a final warning.

During a report on the Sri Lankan civil war, she was hit by an explosion from a grenade launched by the Sri Lankan army.

Marie Colvin permanently lost sight in her left eye.

Recalling the old adage: neither the sun nor death can be looked at directly.

She wore an eyepatch, which became the hallmark of her style.A sort of wink to her survival, to the myth she had become.

A myth of a public figure larger than life, the greatest war correspondent. All of this she was, but behind the legend were doubt and inner pain. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2004, Marie could not ignore the nightmarish scenes she had witnessed.

After a long absence, she made a grand comeback to the journalistic scene during the Arab Spring, brilliantly covering the turmoil of youth refusing dictatorship.

At the same time, the Syrian regime employed unprecedented violence to quell the uprisings. Thus, in February 2012, Colvin entered Syria on the back of a motorcycle, ignoring the Syrian government’s attempts to prevent foreign journalists from entering Syria to cover the civil war. On-site, she described “merciless” artillery fire and sniper attacks against civilian buildings and people in the streets of Homs by Syrian forces. Marie Colvin described the siege of Homs as the worst conflict she had ever experienced.

This would be the last image she retained of a world she had resolved to understand. On February 22, 2012, Marie Colvin was no more.

The world had lost a great journalist. Perhaps the bravest of all.