A fearless fighter

American war reporter Marie Colvin was killed early Wednesday as Syrian forces shelled the city of Homs. Her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, talks to James Barron about her gutsy daughter.

Marie Colvin got into Yale University the way she would later get into foreign countries — with grit and determination.After spending a year in Brazil on a student exchange programme, from January of her junior year at Oyster Bay High School to January of her senior year, 1974, her mother recalls, Colvin returned home to find that her classmates had narrowed down their college choices.

“Everyone else was already admitted to college,” her mother, Rosemarie Colvin, says from the family home in East Norwich, New York. “So she took our car and drove up to Yale and said, ‘You have to let me in.’ ” Impressed — she was a National Merit finalist who had picked up Portuguese in Brazil — Yale did, admitting her to the class of 1978. She was an anthropology major but took a course with the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Hersey. She also started writing for The Yale Daily News “and decided to be a journalist,” says her mother. On Wednesday, Colvin, 56, a veteran correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, was killed as Syrian forces shelled the city of Homs. She was working in a makeshift media centre that was destroyed in the assault. A French photographer, Rémi Ochlik, was also killed.

 

At her family’s split-level home on Long Island, the telephone rang at 5 am. It was so early, her mother says, that “I knew it was something terrible.” Colvin was supposed to leave Syria on Wednesday. “Her editor told me he called her yesterday and said it was getting too dangerous and they wanted to take her out. She said she was doing a story and she wanted to finish it... it was important and she would come out on Wednesday,” informs her mother.

Colvin(Rosemarie) says she had tried to reach her daughter last week. “Usually you can get her” on the satellite phone, Colvin says, “but for some reason, she didn’t return the messages.” The last time she heard her daughter’s voice was on television, when she was interviewed on CNN on Tuesday, hours before her death. Colvin talks of the leaders her daughter had interviewed — among them Col Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. She also recalls how her daughter had been wounded in a grenade attack in Sri Lanka in 2001 as she tried to leave rebel-controlled territory. She lost an eye and, at first, her hearing.

“She got her hearing back,” her mother says. “She still had shrapnel in her brain they couldn’t remove.” She adds that it was pointless to try to dissuade her daughter from going to conflict zones. “If you knew my daughter,” she says, “it would have been such a waste of words. It just wasn’t something that would even be on the plate at all. She was determined, she was passionate about what she did, it was her life. There was no saying ‘Don’t do this.’ This is who she was, absolutely who she was and what she believed in: cover the story, not just have pictures of it, but bring it to life in the deepest way you could.”

“We were involved in the things of the ’60s and ’70s, antiwar things, women’s protests,” Colvin says. “She grew up that way. She was always involved in issues of the time.” So it was not a surprise when she took an interest in journalism, she says.

Colvin(Marie) worked briefly for a labour union in Manhattan after Yale, before she was hired by United Press International in New Jersey. UPI sent her to Washington and later to Paris before she was hired by The Sunday Times of London. “She always got out,” one of her two brothers, William Colvin says, “so we always expected her to get out.”

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(Noah Rosenberg contributed to this article)
©2012 The New York Times