Dispatches ‘On the Front Line’ and ‘Under the Wire’ By JUDITH MATLOFF Published: November 8, 2013 • New-york times book review If blinded in one eye by shrapnel, many journalists would consider early retirement. At the very least they would contemplate avoiding areas known for ambushes and land mines. But Marie Colvin, one of the bravest and certainly best-dressed foreign correspondents of our time, simply turned that injury, which she sustained while reporting in Sri Lanka for The Sunday Times of London, into a style statement. After an excruciating recovery involving flashbacks of the attack, this extraordinary American reporter donned a black eye patch and returned to the field to risk her life over and over again. When she was killed by a rocket attack in Syria in February 2012 on yet another assignment, colleagues were stunned, although not exactly surprised. Colvin, after all, often arrived at the front lines first and stayed longer than others. She had been stranded on a 12,000-foot mountain in Chechnya. She was nearly lynched in Egypt. She spent half her 56 years in the world’s most brutal conflict zones. Her luck couldn’t last forever. ON THE FRONT LINE The Collected Journalism of Marie Colvin Illustrated. 540 pp. Harper Press. Paper, $19.99. UNDER THE WIRE Marie Colvin’s Final Assignment By Paul Conroy Illustrated. 326 pp. Weinstein Books. $26. Two books, one a collection of Colvin’s articles and the other an account of her last weeks, pay homage to this formidable woman, who tested the limits of an extreme profession. I worked in some of the same territory as Colvin as a foreign correspondent and never ceased to marvel at the lengths she took to chronicle violence and cruelty. She slept in caves, wriggled through tunnels and trekked for miles in pursuit of stories. She went weeks without bathing, slept soundly through bombardments and, during the East Timor crisis of 1999, observed dryly as male colleagues evacuated: “They don’t make men like they used to.” Her stamina was fueled by jars of Nes¬café and the conviction that to draw attention to the world’s atrocities, she had to keep pushing. “On the Front Line” showcases roughly 100 dispatches, with a remarkable consistency in tone and purpose. Early in her career Colvin found her métier: vignettes about ordinary people living under duress. Her voice was outraged yet clear and simple, like that of her idol Martha Gellhorn, and Colvin’s employers allowed her to cover whatever she wanted. She didn’t do news conferences. Her focus was on noncombatants under grave threat: what was left of a family cowering in a shelter, for instance. Thanks to Colvin’s vivid writing, the desperate scenes from Gaza to Yugoslavia in “On the Front Line” never grow repetitive. (On a gang member in Sierra Leone: “It is hard to talk to Junior Savage. He has sewn the front half of a rat’s pelt to the baseball cap that is pulled down low over his forehead, so the beady eyes of the dead rodent stare at you as a human voice talks from somewhere below.”) Colvin laced her tragic tales with wry wit, too. One article depicts the existential quandary of an Iraqi double, who, after plastic surgery and a personality change to resemble a sadistic son of the despot Saddam Hussein, struggled to reclaim his identity. Another recounts the bizarre attempts by the Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi to woo her, one of which involved dispatching a nurse with a giant hypodermic needle to her hotel room on the grounds that the reporter looked tired. While the collection celebrates lifetime achievement, “Under the Wire,” by the war photographer Paul Conroy, tracks Colvin’s last assignments, to Libya and Syria. Conroy worked alongside Colvin, and although his phrasing is frequently cliché-ridden, the narrative becomes unrelentingly gripping as he depicts the pair’s path toward disaster. My hands left sweat marks on the pages. Surviving war reportage involves a mixture of luck and judgment. Normally the debate over how long to stay and when to leave is a collective process involving editors and those on the ground. For her Syrian finale, intent on standing by the people of Homs, Colvin rejected all counsel. Their assignment begins with a muddy crawl through a claustrophobic tunnel toward the rebel-held Homs. Fellow reporters think Colvin and Conroy are nuts. Yet the two make it through and interview survivors who had been operated on by a veterinarian for lack of proper doctors. The reports shock the world. As Colvin decides they should press on, Conroy follows her with a sick feeling. As a former British soldier he knows their mission is foolhardy, but he goes along out of duty. Colvin didn’t care what Conroy or her editor advised. She insisted on staying when competition, in the form of three French journalists and a Spaniard, arrived at the already wrecked “media center” where they had set up camp. Soon after, a missile hit just outside their building, and Colvin died while fetching her shoes for escape. The satellite telephone on which she conducted television interviews most likely helped Syrian forces track her location. The French photographer Rémi Ochlik perished at her side. His compatriot Edith Bouvier suffered a fractured leg. Conroy’s own leg was blasted through; he could stick a hand through the hole. Conroy comes across as a remarkably nice chap, with a high tolerance for pain. He had the presence of mind to tie a tourniquet above his own injury and gallantly told a rebel offering help to wait until the shelling stopped. For five days Conroy kept the others’ spirits up while they were pinned down under fire, then escaped, despite his injuries, via the same narrow tunnel through which he and Colvin had sneaked into Homs. When he finally returned to Britain, he underwent 14 operations. The three other journalists survived, too. Was all this grief worth it? People cover conflict for various reasons — escape, adventure, ego, idealism, a compulsion to prove oneself. Colvin once wrote: “Simply: there’s no way to cover war properly without risk. Covering a war means going into places torn by chaos, destruction, death and pain, and trying to bear witness to that.” Yet neither book explains what led this daughter of schoolteachers from Long Island to choose war, or what fueled her moral outrage. And neither explores a question aptly raised in a Vanity Fair article last year: Why did The Sunday Times send a correspondent with a severe drinking problem on such a dangerous assignment? It was no secret Colvin turned to the bottle to self-medicate her post-¬traumatic stress. The books don’t mention the general dysfunction of war correspondents, who either get hooked on the toxic intensity or haunted by its horror. Most correspondents, by the time they reach Colvin’s age, ask to be posted to Paris, but she kept going. Perhaps the reasons can be found in the facts that miscarriages and broken romances (also occupational hazards) robbed her of a family, and that she detested newsroom cubicles and claimed she could get a handle on her drinking only while in the field. Colvin’s death provides a cautionary tale for any young aspirant to this noble but hazardous calling. No one is immune to peril, and those who can’t assess challenges properly are the most vulnerable. Syria continues to be one of the worst ¬places to operate as a reporter, and I expect it will claim more victims. As it stands, 25 professional journalists covering Syria have been killed since the start of the conflict in spring 2011, and at least 18 reporters and media workers are currently missing. Then there are the citizen cameramen and bloggers who lack embassies to extract them. Some have had bad luck, others have made bad calls. The question of whether the risk is worth it remains open. As the newsroom aphorism goes: A dead journalist can’t report. Judith Matloff teaches conflict reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She is the author of “Home Girl” and “Fragments of a Forgotten War.”
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 10:10:10 +0000
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