LIVINGSTON, MONTANA — Marie Colvin gave me my first big break in the exciting world of international crisis correspondence.
I hope the reader detects the slight edge of cynicism in the above statement.
I was a struggling local-language-speaking expatriate freelancer in Turkey doing the usual mix that kept struggling freelancers afloat: a little English instruction here, a color story penned for the back-page of a local weekly every other week, the occasional soft feature in the Christian Science Monitor, and a bit of translation and ‘fixing’ for the wandering staff correspondent on the side while one worked on one’s non-commissioned book about the absolute truth about the country where one had chose to live the expatriate life.
It was probably in this capacity—local ‘expert’/translator–that I first met Marie; it must have been 1988 or possibly 1987. Apparently she kept my contacts (meaning telephone number in those days of the telex) because one day in March 1989 she called with a request: Saddam Hussein, recently freed from the Gulf War with Khomeini’s Iran, had once again gassed his Kurds, who were now streaming into extreme southeast Turkey. It was exactly her kind of story, and so I readily volunteered to work as her translator/fixer.
“Not so fast,” said the growly voice on the other end of the line. “I have something better for you.”
Marie was stuck in Israel, waiting developments on another story: the proposed expulsion of tens of thousands of Israel Arabs and other Palestinians to Jordan (and elsewhere) to make room for tens of thousands of Jewish emigrants from the Soviet Union and could not leave her listening post. She wanted me to cover for her and the Sunday Times until she could get to the scene.
The rest, as they say, is history (or at least mine). I covered for Marie until she got there the next week (to disappear into Iraq with a Kurdish driver who stupidly thought he could take advantage of this lone, traveling woman), picked up ‘strings’ not only at the Sunday Times but the Washington Post (that lasted through my reporting work on Azerbaijan and Chechnya in the former Soviet Union; Marie was usually the one to convince dubious editors to run my material at the former), and secured a deep and lasting friendship with this extraordinary and always giving woman.
I frequently stayed at her place in London when passing through; she was married to Juan Carlos at the time, who was even then starting his long slide down the war-correspondent’s familiar terminal tunnel with depression due to Too-Many-Sights-Seen syndrome. To my knowledge, Marie never showed a symptom or breathed a word about being sick of what she did so well: get in there and get out with the story.
The last time I saw her was in London circa 2003 or ’04 after she had lost her eye in Sri Lanka shelling: she was under a special type of medicine/therapy regime because her good eye was trying to ‘mirror’ her dead one and go blind as well; Marie took that right in stride, fought back and kept her vision.
I had already left the ‘exciting world of international crisis correspondence’ to write books and then teach on the subject, but we stayed in touch. One weird moment came when Marie got engaged to a cousin of a rancher lady friend of mine here in Montana; she never tied the knot, maybe because a new husband would tie her down in a way she could not be bound.
Then a friend who writes illustrated ‘real world’ books for children (‘The History of the FBI;’ ‘Bacteria in the Backyard’) got commissioned to write a book called something like ‘The Real World of War Correspondents,’ and asked me to contact Marie for her, worried that the Martha Gellhorn Prize-winner might be a little too busy with Libya to write a few words on that reality, much less send a pic.
Marie was on it the next day, and is now immortalized not just for her work read by adults, but by the next generation.
RIP, dear Marie–you defined ‘one-of-a-kind.’
Thomas Goltz is an American author and journalist best known for his accounts of conflict in the Caucasus region during the 1990s.