An Intrepid Journalist

Not this time she didn't. On all those other occasions when she placed her life in danger she somehow managed to extricate herself from the leering jaws of death, and bring to the waiting world news of the atrocities she had been witness to. Making, in the process, the world witness to the miseries attendant on war.



"If you knew my daughter", Rosemary Colvin explained, "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."

"She always got out, so we always expected her to get out", said one of her brothers, William Colvin. Well, not this time. She lived a full life, one she designed for herself, that gave impetus and meaning to her life. Which is more, much more than can be said for most lives lived, not to the fullest, but certainly as safely and comfortably as could possibly be managed. She, on the other hand, managed to get herself into the thick of action.

A handout picture obtained in London on February 22, 2012, from British newspaper the Sunday Times, shows U.S. war correspondent Marie Colvin. France identified two Western reporters killed in Syria on Wednesday as veteran American war correspondent Marie Colvin of Britain's Sunday Times and freelance French photojournalist Remi Ochlik. Colvin was a renowned reporter who had covered countless conflicts over 30 years and wore a distinctive eye patch after she was wounded in Sri Lanka. She was voted Foreign Correspondent of the Year in the 2010 British Press Awards. Photograph by: Handout , AFP/Getty Images

The house in which she and other reporters were sheltering was in fact a converted ad hoc media centre. It was being deliberately bombed by the Syrian army, given orders to "kill any journalist that sets foot on Syrian soil". The Syrian regime will not authorize foreign journalists to report from Syria, it wishes no witnesses to the slaughter they are imposing on Homs and elsewhere.

Those journalists who were present in Homs at the centre of the action were there because they smuggled themselves across the border into Syria, taking refuge in that media centre. They were broadcasting from that converted house when they were shelled. And they exited the place in search of safety, which is when they were hit, killing two reporters, Marie Colvin and photographer Remi Ochlik, as they fled the makeshift press centre.

British photographer Paul Conroy on assignment with Ms. Colvin, and French reporter Edith Bouvier were also wounded in the attack. In fact, they had been pre-warned that the Syrian Army was preparing to shell their media centre. Marie Colvin was on the cusp of leaving Syria on orders from the Sunday Times, in view of the dangerous situation.

But, said her mother, "she had to stay. She wanted to finish one more story." Earlier that morning she did have a story, of being witness to the agonizing, slow death of a two-year-old Syrian boy, mortally wounded, dying in her sight. She brought his story to the world.

The last story was her own, dead, an intrepid journalist, at age 56.