The one-eyed woman reporter in the war zone: Accuse war with life

Character card

Mary Colvin, the most senior war correspondent of our time, worked for Britain's Sunday Times. February 22, 2012: Killed in a Syrian government bombardment of Homs city. She lived for reporting and fought for humanity: to live forever under fire.

Always on the way to the next battle

Colvin was an English literature major at Yale. In her senior year, she attended a seminar on John Hussey's reporting of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which struck Colvin as the pinnacle of 20th-century American journalism. Hersey was the first mentor of her career. He made her want to report real things, and he made her believe they could change the world. She later joined Britain's prestigious Sunday Times newspaper, where she met an elite team of foreign correspondents. Whenever she saw the manuscript they sent back from the foreign battlefield, her blood was boiling and she was eager to try. So she applied to be a war correspondent. In her words, shells are not just a noun, casualties are not just a number. They mean burned houses, mutilated bodies, women crying with children, and the flash of terror in soldiers' eyes. "My focus is on the humanity of war," she said. It makes people in a peaceful environment not feel distant and alien."

Few have covered the war for as long as she has. Ruins, death, kidnapping, and brandy have replaced the normal life of one's age. Compared with other war correspondents, she is the oldest and oldest sister of the war. She bantered with Moammar Gadhafi and Yasser Arafat, and during the Lebanese civil war covered massacres in refugee camps in Beirut's southern suburbs. She then expanded her coverage to all the war-torn regions of the world, including Chechnya, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and more.

In 2001, Colvin was covering the war in Sri Lanka when he came under fire from government forces. She survived but was permanently blind in her left eye. She strapped on a black blindfold and headed off to the next battle. The only thing she had against death, so arrogantly approaching her, was faith. "Believe that when you are in a foreign war, many people are waiting to see what you have to say. Believe that they care about the misfortune of the war and are trying to stop it."

While the mobile Internet has made much of the world more transparent, she says, the average person can't go to a war zone and report on it as if they were visiting a circus. So, to know the truth about where a battlefield is, you have to have a reporter who risks getting shot at.

The hardest fight of all

Without the fighting, the country road from the Lebanese border to Homs would be idyllic. Cars crisscrossed the fields, and cypress trees and aspen trees lined the roadside. Winding through orchards, apricot, and apple trees abound. But the war changed everything.

Before he left for Syria, Colvin had told friends he wanted to get back as soon as possible.

With nearly three decades of combat experience, Colvin was accustomed to the loud sounds of stray bullets and mortar shells. Perhaps she didn't expect the situation in Syria to be beyond imagination. Within two weeks of entering Syria, she published two articles, the first titled "Shells Raining" and the second, "We are Surrounded by the Fear of a Massacre."

'This is a cold and hungry city,' she wrote at the beginning of her last report. 'The sound of exploding shells and bursts of gunfire reverberates.' Communications were down, electricity was cut. In the coldest winters they can remember, they can heat themselves with diesel tin stoves, but few families have diesel anymore. Frozen raindrops filled the holes and snow drifted through the windowless Windows. Shops are closed, and families and neighbors help each other, but there is little left in the house. Most of those killed and injured were people who had ventured out to find food.

Colvin has always reported on the harm, fear, and suffering caused by the war on civilians from a humanitarian perspective. Unlike journalists who stay in hotels and go for a spin before returning home, she eats and sleeps with locals to get the deepest details.

Without reports from Colvin and a handful of other war correspondents, officials in offices in London, Washington, and the United Nations building in New York would not have known exactly what kind of disaster was unfolding.

The trip to Syria was one of the most dangerous in Mr. Colvin, 56,'s 26 years of reporting from war zones.

To avoid being targeted, Colvin's vehicle was forced to bounce along country roads, shattering bones.

Rebel forces have set up checkpoints in areas they control. On cold winter nights, people gather around the campfire at the checkpoint, eyeing any suspicious-looking vehicle.

Colvin scaled walls in the dark, drilled through muddy trenches, and finally reached the dark city in the early hours of the morning. The arrival of the foreign correspondent was greeted by a crowd. They are eager for foreign journalists to tell the world about the city's suffering and for the international community to stop sitting on the sidelines. Colvin was bundled onto an open truck and sped off with his headlights on.

When Syrian troops spotted them, they opened fire with machine guns and hurried into an abandoned building to take cover. By day, Colvin saw that almost every building was scarred, and shells were blowing like a storm down every street.

Colvin was also quick to see unprecedented danger, and a recording of her life described the situation in Homs: "The Syrians were not allowing anyone to leave. If anyone showed up on the streets, they were wounded by stray bullets or hit by bullets. There were snipers everywhere. What is chilling is that these snipers have no compassion and they are attacking homes with shocking impunity."

Two weeks of relentless shelling have left the city reeling. The question on everyone's lips: "Why did the world abandon us?"

"The city is a huge human tragedy, and its residents are living in terror." Colvin's first story from Homs, published in the Sunday Times on February 19th, was predictably finished.

On Feb. 21, hours before he was killed, Colvin was called to the BBC and CNN news programs from inside a building whose top floor had been chopped off by a shell. She told the BBC that she saw a baby die that day. "It was terrible, the baby was only two years old, and after taking off his clothes, you saw the shrapnel hit his left chest. There was nothing the doctors could do, and the baby's belly kept rising and falling until it died."

The same day, Colvin posted an update to her Facebook page: "Helpless and cold, but I'll keep reporting."

The Price of Truth

At 5 am Eastern time on February 22, a telephone rang in a building in Long Island, New York. It was so early, and Colvin's mother, who lived here, felt something was wrong. For 26 years, the old lady was frightened by her daughter's presence in the most fearful places.

On Feb. 22, when Colvin was supposed to leave Syria, the newspaper's editor-in-chief asked her to leave immediately, citing the situation there as too dangerous. But Colvin stayed because she was working on an important story.

The mother knew her daughter's obsession: "If you know my daughter, you know that it is a waste of breath to persuade her to stay away from the battlefield. She was so determined and passionate about her interviews that it was her life."

Colvin has been wearing a black eye patch since 2001 when he lost his left eye while covering Sri Lanka's civil war. While many of his old colleagues had left the world of war correspondents and were no longer on the front lines, Colvin was tireless and became the most outstanding war correspondent of his generation.

A long time ago, Colvin was far from the front line, spending a few years behind a desk in the Sunday Times world desk. During that time, she was bored to death. Soon after, Colvin boarded the plane again and headed to the next danger.

When friends and colleagues took their families on trips or vacations, Colvin made his choice -- to pursue a career as a war correspondent. Everything else -- health, family, personal life -- came second. She was married three times, but all failed, and never had children.

After returning from the war, she found that she had not adapted to "peacetime", because the quiet life made her panic. 'After the war, the gunfire and the escape, it was really hard to talk to people about mortgages or the fashion of underwear,' she recalls. "The award also made me restless, and I always felt guilty that I was the one who benefited from the war. We extract the terrible stories that have happened to those people and we remove them from their lives." She felt guilty about it.

"War reporting is essentially the same as it always was. Somebody has to go there and see what's going on." "If you're not in the place where people are being shot at, where people are shooting at you, you can't get real information," Mr. Colvin said in a 2010 speech.

"We always ask ourselves whether the risk of such a story is worth it, and how to distinguish bravery from recklessness," Colvin said in his speech. Her answer was worth it, even if it cost her her left eye and even her life.