Marie Brenner - A Private War

“You only cry when you bleed,” Rosemarie told her children, a mantra Marie took to heart. By the time she was a teenager, she had the confidence and moxie of a daddy’s girl, but her relationship with her father became stormy as she battled for independence. Determined to have her own sailboat, she saved up money from babysitting. A girl of her era—the late 1960s—she would sneak out the window and spend nights smoking pot with her friends. “Bill did not know what to do with her,” Rosemarie said. She made straight As, was a National Merit finalist, and took off for Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. “She and my father were so much alike in their visions that it was destined that they collide,” Cat said. Years later, in London, Colvin would tell Patrick Bishop that she had run away to Brazil—a classic Colvin dramatization of the facts. She actually went as an exchange student and lived with a wealthy Brazilian family. “She came back sleek and chic and determined she was going to live out of East Norwich,” Cat recalled.

In Brazil, Colvin had neglected to apply to college. When she returned, in the middle of her senior year, the deadlines were long past. As the family story has it, she said, “I’m going to Yale,” and took the car to New Haven. “With her was her high-school transcript and her test scores—two 800s,” said Rosemarie. The next day she was back. “I’m in.” Soon after she entered Yale, she met Katrina Heron, and they quickly became a trio with Bobby Shriver, the son of Sargent Shriver, the founder of the Peace Corps. For a class taught by John Hersey, Colvin read his masterpiece, Hiroshima , and she began to write for the Yale Daily News . That fall, Bill Colvin discovered an advanced cancer. Marie was inconsolable when he died. “It broke something in her,” Heron said. To all of Colvin’s friends, her father remained a mystery figure. It was as if a part of her froze at the moment he died. Her guilt about their unresolved relationship haunted her, Bishop told me. But with Cat, her closest confidante, she frequently talked about her anger and her failure to restore the special affection they had had when she was a child.

Sent to Sri Lanka in April 2001, Colvin delivered an interview with a commander of the controversial and brutal antiregime Tamil Tigers, in which she highlighted that there were 340,000 refugees in what she described as “an unreported humanitarian crisis—people starving, international aid agencies banned from distributing food… no fuel for cars, water pumps, or lighting.”

“She could have spent the night and probably have left safely the next morning,” Jon Swain said. Instead, she fled through a cashew plantation and had to dodge army patrols. Trapped as flares from a nearby base swept the ground, Colvin had to make a difficult decision: Should she identify herself as a journalist? Had she not, she later said, she would have been slaughtered as a Tamil rebel. “Journalist! American!” she yelled as she felt searing heat in her head. A bursting grenade had punctured one of her lungs and destroyed her left eye. “Doctor!” she shouted when soldiers arrived and tore off her shirt, searching for weapons. “Admit that you came to kill us,” an officer demanded and threw her into the back of a truck.

“I was uninjured until I yelled ‘journalist’ and then they fired the grenade. The nightmare for me is always that decision about yelling. My brain leaves out the pain,” Colvin told the author Denise Leith. “They made me walk to them. I knew that if I fell they would shoot so I had them put a light on me before I would stand up, but I lost so much blood that I fell down, literally I replay that whole walk endlessly in the nightmare. I know that it is my brain trying to find a different resolution. ‘This body didn’t have to be shot.’”

On the phone, Sean Ryan could hear Marie screaming in a hospital, “Fuck off  !” Ryan said he was relieved, at least, “that she sounded like Marie.” Later she told him that she had fended off a doctor who was trying to take out her eye. Flown to New York to be operated on, she filed three thousand words from her hospital bed. “My God, what will happen if I go blind?” she asked Cat. “I wish I could cry,” she told the TV news editor Lindsey Hilsum. “So many Tamils have called to offer me their eyes.” As she was slowly recuperating, a worried Ryan told Rosemarie to get her psychological support, but Colvin resisted.

Back in London, Colvin was convinced that work would cure her. “I started to worry that she was self-medicating with alcohol,” Heron told me. Meanwhile, her editors gave her a heroine’s welcome and praised her stiff-upper-lip valor.

Ryan became alarmed when she called him, yelling, “Someone at the paper is trying to humiliate me!” A story of hers had run with a headline that used the term “evil eye,” and Colvin saw that as a plot against her. “It was bewildering, and the first sign that Marie was having a stress reaction,” Ryan remembered. Alarmed, Cat could not get her on the phone. “I’ve thrown my cell phone into the river,” Marie told her. “I’m not getting out of my bed ever.”

Two close friends encouraged her to get counseling, and she sought treatment at a military hospital by someone who understood PTSD. “When I look at you,” one doctor told her, “no soldier has seen as much combat as you have.” Sean Ryan recalled a lunch with her at about that time: “Marie gripped the table and said, ‘Sean, I have PTSD. I am going to hospital to be treated.’” She seemed relieved by the specific diagnosis. According to Rosie Boycott, “While the PTSD was absolutely true, it was as well for Marie a way she did not have to confront her drinking.” Bishop begged Colvin to stop; she refused.

For years in England, with its high tolerance of alcoholism and its reluctance to force confrontation, Colvin’s friends and editors often resorted to evasion— Marie is feeling fragile. Marie does not sound like herself . When they tried to intervene, she would tell them, “I have no intention of not drinking. I never drink when I am covering a war.” Her attempts to find help were always short-lived.

She would wake up drenched in sweat. The desperate reel of horrors that played over and over in her mind kept returning to the refugee camp in Beirut, where she saw the twenty-two-year-old Palestinian woman lying in a heap with half her head blown off. As recently as last year, Colvin was staying with her nieces and nephews in East Norwich when the doorbell suddenly awakened her. The next morning Rosemarie discovered that Marie had gotten up and put a knife in her sleeping bag. When Rosemarie mentioned it, Marie said, “Oh, that,” and changed the subject.

Colvin worked at the paper two days a week and hated it. Robin Morgan, then the editor of the paper’s weekly magazine, begged her to write long stories, but Colvin pressed to return to the field. She called the office “the chamber of horrors,” and she hounded Ryan and Witherow to let her get back to work. She went to the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Jenin in 2002 to cover the intifada. Arriving in Jenin, Lindsey Hilsum was convinced that her TV team had the scoop:

“And there was Marie, popping out of the rubble, smoking a cigarette. ‘Hey, you guys, can I get a ride out?’” Recalling the decision to allow her back into war zones, one correspondent recently could not contain his anger. “They would put us all in this kind of danger,” he said. Colvin was never out of the field again.

In 2003, as George Bush prepared to go to war with Iraq, Colvin was sent to assess the scene. After witnessing Saddam’s brutalities, she would fiercely defend the war at parties, declaring that no reasonable person could allow the genocide to continue. In dispatches from Baghdad, she described the mass graves of dismembered Iraqis and the atrocities Saddam’s son Uday had committed on his own family. Not long after that, while visiting her family on Long Island and seeing her nine-year-old niece with a collection of Barbie dolls, she said, “Justine, are you playing dead babies’ mass grave?” She then realized that she was slipping into another reality. She told Cat, “I know things I don’t want to know—like how small a body gets when it is burned to death.” She continued to struggle. “I couldn’t feel anymore,” she told an interviewer. “I’d gotten into too black a place. I needed to say ‘I’m vulnerable.’”