As we got older, Marie included me in her life in ways that were extraordinary, in retrospect. She took me with her everywhere, and dressed me to her (not my mother’s) liking. We sailed all over Long Island as kids, and later in the Chesapeake Bay and the Florida Keys. We went on protest marches and hung out in the park singing to guitar music during her high school years. I tagged along with her to long classroom lectures and wild parties at Yale. She taught me the lyrics to her favourite songs by Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt and Patsy Cline, and often had me sing them for her friends at parties (Marie could never carry a tune). Marie inspired me to explore the world with an open heart and mind, from backpacking through Europe at seventeen (with a luxurious stop in Paris to visit Marie) through the birth of my daughter in Santiago, Chile, nearly twenty years later.
On my last trip to London, my daughter, now 13, was still young enough to appreciate bedtime stories, and I told her that Aunt Marie was the greatest master storyteller of all time. I remembered the beautiful, exciting world she had created for me as a girl, and was thrilled for Justine to share my experience. Not long after Marie went up to Justine’s bedroom, I began to hear loud bangs, crashes and shouts. I went upstairs to find Marie throwing her hands in the air and leaping around the room delivering a full warzone soundtrack for her story, as Justine listened wide-eyed and intent from her bed, resplendent in the gorgeous new pyjamas Aunt Marie had given her. The stories had changed, but in Justine’s eyes I saw the same fascination I had felt as a girl basking in Marie’s attention.
Marie really was the greatest master storyteller of all time, there is no doubt. She could have written novels, poems or plays and enraptured the world with the gift of her written and spoken words. But Marie chose to devote her gift to bringing the attention of the world to the innocent victims of war. Even as her reporting grew so much more dangerous and intense, and the damage to her body and soul became manifest, she never forgot how to capture the imagination of a young girl, and she never stopped believing in the importance of a little girl’s dream. I hope and believe that Marie will continue to inspire young women everywhere, not only as they read about her dedication and talent, but as they dream of the difference just one little girl can make in this world.
Cat Colvin
March 2012
PART ONE
Marie in Amman, Jordan, 1991.
Photograph by Simon Townsley.
Iran–Iraq War
Basra – blitzed and battered, but not beaten
25 January 1987
Marie Colvin sends the first front-line report from inside Basra, Iraq’s besieged city.
In Basra, they say the day belongs to Iraq; the night to Iran. Iraq’s second city is under siege, and Iranian shells slammed into houses for the seventeenth successive day yesterday.
Two missiles hit residential areas on Friday. Long bursts of automatic fire and the sound of close fighting intermittently carry across the Shatt al-Arab waterway that flows past Basra’s corniche to the Gulf.
During the day the Iranian shells fall only about once an hour. But at nightfall the shelling begins in earnest, perhaps because the Iranians are using it to cover troop movements.
The streets remain deserted and only military cars and trucks dare venture out. The shells seem to fall at random throughout the city, crashing into homes, businesses and shops. People here believe that if the Iranians cannot take Basra, they will at least make it uninhabitable.
Although thousands have fled, many remain cowering in homes behind sandbags, piled high to window tops, leaving only cracks to let in daylight and air. Basra has taken on the semblance of a giant military camp, but it has not emptied.
The train I arrived in from Baghdad consisted of 20 coaches filled with soldiers heading to the front. The few women aboard wore the black of mourning.
I took a bus which arrived at 8.30am at Saad Square in the heart of Basra. The shelling began at 8.45am. The few pedestrians on the street started hurrying for cover.
One man stopped and gave me sound advice. ‘It’s not a good idea to walk around Basra when they are shelling,’ he said. ‘You’re very exposed here.’
The Ashrar neighbourhood is one of the heaviest hit in the city. A nearby hotel had its windows blown out and an air conditioner hung from one screw in a window. Branches from trees and masonry littered the streets. On a road leading into the square there was a large crater with a dead horse lying next to it.
In front of the Sheraton Hotel on the Corniche burned-out cars are scattered along the street. All the windows in the building have been shattered and the empty swimming pool is filled with shrapnel from a shell that blew apart a taverna.
While I was there, another shell slammed into the hotel, but did not explode. The building shuddered. An hour later a shell landed nearby on Al-Watani Street, the main street through the city centre which is lined with stores and night clubs which were thriving only three weeks ago.
I took refuge in a basement with a businessman who had been sleeping behind his desk for 16 hours. He gave a depressing view of the city’s chances. ‘I think this is how Germany must have felt in the last days of the Second World War,’ he said. ‘People are just waiting. It’s not that they think the Iranians will take Basra, but maybe they will make it impossible for us to live here.’
The western part of the city has escaped heavy shelling, and there shops are still open and people are on the streets. Even at night soldiers stand outside at corner restaurants eating kebabs.
But everywhere there are tales of tragedy. One soldier was crying as he described how three friends had gone out to telephone home when the bombardment appeared to ease on Wednesday. All three were killed by a shell.
The hospitals are overwhelmed. Members of the Popular Army, the militia that handles logistics for the regular army, make daily rounds asking for blood donations and the sick are being moved out of hospitals to make room for soldiers.
Last week, with doctors exhausted by the influx of wounded soldiers, engineers were called to the hospital to help with amputations.
At about 9 on the evening of my arrival the incoming fire became more frequent. The Iraqis sent up huge pink flares that hung suspended over the Shatt for 10 minutes. It was night time, and night time in Basra belongs to Iran.
Black banners of death fly over Baghdad
25 January 1987
After more than two weeks of fighting, the Iranian offensive which began on 9 January appears to have established a bridgehead of about 40 square miles, according to military analysts here. The Iranian front lines are about six miles east of Basra, writes Marie Colvin in Baghdad.
Iranian troops have infiltrated at night, adding incrementally to their occupied ground. But they have not been able to breach the first main defence line between them and their target of Basra, on the east side of the Shatt al Arab waterway which, farther south, forms the border between the two countries.
Iraq has not launched a counter-offensive on the ground, the only way it could drive the Iranians out of the marshes.