Marie Colvin In Vanity Fair: 'Every Bone In My Body Is Telling Me Not To Do This'

Vanity Fair (via Lloyd Grove) is teasing Marie Brenner's profile of the late journalist Marie Colvin online:

“'My darling, I have come back in to Baba Amr, the besieged neighbourhood of Homs, and am now freezing in my hovel with no windows. I just thought, I cannot cover the modern day Srebrenica from the suburbs,' London Sunday Times correspondent Marie Colvin wrote in an e-mail to her boyfriend Richard Flaye. 'I will do one more week here, and then leave. Every day is a horror.' It was the last e-mail she would ever send him ... 'Every bone in my body is telling me not to do this,' Paul Conroy, the English photographer who was with her when she died, recalls telling Colvin as they left for Syria. 'Those are your concerns. I’m going in no matter what,' she said. Brenner reports that Colvin chose to go back into the field despite having received a diagnosis of PTSD, and the fact that when she wasn’t in the field, she sometimes drank heavily. 'If The Sunday Times had not allowed Marie to continue the work she loved, it would have destroyed her,' said Colvin’s executor, Jane Wellesley. But others believe Colvin’s editors allowed her back into war zones when her fragility was widely known. 'They would put us in all kinds of danger,' one correspondent angrily tells Brenner, who overheard one writer say, 'The Sunday Times has blood on its hands,' at a Frontline celebration of Colvin and her work."

For all the wonderful new freedoms gained by the Arab Spring for the people on the Muslim street, it is instructive to take a moment and memorialize the Journalists -- who write the first drafts of History, incidentally, -- that have died informing us.