The Special Report

Marie Colvin: Was I stupid?

"That lens has to go," said one.

A tiny pulling feeling. The "buckle" they were sewing into my eye seemed to be causing problems. More tiny pulling sensations. I started feeling claustrophobic under the green mask that covered my good eye but left the injured one exposed to their blades.

I knew what was going on because I had opted to go under the knife with a local anaesthetic. 

The surgeons weren't sure what they would find when they went in. A 6mm piece of shrapnel had blasted through my eye, entering the front right side and tearing out through the retina that lines the eye, detaching it completely. "How are you doing in there?" asked Dr Stanley Chang, the eye surgeon who had invented some of the microsurgery equipment he was using to operate on me.

From their conversation, I could tell that blood was the main problem. The shrapnel had caused extensive haemorrhaging in the eye and blood had pooled behind the retina. To reattach the retina and save the eye, the blood needed to be scraped out, bit by microscopic bit, so as not to damage the retina further.

Scrape, scrape, scrape; I was now about four hours into the operation.

The days before the surgery had been full of dread.

I had been exhausted but hopeful the night I arrived in New York by air medivac from Sri Lanka. It was late on April 19, three days after soldiers fired the grenade that injured me. My mother and my sister Cat were waiting for me at Columbia Presbyterian hospital. So was Chang.

He examined my eye and then sat with me in his darkened office to give me a verdict I had not expected. He said he would try to save the eye, but didn't think the chances were good with such a traumatic injury.

The worst part of the operation came towards the end. Chang tried again and again to reattach the retina, but couldn't do it. I remember at one point hearing him saying with grim determination: "We are going to attach this retina," in a voice that made it clear he was not going to give up.

A nurse calmed me, took it off and wheeled me into recovery.

The ordeal had just begun, however. Nurses were under orders to lay me on my stomach to keep the retina and oil in place in the eye. The next three days passed in a haze. I remember thinking I want this eye out, regretting ever agreeing to surgery to save it, just wanting the pain to go away.

On the fourth day, I went to a rented service flat in New York City to recuperate. My eye was covered in a bulky white bandage. I presented a bizarre spectacle to the curious, because I had to walk looking at the ground to keep the retina and oil in place.

I was still under doctor's orders to lie on my stomach for a week. This seemed torture just to think of. But there was one thing I had to do before getting into bed.

I smoked a couple of cigarettes and went into the bathroom. I took off the bandage and looked up into the mirror for the first time.

No flower comparisons came to mind. The pain made my eye feel like the enemy. The eye itself looked even worse.

It was swollen to the size of a peach, bright red, with a thin line - like that little indentation that peaches have across their middles - the only evidence that the two lids had ever opened or would ever open again.

I went and lay on my stomach, my head off the foot of the bed, looking face down through a weird contraption that seemed like an inverted and padded toilet seat. With one eye, I examined the carpet.

With nothing to distract it, my mind began playing endless reruns of what had happened to me. I didn't feel the need to consult Freud; my subconscious was clearly seeking an outcome it liked better. The pain of being shot was not the focus of my nightmares, but that didn't make them much more bearable.

I had been wounded trying to leave the northern, Tamil area of Sri Lanka and re-enter the government-controlled south at the end of an assignment to visit the Tamil Tigers, the LTTE.

Leaving LTTE territory was not a simple matter of hitching a ride. For the past six years, the government in Colombo has banned journalists from the area, hoping to hide the catastrophic humanitarian crisis engulfing 500,000 Tamil civilians bottled up behind a siege line of army bases. I had to cross this line clandestinely.

For two nights the guides decided it was too dangerous to cross. The third night, April 16, after we had squatted for hours in a rice paddy, bitten by mosquitoes I couldn't swat for fear the noise would be heard, the lead guide waved us quietly forwards.

Ahead lay ditches, a road and a deep expanse of open ground. In the distance was the jungle. I took my shoes off; one of the things I had learnt was how difficult it is to walk in water wearing shoes. As we ran, stooped low, towards the safety of the jungle, a rolling flash erupted from the right. Sri Lankan soldiers in a forward listening post had opened fire. I crawled on my belly as long as the gunfire lasted, frantically, as if I could somehow escape. Flares went up, arcing high into the sky and falling slowly, turning night to day. I was trapped in a field, behind a clump of weeds, alone. And that's where the nightmares always begin.

My mind has recorded in exact detail what happened next, except that the tape is slowed down and spools endlessly. Soldiers are coming for me in the night, and I have to make a decision. They come forward inexorably, endlessly.

In reality, I think I only lay in the field for about half an hour. Finally, aware that if they stumbled on me they would shoot me, I shouted "journalist". They fired a grenade at the sound of my voice. Shrapnel hit me with a shocking impact of pain and noise.

Usually that wakes me up, but sometimes the dream continues and I am walking forward - as I did that night when I figured out I wasn't going to die, and I kept yelling, and someone speaking English told me to stand up, and I went on walking and falling down at times from weakness and shock and loss of blood. Only, in the dream, I am being shot at each time I fall, and I can feel what it is like to be shot across the chest.

The first time I went out alone on the street with my new pirate-patch look, I couldn't cope. I had left my bag of clothes - along with my computer and satellite phone - behind at the scene in Sri Lanka, and I thought it would be a simple matter to buy some more.

People on the street glanced at my eye patch and looked away, but the doorman at my apartment block asked: "What the heck happened to you?" American friends said they loved the patch but wanted see what was behind it.

I have been asked if my trip to Sri Lanka was worth it. One blunt BBC reporter argued in an interview, not unkindly: "Some people would say it was stupid, Marie." Was it? That's a hard question to answer.

Certainly, Sri Lanka is a forgotten conflict. Some 83,000 people have died since the country exploded in civil war in 1983, a loss barely noticed except by their families. 

On a smaller scale, however, the trip did seem to me worthwhile. I may be exhausted and haunted, but not all the images that flash back to me evoke dread. I remember a government agent in a town in the Wanni - the region controlled by the LTTE - who put his neck on the line just to give me information. 

He had facts and figures of the type that make on-the-ground reporting worthwhile. I wanted to resolve two contradictory stories: the government in Colombo claimed to be distributing food to Tamil civilians on the same monthly basis as the rest of the country, yet in village after village people told me they received little. Many were painfully thin.

Not everyone was as easily persuaded that I was worth talking to. Father Xavier, the Roman Catholic priest of Mallawi, was garrulous, opinionated and angry. He told me he had given up on the West: nobody cared about the plight of the Tamils, why should he waste his time talking to me. So what if I was the first journalist to come to the Wanni in six years? Western television cameras went to famines in Africa every year. They sent back pictures from Kosovo of Serbian killings. What about here?

"People tell me they feel they have suffered so much, it is not worth ending the war to return to the same situation," he said. "They have lost their homes, their land, their sons and daughters. The only way to end the war is for the Tamils to have their self-determination." The government siege had turned people to the Tamil Tigers. "I know you in the West say they are terrorists," he said. "Here, they are the only people that have protected us Tamils from being chopped up."

A surprising amount of mail arrived from Sri Lanka during my weeks of recuperation. Messages from Tamils were mostly sympathetic. None was under the impression that I supported their cause, but they sent heart-rending appreciations for providing the first report on their homeland in years.

The Sinhalese majority was divided. A man wrote from Colombo: "I am not a Tamil, but if there were more journalists reporting the truth as you did, this war would be over in 24 hours."

Others were less kind. One of the more printable Sinhalese critics - a woman claiming to be a doctor - wrote: "If you sleep with dogs, you wake up with bugs."

So, was I stupid? Stupid I would feel writing a column about the dinner party I went to last night. Equally, I'd rather be in that middle ground between a desk job and getting shot, no offence to desk jobs.

For my part, the next war I cover, I'll be more awed than ever by the quiet bravery of civilians who endure far more than I ever will. They must stay where they are; I can come home to London.

-The Sunday Times 

Inside the glass house

Editorial/ Opinion Contents