A Private War Quotes

Newspaper Editor: Why is it important, do you think, to see this images? Why is it important for you to be there? Right now you may be one of the only Western journalists in Homs. Our team has just left.

Marie Colvin: For an audience for which any conflict is very far away, this is the reality. There are 28,000 civilians, men, women and children, a city of the cold and hungry, starving, defenseless. There are no telephones. The electricity has been cut off. Families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbors. I have sat with literally hundreds of women with infant children who are trapped in these cold, brutal conditions, unable to feed their children anything other than sugar and water for weeks on end. That little boy was one of the two children who died today. It's what happens every day. The Syrian regime is claiming that they're not hitting civilians, that they're just going after terrorist gangs. But every civilian house has been hit. The top floor of the building I'm in has been totally destroyed. There are no military targets here. It is a complete and utter lie.

Newspaper Editor: Well, thank you for using the word " lie ". I think a lot of people wanna thank you, because it's a word we don't often hear, it's not often used, but it is the truth in this case. The Syrian regime, their representatives, have continually lied. They've lied on this program to us directly. Marie, I mean, you have covered a lot of conflicts over a long time. How does this compare?

Marie Colvin: This is the worst conflict I've ever seen. It's the worst because it was a peaceful uprising that was crushed by violence. President Assad is sitting in his palace in Damascus in panic, the entire security apparatus his father built crumbling around him, and he is responding in the only way he's been taught how. When he was a child, he watched his father crush oppositions by shelling the city of Hama into ruins and killing 10,000 innocent civilians. He watched, as we're watching, a dictator killing with impunity. And the words on everybody's lips here are, " Why have we been abandoned? ". " Why? ". I don't know why.

[first lines]

Interviewer: Last question. Fifty years from now, some youngster's gonna pull this disc out of a box and maybe make a judgment about becoming a journalist. What would you want that youngster to know about Marie Colvin and about being a war correspondent?

Marie Colvin: Very difficult question. It's like writing, uh, your own obituary. I suppose to look back at it and say, you know, I cared enough to go to these places and write, in some way, something that would make, uh, someone else care as much about it as I did at the time. Part of it is you're never gonna get to where you're going if you acknowledge fear. I think fear comes later,

[realization chuckle]

Marie Colvin: when it's all over.

Marie Colvin: [about Norm] He was always first in and last out. He was invincible.

Paul Conroy: There are old journalists and there are bold journalists. There are no old and bold journalists. You said that.