Colvin’s womanhood is, of course, a major selling point of her legacy, much as it was for predecessors like Gellhorn and Lee Miller, the idea being that these were women who made a name for themselves in a man’s world—because war, the business of killing and dying, is still mostly a masculine domain. Hilsum, who knows a great deal about these topics, first met Colvin in 1998, in Djibouti, when the two shared a risky flight with a Ukrainian pilot flying a dodgy airplane into war-torn Eritrea; the experience, Hilsum writes, made the two fast friends. Thirteen years later, they had dinner, in Beirut, a few days before Colvin took off on her final, doomed trip into Syria, and, on the night before Colvin was killed, Hilsum had interviewed her over Skype, from London, for Channel 4 News. “I had known her so fleetingly,” Hilsum writes. “A dinner in Tripoli, a bumpy drive through the West Bank, a drink in Jerusalem. And now she was gone. There was so much I didn’t know about Marie, things she had hidden from me, or that I had chosen not to see. What drove her to such extremes in both her professional and personal life? Was it bravery or recklessness? She was the most admired war correspondent of our generation, one whose personal life was scarred by conflict too, and although I counted her as a friend, I understood so little about her. As grief subsided, I thought of her no less often. She was always there, her ghost challenging me to discover all that I had missed when she was alive.”

Although Colvin and I were both members of the small tribe of correspondents who meet up in one war zone after the other, over many years, I didn’t cross paths with her until the summer of 2006, when we were in Lebanon during the Israeli war with Hezbollah. It was a surreal war: there was no defined front line, but, all over the country, the Israelis were in the air, bombing, bombing; here and there, bridges were being knocked out, apartment buildings turned to instant rubble. Sometimes, people travelling in cars or on motorbikes on otherwise peaceful-seeming roads would be suddenly zapped by a missile, directed by some unseen eye in the sky. For most of us, these were the visible aspects of the war, while the secretive fighters of Hezbollah were largely invisible, clandestine, beyond our line of sight.

Our meeting was brief. Along with an eclectic group of other journalists from various countries, Marie was staying in a shabby hotel in Tyre, at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Tyre was a jumping-off point to the embattled villages to the south, which was Hezbollah-controlled border country. Marie was seated at a table in a long room with windows, the sun streaming in, absorbed in a dispatch she was writing. She was dressed all in black and wore her famous black eye patch. My recollection is that she was smoking. What most struck me was that she was alone.

The next time we met was in Afghanistan, in October, 2010. I had just spent a couple of weeks with U.S. Army troops who were conducting operations in the south of the country, around Kandahar, and was resting up for a few days in Kabul. Marie had just arrived from a similar experience in a different part of Kandahar, and we met to swap news. The very next day, we saw each other again to share upsetting reports concerning a mutual friend: the New York Times photographer João Silva, from South Africa, who was also in Kandahar, had been badly injured after stepping on a land mine while out on a foot patrol with the U.S. Army. Over the next few days, in e-mails from friends, we were relieved to learn that, although João had been severely wounded and had lost both of his legs, he would ultimately survive. Even so, it was a depressing, sobering episode. As I left Kabul, Marie told me that she was planning to return to Kandahar, and to go back out with U.S. soldiers on their risky patrols.

In Kabul, we also talked about Sri Lanka. We had both reported on the civil war there. On a trip with the Tamil Tiger guerrillas, in the spring of 2001, she had been badly wounded in an attack by government troops, and had lost her left eye to shrapnel from a grenade. The injury was why, during the following decade, she always wore a black eye patch. The war had finally ended, in spectacularly gruesome fashion, in May of 2009, when the Tigers and thousands of their civilian-camp followers were trapped on a beach where they were mortared and bombed into submission by government forces. Some forty thousands civilians are believed to have been killed in the bloodbath, while the Tiger rebel leaders and their family members were executed after surrendering.

After her own ordeal, Marie had not returned to Sri Lanka, but she had stayed in touch with some of the senior Tiger officers, and at the end, in desperate circumstances, they had used satellite phones to call her and ask for help and mediation to save themselves and their families. In coördination with the United Nations representative in Sri Lanka, Marie had secured guarantees directly from the President in return for their surrender. Instead, as they walked out from their refuges with white flags raised, they were murdered. It was a dismal end to a dismal conflict. Marie was matter-of-fact about the betrayal, telling me, “This was not the chaos of battle. It was a negotiated surrender. Promises were made and they were broken.” There was little more to say.

I spoke with Marie by telephone around Christmas, 2010, a couple of months after our meetings in Kabul. She was back in Britain, on a sailing trip with friends in the Scottish isles; she was an avid sailor—it was one of her only true escapes from the life at war she had chosen. By late February, I was in Benghazi, reporting on the revolution that had erupted against Qaddafi. Colvin was also back in Libya, reporting from Tripoli, where Qaddafi still clung to power. We saw each other in Tripoli, in early September, 2011. It was a few days after Qaddafi’s regime had fallen. Amid chaos and uncertainty, as militiamen had taken over the city, Qaddafi himself had escaped the capital and gone into hiding. Marie and I spoke at the Radisson Blu hotel, overlooking the city’s corniche, where many reporters were staying. I found Marie sitting alone in the hotel café. She informed me that she was going to stay on to try to locate Qaddafi, whom she had first met so many years before. She would stay as long as necessary, she told me, perhaps a couple of months more.

Much as I had after each of our past meetings, I came away from that encounter with Marie with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I admired her commitment to each conflict she covered, and also her bravery in the face of physical risk. But the sense of overwhelming loneliness that she gave off always left me feeling sad. As Hilsum notes as one of her motivations in writing her book, there was something unfathomable about Marie’s compulsion to stay on longer and go in deeper than everyone else in the awful, risky places we sometimes covered.

By this time, Marie’s days were spent in an increasingly hectic flurry to pull the disparate strands of her life together. Like most people, she craved the succors of a loving relationship and relished a stable home life with its attendant comforts, but she was also impelled to repeatedly put all that to risk by going to war zones. At the same time, her reporting was what gave her life its public significance. Marie was competitive and wanted recognition for what she accomplished, but she was not only a careerist; she was genuinely horrified by war’s human devastation and hoped, however unrealistically, to ameliorate it. Her impulse transcended the business of journalism, of course, something that is not uncommon among war reporters, who repeatedly confront moral challenges to their ostensible impartiality.