Cola with journalists at the Pearl Continental Hotel and who were thought to do little of the fighting. In Peshawar, a beard meant credibility. It was striking how many Western journalists and relief workers who had contact with the guerrillas had beards. You would grow one before you arrived in Pakistan and shave it off as soon as you went back home. Once, when I shaved off my beard before leaving Peshawar, a mujahid friend laughed at me and said, “You look like a woman — no, like a Christian!”
The Pathans had no patience with the fine lines or ambiguities of other cultures. Either you were a man or you weren’t. It was a barren, stunted vision of life that made sense only under impossible conditions — which was why it flourished in the 1980s. In such a harsh and sterile social environment, male friendships took on an archetypal character, based on the bread and salt of absolute trust and the respect that could be earned only by bravery and the willingness to endure terrible physical hardships. It took a rare kind of individual to be able to pass through the crucible of Pathan friendship, especially if the friendship was with someone like Abdul Haq.
In a decade of war, a few foreign journalists managed to become close friends of Haq. They were the only people he trusted outside his family and guerrilla organization. Haq would often agree to meet a journalist only if he was recommended by one of Haq’s friends — getting close to the commander meant first getting close to the commander’s friends. By ordinary, conventional standards, none of the journalists whom Haq considered his friends were well-established professionals, and they lacked the clout of other media personages to whom he wouldn’t give the time of day. But Haq had his own ideas about what constituted a good newsman. To him, a good journalist was a strong, brave man who would regularly risk his life just as any fighter would. And when it came to spotting brave men, Abdul Haq was an expert and an uncanny judge of character.
John Wellesley Gunston did not have a beard, and he was the only journalist in Peshawar who wore a suit and tie to some appointments. Of average height and weight, Gunston had a smiling, cherubic countenance and the pale English complexion that seemed the epitome of youthful innocence and vulnerability. No matter whom he was with, his light brown eyes always sparkled with friendliness and enthusiasm. Gunston was one man in Peshawar who was not trying to prove himself: he possessed the absolute self-confidence that came from being born into a wealthy British colonial family and having served in the commonwealth’s best army units. Unlike other Westerners in Peshawar, who preferred hiking boots, khaki pants, and sleeveless military jackets from Banana Republic, Gunston was a real soldier and was therefore content to dress as a civilian. In the cowboy environment of the American Club bar, he always wore pressed slacks, a pin-striped shirt, and well-shined loafers.
Gunston was born in July 1962 in Nyasaland (later Malawi), where his father was the local British commissioner in the town of Blantyre. Gunston gave his address on business cards as the Cavalry & Guards Club, one of London’s few remaining gentlemen’s clubs, where officers, both serving and retired, of Her Majesty’s Footguards and the Cavalry can dine together in an atmosphere reminiscent of glories past. Gunston would use such exclusive surroundings to entertain visitors before showing them his personal library of over two thousand books on travel, photography, military history and tactics, and opera. He owned eighty books on Afghanistan alone. Having never finished secondary school, he considered himself self-taught. His room at Dean’s Hotel was always littered with good books, lying all over the tables, beds, even the floor. He had a particular affinity for Lord Byron and could recite sections of
You couldn’t help but like Gunston; for one thing, he genuinely liked everybody else. He could talk for hours on the most banal subjects with embassy mechanics and security officers who probably didn’t know who Byron was. If he harbored a trace of condescension toward anyone, I never noticed it. Perhaps it was just good breeding, but he never spoke badly of others behind their backs, even the few people in Peshawar who he knew disliked him. Gunston was like a relic from a bygone era, without the doubts and complexes of most people.
Gunston had lived in Blantyre, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and London before being enrolled, when he was fifteen, at Harrow, where Byron himself was educated. (Byron wrote poetry atop a grave in St. Mary’s churchyard, near the dormitory Gunston would live in.) Harrow was also a family tradition. Gunston’s was the fourteenth-oldest Harrovian family, going back to the 1700s.
Gunston lasted a year at the school. “I got bored of studying,” he once told me. “I thought it necessary to join up and fight communism in Rhodesia. I was running the British branch of the Save Rhodesia Campaign from Harrow. Politically naive, I now readily admit, but I was only sixteen. I had a terrible row with my family about it.”
Lying about his age, and making use of his father’s colonial service connections, Gunston returned to Africa and joined the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit of the British-South African Police, which was founded by Cecil Rhodes. Gunston was one of nine whites and ninety blacks who patrolled an area in the Zambezi escarpment the size of Wales, at the point where Rhodesia, Zambia, and Mozambique met. The man he replaced in the unit had been killed a few days before Gunston joined. In April 1980, after he served in the unit for eighteen months, Rhodesia became the independent state of Zimbabwe. Gunston was given forty-eight hours to leave the country.
He returned to England and a few months later enrolled at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where, after a six-month course, he was given a short service commission. It was a stormy period. Gunston kept getting into trouble with his weapons instructors. “Their way of teaching was pedantic,” he said. “They hadn’t seen action, I had.”
The next step was a place in the Queen’s Household Troops, better known as the Irish Guards, a branch of Her Majesty’s Footguards who patrol and troop the colors outside Buckingham Palace. “It was the sort of regiment where you were never asked how much money your father made but how many acres he owned.” Gunston’s career at the palace came to an abrupt end after two years as a lieutenant when a car he was driving hit a brick wall, resulting in broken ribs, arm, and leg.
Having recovered, at age twenty-one he was offered jobs at a merchant bank and the stock exchange, traditional careers of Irish Guardsmen. Instead, in August 1983, Gunston decided to win his spurs as a war photojournalist. “I was always good at drawing and composition, and it seemed to be one of the few professions where I could make use of my experience as a soldier, get paid, and be on the fringes of history at the same time.” Afghanistan in particular had caught his eye for personal reasons. Gunston’s step-grandfather, a Colonel Bertie Walker, had commanded a cavalry unit on the Northwest Frontier after the third British-Afghan war of 1919 and was decorated twice. Moreover, Afghanistan seemed like the kind of place where Byron might have turned up. And, like so many Brits, Gunston was enamored of Kipling. In addition to quoting
First Gunston did a little research on Afghanistan at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London, where he learned about a maverick mujahidin leader called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who it seemed should be avoided at all costs. Hekmatyar ran Hizb-i-Islami (Party of Islam), an extremist, anti-Western resistance faction that, though it went by the same name as Yunus Khalis’s party, shared few of its values. Traveling with Hekmatyar’s men, Gunston learned, was not considered wise. They had a reputation for stealing journalists’ gear, leaving them stranded in the war zone, and occasionally killing them.
“But, as it happened, two days before I left London on my first trip to the Northwest Frontier, I met a charming old Pakistani major at the Cavalry & Guards Club who gave me a personal introduction to General Fazle Haq, the governor of the Northwest Frontier at the time, who arranged for Hekmatyar to take me inside. I decided to let fate take its course.”
The foray had a mad, magical quality to it. Gunston and a group of Hekmatyar’s fighters made it into the center of Kabul in the middle of the night undetected. But the guerrillas couldn’t decide whether to aim their mortar and recoilless rifle at the Afghan Defense Ministry or the headquarters of the Soviet High Command, some four hundred yards apart. They asked Gunston what they should do. “I held no strong views either way,” he said. Eventually, they picked the Defense Ministry. Then the mujahidin realized that they had neglected to bring a shovel to dig in the mortar and rifle. So they knocked on house doors, waking people up, until they found someone who would lend them a shovel. The mujahidin made a lot of noise digging up the street only twenty yards from the mud wall surrounding the Ministry building. Finally, after shouts of
