Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan

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 dressas 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
Don Juan
and
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
by heart. Gunston was only twenty-five when I met him, yet he exuded an air of seasoned maturity of the sort that members of the British upper class display like a coat of arms. His passion for Byron may have been his only youthful affectation, but given everything else I knew about him, I never dismissed it as ridiculous.
    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, atHarrow, 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,