Encountering Rory Peck

by Brian Barron - BBC New York Correspondent

It was in a dingy, smoke filled eatery in Peshawar - a place awash with stomach bugs, assassins, spooks and Afghan rug sellers - that Rory Peck first entered my life. It was nine or ten years ago, and we were grubbing around for any moving pictures out of Afghanistan, as we ourselves sought reliable Pathans to get us in and out of that marvellous but benighted land.

Over coffee Rory handed over some Video 8 tapes he'd shot the previous month with mujahedin groups, largely around Jalallabad and a couple of other besieged government garrisons. It did not take long to find out that Rory was a deceptively complex character: almost debonair in style, hooked on the Kiplingesque ambience of the North-West Frontier, unstinting in his admiration of warrior courage and seemingly casual about the enormous risks he took himself. But behind the sparkle and the Irish drollity, he was an absolute military pro.

Looking at Rory's tape in an edit suite at our hotel a few hours later, I found an extraordinary sequence of a group of muj on the top of a mountain, in effect playing chicken with gunners in the encircled garrison below. The muj were dancing and taunting the government guns, soon there was the whistle of heavy incoming and several tremendous explosions on and off screen, and then all around the potentially fatal tinkle of shrapnel falling everywhere. Somewhere among it, or under it, holding the camera as steady as a rock, was Rory.

Even more hair raising, was a later sequence from another tape, done at the extreme frontline outside Jalallabad, as thousands of rounds of heavy machinegun fire whistled and sighed overhead. Only a character of immense self-control and seemingly nerveless grasp of military fieldcraft could have got in and out of that hellhole - for the mujahedin took heavy casualties.

Not surprisingly, with that sort of visual resume, it did not take very long for Rory to acquire a Sony Betacam from the BBC and rapidly develop additional journalistic skills. He retained a great zest for frontline, turbulent places where sometimes entire governments - or what passes for them - fall into the abyss.

Underneath the banter and the sense of fun - and the mufti costumes he donned for Afghan trips along with the pork-pie hat (or was it a trilby?) he wore to confuse the natives on occasional visits to BBC TV Centre - was a serious operator. He disdained macho crap. I see him as a latter-day cavalier and adventurer, too, or one of those gunpowder-stained Irish/British military stalwarts from the 100 Years War, with the nous and ambition to show our often indifferent modern world, the sometimes grisly realities of the outer limits. To his peers, Rory was quite simply one of the best. He brought real lustre to that once-maligned species, the one man band.

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