Usually Doesn’t End Well…
by Bruce O’Hara
October 12, 2023
This week, events in the Middle East have me revisiting memories from more than a half century ago.
When I was a naive and idealistic 19-year- old, I became a convinced pacifist, and volunteered with the Quakers to do summer recreation work with poor Catholic kids in war-torn Belfast.
The second week I was there, the IRA ambushed and killed a British soldier. The next day, British Army units swarmed through our neighborhood several times, arresting dozens of young men, and beating up scores more.
More than once that day, I was stopped and ordered to lean spread-eagled against a wall, while army squad took turns interrogating us. (You had to be sure to keep your arms and legs spread as wide as possible the whole time, or you risked a rifle butt hard up your crotch.) Talking back was ill-advised, what with the paratroopers expressing a fervent desire to: “Teach you bastards a lesson you’ll never forget.”
I remember asking Jimmy McVickers, one of the local Catholic volunteers, why the IRA would do something so guaranteed to cause hardship for all the men in the community. “It’s not as though killing one British soldier is going to hasten the arrival of a free Ireland,” I observed.
“Recruitment,” was Jimmy’s response. Whenever the IRA was short of volunteers, they would kill a British soldier, knowing if they did so the British Army would so brutally terrorize the community that the IRA would get a bunch of new recruits, and a big influx of donations, in the days that followed.
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