Originally Posted by
Una Due Tfc
Hughes I have the utmost sympathy for the situation you were placed in, the murder of young innocent British Soldiers who were there under orders was abhorrent, evil, vile, monstrous....but firing on the back of someone is against the Army's ROE, let alone the civilian law implications.
These young men were failed by their State in my opinion, but putting the back of a civilian in your sights and pulling the trigger.....this is at BEST reckless endangerment, at worst.....I don't want to say.
That is the crux of this, these young men were indeed failed by their state. They should never have been placed in that situation, it not only did little to protect the civilian population, it also increased the tension, and the level of violence, by both sides of the sectarian divide. Let us not also forget that a very great deal of the violence within the Six Counties was criminal, and not always sectarian. Organised criminals, or both persuasions and none, took advantage of the absence of normal policing to expand their violent crime networks, often using the sectarian divide as a cover.
This always happens in what amounts to war zones, and is not unique to The Troubles. It has featured in modern Irish history since before the formation of the Free State, with violent criminals being allowed to operate under either the covert consent of the ruling government (as happened in the Six Counties), or just because the normal checks and balances of law and order are absent. An example would be the gang rape of my grandmother, at the hands of the Black and Tans, at a time when Ireland was under British rule. She never really recovered from that and took her own life when I was a small boy.
It is a truism that the "winning" side always gets to write history, something I didn't really grasp until I was an adult. I was born in England, and didn't take up my Irish citizenship until after a trip to Ireland on my honeymoon. We visited my family, and walked around a museum in Limerick where they had an exhibit covering the history of Ireland from the period around the Easter Rising, through the War of Independence, the formation of the Free State and the Irish Civil War, to the eventual creation of the Republic of Ireland. The portrayal of Irish history I saw there was very different to that I had been taught at school in England. My history teachers at school had openly lied to me, of that I am certain. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two versions of history, but the reality is that the British Empire got to write the version accepted within that Empire, and it is not an accurate portrayal of eventsl.