Originally Posted by
_Agrajag_
As someone rightly observed earlier, the peacekeeping force were hated by both sides, and were fair game as targets for both, even if the UK media often tried to focus on the Republicans as the bad guys and the Loyalists as the good guys..
We weren't a "peacekeeping force" we were there to support the RUC in the legal execution of their duties. The IRA were painted as the bad guys because they were, during pre-deployment training the focus was on Republican terrorist groups because they were the ones actively targeting and killing us. The Loyalist terrorists concentrated on killing Catholics, occasionally targeting the Security Forces if we stopped their fun. Or perhaps I missed something during my 3 tours and have been wrong all this time.