Soldiers’ Stories
On the History Channel tonight is a programme called Soldiers’ Stories. From the website:
Soldiers’ Stories tells of the troubles in Northern Ireland from the perspective of the British soldiers who served there between 1969 and 2007, the longest continuous deployment in the history of the British Army.
This was a war against terrorists who knew no mercy or compassion; a war involving sectarian hatred and violent death. Over 1,000 British lives were lost in a place just 30 minutes flying time from the mainland.
This year is the 40th anniversary of the British Army’s arrival in Northern Ireland. They were deployed on 14 August 1969, by the Wilson government, as law and order had broken down and the population was in grave danger. Between then and 2007 some 300,000 British troops served in Northern Ireland. Occasionally they were welcomed; more often, they were spat at, pelted with missiles or shot.
So how did it feel to be a British soldier in Northern Ireland? These are their stories, terrible stories of bombings, killings and heartache over three decades, told for the first time from their own perspective.
This looks like excellent viewing and is definitely on the To Do list for this evening.
It’s a rare occurance, ASE, to see a show with a more soldier-centric theme. The crap (well, much of it crap, when they bothered to put something out) broadcast by the BBC carried the usual right-on “make f***ing hay” agenda. It was so transparent I detected it even in shows I saw in my early teens. But I’m lucky, as my grandfather has passed on many WW2 stories to me, and many from after that from places such as Aden and the old Malaya. A mixture of hard hitting, infuriating, upsetting, and just plain quirky and amusing stories. And I got to sit in the same room as him to hear them all. Suffice to say, I neglected to tell him about Jimmy f***ing Carr.