On the 6^th February, 1971 whilst patrolling in the New Lodge area of Belfast, Gunner Robert Curtis of the Royal Artillery was shot by an IRA gunman; he was just 20 years of age and left a young, pregnant, widow.

Nine days later, a fellow R.A. comrade, Lance Bombardier, John Laurie aged 22 who was wounded in the same fire fight as Gunner Curtis, died of his wounds. The killing spread to Londonderry and a scant 2 weeks later, a Military Policeman, Corporal William Joliffe who was just 18 years old, died of his wounds after being attacked with a petrol bomb.

By the end of that year of 1971, a further 45 British soldiers would have been killed, making it the worst year for fatalities for the Army since the end of the Korean War in 1953. That figure, sadly, would be surpassed several times more.

The following year, 1972 it would hit a peak of 129, reducing to 66 in 1973 and then, thankfully, it would never again hit those awful heights.

In the year of Rob Curtis’s death and the following year, the Army recorded 2,404 bomb incidents and a staggering 12,387 shooting incidents in a country of just 1.5 million people.

That there had been no deaths prior to the loss of Gunner Curtis was utterly incredible; but it was coming and once it did, tragically for the soldiers, the floodgates would open. Immediately prior to Robert’s death, the Army had been on the streets of Northern Ireland, supplementing and in most cases, supplanting, the role of the hard-pressed RUC, for 18 months. In the days up and until his shooting, over 700 British soldiers – in the same period, over 800 RUC members – had been injured in riots and other forms of violence. Most Britons had been thankful that despite the injury rate, there had been, mercifully, no deaths. But, one Monday in early February, 1971, a gunman’s bullet would change, forever, the face and complexion of Northern Irish – and, inextricably linked as it was – British politics.

26 years on from the death of Robert Curtis, almost to the very day, Lance-Bombardier Stephen Restorick was shot dead whilst manning a permanent vehicle checkpoint (PVCP) near Bessbrook Mill army base in Armagh. Although 16 months later, Corporal Gary Fenton, QCB, of the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire & Wiltshire Regiment was knocked down and killed whilst manning a vcp at Crossmaglen, Restorick was the last squaddie known, definitively, to have been killed by the IRA.

Gary Fenton was inspecting a truck which drove forward and killed him. Unbelievably, the driver received only a 6 months suspended sentence and loss of his driving licence for just one year !

This collection of voices will, I trust, fill in the tragic gap between the deaths of Robert Curtis and Stephen Restorick. That gap was marked by the passing of 9,503 days and nights and on every one of those days and nights, British troops sought to keep the peace in Northern Ireland.

One statistic, sadly, however, will never change, and that was that Gunner Rob Curtis would be accorded a footnote, a major one, in the history of what is somewhat euphemistically known as "the Troubles"; he would be the first of over 740 British soldiers to be killed over the course of the next sad and tragic 26 years.

The author attended East Ardsley Secondary Modern School, a "gasworks Lane" kind of Secondary Modern, leaving in 1964 as the school was closing and the village Primary school would relocate onto that hallowed ground vacated by the author and his contemporaries. Amongst the bright-eyed, collective innocence of the new term in September of that year, was a 9 year old boy called Tommy Stoker. Half his lifetime later, whilst in an OP overlooking Berwick Road, Ardoyne in Belfast, with the Light Infantry, Tommy was accidentally shot in the back and badly wounded on the 29^th July. After a courageous fight against death, he succumbed to his wounds 7 weeks later. He had only been with the battalion for 2 days.

On that date, 19^th September, 1972, Tommy became one of three L.I. squaddies killed in a matter of weeks, and the 154^th British soldier to give his life for peace in that troubled province. On the roll of honour, his name is enshrined between those of Lance Corporal John Davies (Royal Regiment of Fusiliers), killed in Londonderry’s Bogside and a Para, Frank Bell, who, like Tommy, was only 18 and he was killed on the notorious Ballymurphy Estate in west Belfast.

I visit Tommy’s grave in St Michaels Parish Church at least once a year in order to place flowers for a fallen comrade and, on the grave he shares with his Mum, are the words "Died 19^th September, 1972, aged 18 years" Without the slightest embarrassment, I confess that I cry every time I visit his grave. On a nearby war memorial, commemorating the names of East Ardsley’s fallen of two world wars, is the simple inscription - finally placed there, I understand as a result of his family’s perseverance and persistence – which reads "T.A. Stoker: Killed in Ireland 1972"

As one reads the engraved names of the young boys who perished on the Somme and "Wipers" and a myriad number of other places on the fields of Flanders, the names in both wars are depressingly, the same. Indeed, it could be the morning register at my village school which Tommy also attended. In the event of another war, one supposes that the names of its fallen would be, tragically, the same ones.

This book is dedicated not only to the memory of every one of my fellow squaddies killed as a result of the madness which was inflicted, forcibly, upon Northern Ireland for such a large part of my life, but especially to Tommy Stoker. It is also dedicated to those who were injured and suffered debilitating and career-ending wounds.

Further, it will be a collection of accounts and photographs of those who served their country in that sad place where Britain lost almost as many service personnel as she did in the Korean War. We must not lose sight of the fact that men fell, not only in areas of the province which would become, tragically familiar, but also in other places, not renowned for violent death. Men fell in places such as the Murph, Turf Lodge, Short Strand, Lower Falls Road and Springfield Road in Belfast, the Creggan and Bogside a little further north in Londonderry, also in Enniskillen and, of course, in that terrible bandit country of Crossmaglen and South Armagh, and there were other towns and cities, away from Northern Ireland.

Let us not forget the killings in Hyde Park, and on the same tragic day, in Regents Park; in Deal, at Army and RAF barracks in Holland, Belgium and Germany and even on the streets of Derby, where Sergeant Michael Newman was assassinated outside the Army Careers Office there. Let us not forget those squaddies and their families, cruelly murdered, on an Army bus on the M62 motorway in my native West Yorkshire. Let us also hold dear to our hearts 19 year old Private William Davies of the Royal Regiment of Wales who was shot dead at Lichfield railway station in Staffordshire whilst off duty and waiting for a train. Of all the cowardly acts of murder committed against British troops, this atrocity cuts to the very core of our civilisation.

One remembers the nightly news during 1972, when 129 soldiers were killed in that insane year, with a soldier’s death on average every three days or so. Reports of a soldier shot in the head by a sniper in the Ardoyne or a soldier covering Army engineers being shot in the chest in the Falls Road or of another soldier being shot in the back in the Markets area whilst on foot patrol. Did we all become inure to the tragedy of Northern Ireland as it unfolded in our own living rooms on an almost daily basis ?

As these words are written, it is well over 10 years since Stephen Restorick was gunned down manning that PVCP on a fateful day in Bessbrook and in those intervening 10 years, we have had the Good Friday agreement, early release from prison of convicted terrorists, supposed decommissioning of arms and a new power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive; in short: reconciliation. There will, inevitably, be criticism of my insistence on writing this book from the perspective of the British soldier, the squaddie and the Tom. There will be no apologies for this stance and I ask you, the reader, to judge that stance.

Even today, quite a few years after my own unremarkable Army career ended, like many an ex-squaddie, ex-Tom or ex-Rupert, every time I hear on the nightly news of the loss of a British soldier, whether or not it is Iraq, Afghanistan, or in the past, in Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, or over in "the Bog" and, course, in the South Atlantic, I die, just a little, inside.

During the writing of this book, I received an e-mail from an old squaddie who served with the Glorious Glosters on Imjin Hill in Korea in the 50’s and he told me that he too, still grieves all these years on.

I met and spoke with David Hardy who survived the appalling carnage which followed the IRA’s attack on a Light Infantry coach bringing returning soldiers to Northern Ireland; by some miracle – despite the pain still suffered almost 20 years later – he lived; 8 of his comrades did not. It was an honour to have this ex-squaddie contribute to this book.

I apologise for any distress which might be caused through mis-spelling of soldiers’ names, or the use of a wrong Christian name, or rank, but all the facts were checked on reputable sites prior to publishing. I am aware that distress can be caused and a former Lieutenant Colonel of the Glosters implored me to make sure of my facts; I trust that I have indeed done so.

I think that it was a former Airborne soldier, Anthony Deane-Drummond, M.C. who once said, following the tragic but heroic failure at Arnhem in September 1944: "If you meet a man who fought at Arnhem, then buy him a drink." I say the same about the lads who served in Northern Ireland.

I hope that, through these voices, you will begin to understand – those of you who were fortunate enough not to have been there – what life was like on the streets of Belfast and Londonderry and Crossmaglen and a dozen other places in Northern Ireland. You will read the voices behind the statistics; maybe you will not see the faces behind the statistics, but be sure, every squaddie who served in Northern Ireland during those terrible years has a voice.

Perhaps, if these voices strike a chord, you, the reader might just understand the stories behind the words which, for so many years of our lives, echoed around our living rooms with the evening news, particularly on News At Ten, when, between sombre chimes of Big Ben were sandwiched the words: : "In Northern Ireland, another British soldier has been killed"