The waiting game I played with lone soldier on a dark country road

In these parts, I marvel at how times have changed for hurlers in the past two decades. It’s as different as night and day from when I was 16 in the early 1980s to the 16- and 17-year-olds I now coach in Cushendall. And thank God for that.

During the summer just gone, I was having the banter with these lads about new films and they were all raving about the Elvis movie. When they asked me my favourite TV programme, I mentioned The Sopranos. None of them had heard of it. But then, life goes on. I’m sure most of them wouldn’t know what UDR stands for at this remove but our generation knew exactly what they stood for.

This is a story I have never told before, not even on Laochra Gael. It was the worst night I experienced throughout the Troubles.

I was picked on the All Star hurling team of 1991 and given that there weren’t too many hurling All Stars around these parts, I was invited to every dinner dance and medal presentation across Ulster in the aftermath of the team’s announcement. Just as the award itself was a great honour, I was similarly delighted to accept these invitations as a way of giving something back to the GAA.

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On the night I’m referring to, I went to Omagh to attend their dinner dance and had a very enjoyable evening. I decided to head for the long journey back sometime after midnight. I took to the by-roads and back roads over the mountains around Cookstown. There wasn’t a sinner about on these country roads until I noticed a red light some distance ahead of me.

I slowed down as I approached the light and figured out that there was a person flagging me down. By now it was after one o’clock in the morning and here I was on my own in the car, with the only other living person this silhouette between my car headlights and the pitch darkness of the night behind him.

When the guy walked over to me, I wound down my window and saw that he had his face painted in black as camouflage. He made no effort to communicate other than with a one-word demand: “Licence!”

I gave him my driver’s licence and immediately he walked to the back of the car where I could no longer see him as it was pitch black. I didn’t know what he was doing but, in such situations, I knew I had to sit tight.

Five minutes passed.

Ten minutes passed.

Half-an-hour went by.

I could neither hear nor see what this soldier was at. You don’t sit there in such a situation for long without your mind starting to play games with you. The fact that there were no other cars coming or going meant it was just me and him. A strange fear built up inside me.

I was there sitting in the driver’s seat for almost two hours, trying to stay calm but sweating and imagining all sorts of scenarios. I knew if I attempted to drive on, he would shoot me. Or even if he didn’t, it could be a case that there was a road block mounted further up the road and they’d get me as I approached. It took everything I had inside me not to give way to the rising panic that got worse with each slow passing minute which seemed more like a lifetime.

Around three o’clock, just shy of two hours after he stopped me, he came back out of the night, stuck his hand into the car and said: “There’s your licence”.

There was still no clear instruction for me to go, so as I’m driving away, I’m wondering will I hear the crack of a bullet any moment now?

As a potential defence, I start to move my head away from the centre of the seat, thinking if he is taking aim behind me now, at least I’ll make it difficult for him. I drove and flipped my head over and back for about half-a-mile up the road. I knew then I was clear but I also knew I was totally shattered. I had another hour and a half on the road and by the time I got home, I decided there would be no more rounds of dinner dances for me.

When I was growing up, you could never carry hurls. A priest used to come around on a Friday night and gather them up as he didn’t want to make us targets coming from training or matches. The country has changed so much for the good, it’s unreal. Our new generation, fortunately, is oblivious to all of those dark times but the one constant they have with us is the same love of the game. Hurling will always win out in these parts.

This is an abridged version of a piece written by Terence ‘Sambo’ McNaughton for inclusion in Grassroots: The Second Half, a compendium of GAA stories from around the country, edited by PJ Cunningham. The book is published by Ballpoint Press and is available for €19.99.