Too many books about the North take themselves way too seriously. Some that spring to mind are pompous and boring. Bernard O'Mahoney's Soldier of the Queen captures perfectly the life of a British soldier at a key point in the history of Ireland in the late 20th century, and it is acidly funny.
O'Mahoney served with the Fifth Inniskilling Dragoon Guards in Fermanagh during the period of the Maze Hunger Strikes. He was harassing the electorate of the Fermanagh-South Tyrone constituency, mainly his co-religionists, during Bobby Sands's election to Parliament. He recollects the crude jokes about Sands's protest among his fellows, soldiers taking bets on how many days he would survive, posters about the "slimmer of the year" in the barracks.
But he also remembers how scared his fellow young soldiers were in this cold, wet hostile place, how some cried in their sleep at night and the constant fear of being rendered into "fertiliser" by an IRA bomb or mortar. Only one of his colleagues was badly injured in a mortar attack on an outpost; O'Mahoney and the other rescuers who rushed to the scene added to the young man's woes by snagging his stretcher in a hedge and catapulting the patient into a ditch as they rushed to the medi-vac helicopter.
As he came from an Irish family - complete with problems - O'Mahoney had a deep dislike for the sectarian local militia of the Ulster Defence Regiment he served alongside. He and his fellow English "professionals" had a low regard for the local UDR men - "not one of the British Empire's better ideas" known as the "Utterly Defenceless Regiment".
He shares the same deep cynicism about authority and military life that you find among all professional soldiers. Anyone who happens to like military life is "army barmy". NCOs, particularly the instructors, are deeply disturbed. Officers are universally obnoxious or stupid. The only officer that O'Mahoney warms to is an upper-class young man who, like him, joined the Army out of compulsion - family pressure, as opposed to O'Mahoney's need to get out of going to prison for robbery and assault. O'Mahoney and his peers fondly referred to their young platoon leader as Major Disaster.
O'Mahoney's childhood in a rough working-class housing estate, and the beatings meted out along the way (all he missed was the continuation of the beatings in school from sadistic teachers to make his Irish upbringing complete) prepared him perfectly for army life and service in Fermanagh in 1981. The privations and structured abuse of military life seemed perfectly natural to him. He and his fellow working-class friends quickly applied their street craft to soldiering in Northern Ireland. They handed out sweets when patrolling in dangerous republican housing estates so children would gather around them and the IRA would refrain from detonating roadside bombs.
Mostly, though, there was boredom: "I was lying on my bed reading someone else's tabloid newspaper". As if fate had not conspired sufficiently to afflict the young O'Mahoney's life, he fell in love with a Protestant woman in the UDR, a relationship that was doomed from the outset.
It is good that Brandon Books, Gerry Adams' publishers, have chosen to print this book (written in conjunction with Mick McGovern, who was also a co-author on the since-murdered Eamon Collins's expose of life in the IRA). Soldier of the Queen is as good a book as you are likely to find about military life and soldiering in Northern Ireland.
Jim Cusack is the Security Correspondent of The Irish Times