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A foot soldier in the Irish Republican Army delivers an unrepentant memoir. ... An in-the-trenches story of life as an ordinary soldier in a complicated set of circumstances." — Kirkus A foot soldier in the Irish Republican Army delivers an unrepentant memoir. … An in-the-trenches story of life as an ordinary soldier in a complicated set of circumstances.” — Kirkus Other items listed included assault rifles, heavy machine guns, military grade mortars RPG-7 and Sam-7 surface-to-air missiles.
From their first meeting, Crawley remembers Bulger as being immaculately dressed, intelligent and well-spoken. He was polite and respectful, but demanded respect in return. Crawley was spring from prison on Sept. 10, 1994. He immediately rejoined the IRA. His next mission was even more ambitious than the last: Sabotage the English power grid. Straightforward and unsentimental...Crawley provides enough context to understand the realities on the ground in the Ireland of the 1980s." — Shelf Awareness Crawley’s story is well told in The Yank. The writing is distinctly British — men are “lads,” a kindness is a “favour,” two weeks is a “fortnight”— and the author avoids commas even in compound sentences. I stumbled across occasional awkward sentences but was impressed by the quality of the prose from a man who is not a writer by trade.
Martin McGuinness
Thrilling... Crawley gets the reader’s heart pumping as he describes escaping shootouts with enemy troops, battling a hurricane in the North Atlantic while running guns from the U.S. to Ireland, and telling off a CIA agent who tried recruiting him." — The American Military News Former IRA gunrunner John Crawley says he used to meet Martin McGuinness in the 1980s in the Botanic Gardens in Dublin to discuss operations. They brought peanuts and fed the squirrels, he says. They also talked about guns and building the IRA’s arsenal of weapons. Mr Crawley also reveals the inside story of how the huge cache of IRA weapons were seized after being transferred from a US vessel, the Valhalla, to the Marita Ann in the Atlantic Ocean after it was boarded by Irish authorities in 1984. Sir, no, sir. The private got a letter from his wife that she wants a divorce, and the private needs to phone her, sir.’
Born of Irish parents he spent his early years in the US before moving to Ireland as a 14-year-old in 1972.While in Chicago, I stayed with my Aunt Alice and Uncle Mike. Mike Cahill was my mother’s uncle. He had emigrated to America from County Kerry at sixteen years of age and worked for the gas company his entire life. Aunt Alice, of German-Dutch origin, was from a farm near Pontiac, Illinois. She was a lovely woman and our family adored her. The couple had no children and welcomed me in while I got sorted out for enlistment.
Partly out of curiosity and partly to keep Mike happy, I went to see a Marine recruiter. I told the recruiter that, although I thought the Marines were good, I wanted to go for Special Forces and the Marines had no such unit.
John Crawley
A young Irish-American man joins an elite US Marine unit to get the most intensive military training possible — then joins the Irish Republican Army, during the days of some of the bloodiest fighting ever in the Irish-British conflict . . . He reveals that he was reluctant to take on the task partly because he was due to link up with a highly active IRA unit led by Monaghan republican Jim Lynagh, who was killed in 1987 during an SAS ambush in Loughgall, Co Armagh.
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