WHEN THE TROUBLES CAME TO LOUGHGALL
Early on the evening of Friday, May 8, 1987, eight members of the East Tyrone Brigade, among the most militant units of the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA), steered two stolen vehicles toward the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) station in Loughgall, Northern Ireland. Five of the men, comprising the main assault team, occupied a Toyota van, while the other three rode a backhoe—what the Irish call a “digger”—toward the light perimeter fence. Rocking gently in the digger’s bucket sat an oil drum packed with more than 200 pounds of Semtex plastic explosive with two unlit 40-second fuses. The plan was for the bomb crew to plow through the fence and blow up the building, while the assault team opened fire with automatic weapons on any surviving constables within.
The attackers all wore coveralls, balaclavas and surgical gloves and had covered their shoes with heavy socks to foil any attempts at forensic identification. They needn’t have bothered. Unknown to the IRA unit, the British had gotten wind of their operation. Twentyfour commandos of the army’s Special Air Service (SAS) lay in wait—six inside the station with the three constables on duty, and 18 more concealed behind walls and trees around the station.
Over the millennia nations worldwide have eulogized their political dead as martyrs to various causes. Few have offered up their native sons for as long a stretch of time as has the Emerald Isle. For hundreds of years Ireland—in its perpetual quest for independent nation status—has sent forth and lost countless of its fervent young men, only to eulogize them in song and saga.
The bitter conflict that blighted Northern Ireland for three decades beginning in the late 1960s was only the latest in the centuries-long struggle. Fought between the mostly
