Well done, Ben Griffin. Well done for having the balls to stand up to violence, when it would have been easy to trade on your reputation as former SAS hard man. Really, really inspiring.
I did 4 tours (Derry79, Fermanagh82, Ballykinler84/5, SouthArmagh87). Pre-Fermanagh we did Irish history with the Education Corps as part of pre-deployment training. I tried to do everything with humility and resolve. Humility before history, resolve before terror. Some friends recently moved to Belfast and invited me over. I’d feel very odd going back. Out of order in some sense. A senior RUC officer* with whom I’d had a bit of a run in about OOBs on his patch told me ‘You guys come over for 6 months. We live here’. I reflected long on this. I think it was the the philosopher Isaiah Berlin who argued that in the resolution of value conflicts there has to be be some value loss. *One of his men ND’d his Ruger into the station ops console, right next to me!!!
