On this page you will find extract's from Bernard O'Mahoney's book Soldier of the Queen published by Brandon Books :-

Reckless at 16
By the time I was 16 I was completely reckless. I didn't seem to care what I did, who I did it to or whether I got caught. Hughie, Stan and I were in Birmingham one day walking around the market area below the Bull Ring shopping centre.
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Chuckles the Pekinese dog
My best friend at the time was Stan, the son of a policeman. He had been present at my first attempted burglary when I had broken the catch on a local supermarket's store-room window in the hope of gaining access.

However, we couldn't get inside and had to be content with reaching in and grabbing what we could - Jaffa Cakes and whisky. Stan was also having problems at home, although these were completely unlike mine. He did not like his step-mother and felt she did not like him.
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"YOU FUCKING PIG! YOU FUCKING KILLED ME!"
Everything was done with a view to inspection. The corporal would come in wearing white gloves. You would be standing by your beds (blankets boxed and precisely measured with a stick).

He would put his white-gloved hand behind a radiator and if when he took his hand away there was even the slightest speck of dust on his glove he would scream: "You fucking pigs!" I'd find it hard not to laugh. One time he went in to the room next to ours and after a few seconds I heard him shouting:
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Suspicion of murder
Of course, there were still lots of petty rules that I was always running up against. The army thrived on total bullshit: it was smeared on everything you came into contact with. One rule was that you were not allowed outside the camp without a collar.
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Mortar attack
It was around 10.30p.m., too early to bother trying to sleep. I half expected we'd get called out at some point that night. I imagined the local republicans getting tanked up in the pubs to mark the passing of their MP They would soon be spilling out onto the streets looking for targets they could vent their anger on.

I threw the newspaper down and sat up just as the door flew open. A soldier shouted: "Heli-pad! Heli-pad! They've attacked Rosslea!" We burst into activity, grabbing our weapons and running out the door into the slumbering camp.
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