Valuable lessons from Ireland

For most people, the recent news was more symbol than substance: The British army removed its last troops from Northern Ireland, ending a security mission of nearly 40 years.

For me, the headlines marked the end of an epic tale that I had watched, first in person, then from afar, as it unfolded with brutal clarity. But the story also offers a deeper message about what happens to superpowers when they seek to fight wars on terrorism in heavily divided lands.

I was sent to the Naval Communication Station in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, in May 1971, to finish the last 18 months of my four-year enlistment in the U.S. Navy. As such, I was cast into a web of contradictions.

As with my 260 brethren at the base, I not only enjoyed a safe, comfortable duty station, but also found myself within a local population that loved "the Yanks," as we were known. Some of it was economic: the jobs the base provided, the disposable income it generated. Some of it was ancestral, with the age-old ties between America and Ireland. And some was personal: One-third of the sailors who arrived single left with Irish brides.

Just outside this cocoon, however, was an urban war zone unlike anything I'd seen. Sandbags, barbed wire, and heavily fortified command posts with lookout towers dominated the landscape. A drive to work or the shopping district would be routinely interrupted by army checkpoints, and the soldier's greeting of "All right, lad, let's have a look under your boot [trunk] and bonnet [hood]."

Your stop at the red light could put you face-to-face with riflemen perched on the back of an armored carrier, their eyes scanning the area for snipers. And your walk from shop to car in the city center could place you on the fringes of a pitched battle between an army riot squad and stone-throwing teens.

Under this layer of novelty lay an even darker side. Here, the story was how historic hostilities, civil war, and the legacy of British rule had planted a virus in society. In a moment, decent, polite folk who had invited you in for tea would be raging about the "war to the end" against the other side.

I remember the shy, pretty civilian clerk in the base's disbursing office. Thugs in her neighborhood had just tarred and feathered a Catholic girl for the sin of dating a British soldier. The clerk's mocking response: "She's lucky to have gotten off so light."

Likewise, I recall Protestant hardliners "educating" me on the inherent evils and shiftlessness of the Catholic minority, who wanted to suck Ulster into an impoverished, repressive all-Ireland republic. (It didn't happen, of course, but the Irish Republic, better known these days as the Celtic tiger, now enjoys a standard of living reported to be higher than that of Britain.)

Finally, there's the cautionary tale. What was intended to be a peacekeeping mission of a few months ultimately became a war on terrorism that sent 300,000 troops to an area the size of Connecticut over 38 years and left more than 3,700 dead, 763 of them British soldiers.

At first, Catholics welcomed the troops. Within a year, the army was their enemy. After Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in January 1972, when 14 unarmed demonstrators at a banned civil rights march were fatally shot by British soldiers, the split was irrevocable. Working-class Catholic communities became breeding grounds for the Irish Republican Army. All sides - Catholic and Protestant paramilitaries and the British Army - talked about military victory. But when the relentless bloodletting produced no more than a stalemate, a political settlement evolved, painful and protracted though it turned out to be. Now, with a power-sharing government and new, integrated police force moving forward, the British Army can finally bid ta-ta to its long night in Northern Ireland.

As the United States struggles toward an end in Iraq, fighting al-Qaeda, trying to defuse a civil war, looking to the future stability of the region, our parallels with the British army's experience in Northern Ireland are more than educational. They're eerie.