Booksie

BooksieBy way of preamble I would like very briefly to relate some of the circumstances, which led to my decision to pursue my career in the Defense Forces.
These motivations were a mixture of personal experiences over a 7 yr period during which I had sought but failed thus far to discover a sense of professional security or personal satisfaction in my career.
I do not propose to elaborate here on this particular strand of my experience but the allure of the army however may have had a more subtle, subterranean but potent psychological influence on me given that both my father and my uncle had served with distinction in most of the major campaigns during the second world war
. My Father served as a dentist in world war 2 from the battle of El Alamein- the defeat of Rommel; through Italy, and again on the D-day landings.
He was also one of the first dentists sent in to Dachau death camp after the war to assist in quantifying the dead from dental forensics.
But to return to my own narrative. Having spent 7 post graduate years on a seemingly aimless odyssey – in surgery , medicine , psych , casualty obs etc during the winter of 1979 at the age of 30 I saw an advertisement for doctors in the Irish Army.
My impression of the Army at the time was fused with images of bulls wool. Boots, high barrack walls and booze ; of broken down trucks manned by frozen soldiers with cyanosed faces on St Patrick’s day parade , but I was also aware that their involvement in the Congo had changed the Army ; had shaken the mothballs and laid down a challenge for them to participate in the UN mission in the Congo, and that they had responded this challenge with valour.
I was immediately attracted to the world of the Mid Oriental glamour that service in the Lebanon might provide ; that dual sense of revulsion and seduction coupled with the sense of adventure into the exoticism of the middle east seemed to evoke in me an irresistible appeal. I was also lured by the hope that I might finally find some definitive destiny and purpose in my chosen career.
I was commissioned in Feb 80 and my first posting was to St Bricins Military Hospital. The post was ill defined. I was a kind naïve novitiate in this strange new world of military medicine ..
The first time I attended the surgical OPD was indeed a revelation to me . The surgeon – a Prof of Surgery in Mercers hospital was reviewing his post op cases. These were first inspected by my commanding officer, and he in turn instructed me how to present the case to the surgeon in military fashion,
. I was like a kind of a minor acolyte in what was beginning to look to me more and more like something bordering on comical farce The case was an excised ingrown toenail. I joke you not -They both looked at the toe quite ponderously, then turning to me the surgeon said – a thing of beauty is a joy forever’ . At that dark moment I had that sinking feeling that I was becoming an unwilling participant in a of a bad pantomime , out of season.
But there I was an innocent on the precipice of something propitious; a beholder of the prodigious marvels of this giant of surgery.
But then quite to my surprise, this quaint and avuncular old professor came up with one astonishing epithet which I have cherished to this day. After the laborious day in OPD reviewing toe nails and other mind boggling surgical triumphs he called me aside and told me there were 2 kinds of patients I would meet in the army – Those who wont stand up and those who wont lie down.
This was to be come quite manifestly clear to me very soon , and it would endure the span of my military career .’ Those who wont stand up and those who wont lie down-It was so prophetic and precise that I always doubted if this later day surgical pioneer could have conceivably coined the phrase. It was axiomatic and almost Wildean in its satiric wisdom .
I was soon posted to Costume Barracks Athlone where I was to learn more about Byzantine structure of the army chain of command . This is quite unfathomable to comprehend. Suffice it to say that by comparison the HSE module is one of dazzling clarity. In the army , the pyramidal structure is so ordained that the higher up the chain you go the less responsibility you take ; It also ordains than when any cudos attaches to some initiative , the traffic is all one way to the top; and where blame attaches the traffic goes all the way to the bottom.
The most benign way of describing it is to say that the Army has a time honored code, which says that divided responsibility is diminished culpability. This keeps the top guy at the top and inures him from any usurpery , competition or challenge from those lesser creatures beneath him.
By 1980 the destiny of the Army had already been determined The weather vane of all militaries had changed and that arrow which was slewn in the Congo in the 1960s had drawn the army into a new and consequential era , and now the Defense Forces were involved in the changing geopolitical landscape of the Middle East
I arrived in Lebanon just after the Israeli war. The Israelis had retreated to a UN brokered line in Southern Lebanon .The UN had been sent in to the buffer zone between Israel and Southern Lebanon. But now the Lebanese were engaged in a civil war .This involved a power struggle between the various sectarian factions- largely Shiite and Sunni Muslims, and smaller Christian and Druze community . At one time or another each of these groups aligned themselves to the other 2 for political supremacy.
So within the buffer zone the civil war was raging ; and to the south the Israelis were poised to reinvade if their Northern territories were imperiled again by the PLO.
It was here in this buffer zone that the Irish battalion was deployed. The medical platoon comprised 2 doctors and 18 medical orderlies. The mission was referred to by the acronym UNIFIL - the united nations interim forces in Lebanon. The interim part of the thing is curious given that the mission lasted 23 years.
We occupied a hospital about the size of Portiuncula in the 60s in the mountain town of Tibnine – about 40 miles East of Beruit
Due to the vagaries of the civil war the attendance of the resident medical staff was irregular and unpredictable. We therefore had to provide hospital in patient care in medicine, surgery, paeds most of the time for the surrounding hinterland.
In addition to this we were tasked with the providing clinics outside the UNIFIL- where the villagers were deprived of even the basic medical services for weeks on end.
My first call out was a road side execution.
There at the side of the road was a young man with his hands tethered with electric cable and a bullet through his head There was and a note attached to his clasped hands. We were cautioned never to touch the bodies lest they be booby-trapped. The body had to be turned with a grappling hook - The note read – those who chose to play with fire will pay with fire. He was about 16 yrs of age.

My second call out was after a dawn air raid – the houses of a suspected terrorists had been targeted and blown up by an Israeli Air strike. The mercenary had escaped leaving 2 dead children in the carnage. I can never forget the image of their 2 beautiful faces – undamaged as we put their small bodies into adult body bags, tagged them , and bought them to the hospital fridges. The hardest soldiers were touched by this pitiful sight, as most had children about their ages: a boy and a girl about 10-11 years of age
We were called back to the same village some 2 hrs later.
There was a flurry of activity around derelict house. Hope dawned in that something could be salvaged from the carnage. We were soon to discover that there was a mule trapped inside the smoldering shack. After the initial shock the farmer who owned the shack and the father of the dead children realized that he could have another family, but he couldn’t harvest his meagre tobacco and olive crop without his mule.
And while this seemed repugnant to our sense of values, as most of these mountain people were living on subsistence farming his rationale was very real to him. So you had accept the realization that this was Lebanon- life was at the same time both sacred and cheap, but survival was everything.

We also catered for a Norwegian Transport Company of about 400 soldiers within our area . One morning I was called to the yard, where a mechanic had blown himself up while welding a petrol tank. His clothes were still smoldering when we got there and the smell of burning cloth and flesh still lingers. He had massive 3rd degree burns, well in excess of 50%
We infused him with plasma , plasma expanders and morphine. He went into shock and had a cardiac arrest. He was resuscitated and when he was stabilized to some extent he was airlifted by helicopter to Naqura – the UNIFIL field hospital on the coast between Israel and Lebanon, My only worry in transit was that he would have another arrest in flight .You hear nothing with a stethoscope in a helicopter.
As we approached the field hospital I spoke from the air with the chief surgeon explaining the extent of the burns. I suggested we request permission to take him over the border into Israel – to Rambam medical hospital in Haifa, He agreed and assured me that he would arrange permission for us to cross the border without landing . He was to arrange this with the Northern Command of the Israeli Defence Forces who controlled the border. There was a mechanism whereby these airlifts , Missions of Mercy could usually be readily negotiated with the Israelis , who almost without exception responded positively and expeditiously to such requests .The pilot then got clearance to go and as we approached the border just over the cliffs at rosh an enqura they opened fire on the helicopter. The rounds were tracers mostly it later transpired, but the Israelis later insisted that they hadn’t been forewarned of an air lift and as they had been aware of an imminent air attack by the PLO , and thinking this was it they took preventative action by firing on the helcopter.
We landed on the rooftop of the hospital and delivered the patient to the care of the Israeli doctors. We had dealt with Israeli doctors on many previous occasions . Most of their doctors were , like their military American trained. Miraculously the patient survived; the Israelis had been at the cutting edge of the management of extensive burns at the time . So a week went by and against the odds the pt had survived . then a fortnight ,then a month. At this stage there was a great yearning by the Norwegians to bring him home as the Norwegians were also developing new techniques for the management of burns – This involved treating the pt untouched in a bath of olive oil and using bilaminate skin and biologic self-skin replacement. So the patient survived for a further 2 months and died in Norway just short of 100 days post injury.
On reflection had he died on the spot or after the first cardiac arrest, things might have been more humane.
Lazarus
Reflecting on many of the memories which in turn both haunt and humour me now , on reflection I see they have a common thread ; the of lack of communication.
This is certainly the case in another incident.
This was a case where at an outlying clinic I was asked to see an old man who was bedridden. On examination it seemed to me that he had Congestive Cardiac Failure, and I arranged to bring him back to the civilian hospital in Tibnine, which was now under military control. I knew the Col in charge of the hospital and explained to him that I would look after the patient . In the morning the family arrived at my surgery in a very distraught state to tell me that their father had been transferred to Tyre hospital on the coast. I went immediately to the Col who confessed that he had ordered the transfer on account of the old man’s political baggage – he was a PLO fighter and any overt sympathy shown by the military in charge of the hospital could invite retaliation .
Because of further suicide bombings on the coast road the family had been denied access to the Tyre hospital.
On the following day I received a call from a French Major – an NGO officer to tell me that my patient had died during the night and that he was delivering the remains back to me later that day.
I then went to break the news to the distraught family. When the hearse / ambulance arrived in the village square the major came directly to me with the papers – his manifest - I went in to the ambulance to identify the remains before the family might see him to see to my initial horror, there was the old guy sitting up on a stretcher, his stick still in hand – He winked at me and bade me- Marhabba ( good day )
Shocked and stupefied I went to the grieving family across the square who just wanted the body back. I explained that there was an error and that their father was in fact alive. I was knocked aside in the stampede, and they whisked their father away never to trust me again.
I just could not comprehend how the French Officer could have accepted a corpse believing it to be so without checking. He was outraged simply because in his opinion his office had been misled. It never occurred to him that he might have inspected and identified his manifest – No, he was adamant –He had followed proper procedure and he insisted that he was given a death certificate in Arabic and that it was completely outside his remit, and his Gallic affront could not be appeased. It transpired that the ‘death certificate ‘ were just the personal details of the old man. It made no reference to his health let alone his demise.
The family later forgave me, but after some humble contrite imploring on my behalf and later I came to befriend the old man… but they never let him out of their sight in my presence ever again.
We helped out in other battalion areas. I remember having to go to stay in the Fijian area after their doctor had dropped dead out jogging one morning. he was just 40 . The Fijians sent just one medical officer per battalion – considering that they have only 4 battalions in their army their contribution to the UN was proportionally quite enormous.
But the workload was far too much for one doctor in a stand alone situation, particularly when just some months previously the Israeli Defence forces launched an aerial bombardment on a tent within the Fijian compound where the local civilians had taken refuge.
There had been warnings of retaliations on suspected members of the Hizbulla in the town of Quana. The Israelis launched what they referred to as operation Grapes of Wrath. The Air strike was precise. Despite the blue flag of the UN and the Red Cross they struck the tent with precision killing 150 women and children.
Again we were confronted with the merciless barbarity of war in all its evil manifestations- more children in more body bags, and the mass burials before dawn.
This particular episode more than any other highlighted for me the many shortcomings of the UNIFIL mandate. We had failed all the refugees seeking protection in a UN compound, under the Red Cross and the blue flag and had witnessed an incident of ethnic cleansing which we were powerless to prevent.

Don Tidey Kidnapping
Between tours of duty things were still unsettled at home. The IRA was still active and the main function of the army at home was to aid the civil powers and to subdue any internal threat to the structures of the State.

In Late December 1983 the business man- Don Tidey, had been kidnapped by the IRA)

I had been stationed in Finner Camp in Donegal and had gone down to Dublin for the Medical Corps Annual Dress dance. I was in the middle of the jubilations when I was called to the emergency phone in St Bricins. The 4 western Command had been put on stand by; I was ordered to return to Finner.
I was given 4 hrs to recover from my revelry then get into my car and drive to Finner.
I arrived in Finner where there was an escort waiting. I didn’t have time to change. I was told to follow on so I turned the car – and was led into the heartland of IRA Country – Ballinamore. There was a siege mounted around Dadara wood. They were expecting the IRA to break cover at any time. A Garda and a soldier had been killed just before I arrived.
I immediately set about establishing a medical aid post in the belief that a shoot out was imminent.
There was only one request I made, Just provide me with a room to treat any injuries, Every 6 hrs we had a briefing and a debriefing – sometimes with the Gardai sometimes without. At each briefing I asked about the possibility of getting a room in a school house. There was a reluctance to entertain this request which baffled me initially. It then became apparent to me that the local parish priest was a sympathizer and had refused the request, I thought it was simply a question of knocking down the door but it shows you that even then the army didn’t want to cross swords with the clergy; besides my superiors reasoned, hadn’t I 3 ambulances at my command, and an army helicopter at my disposal- one of the 4 helicopters in the air corps -dedicated for evacuation of wounded. What more could I possibly want – A room just to stabilize the patients, I
reasoned. I tried to explain that a helicopter is like the worst possible kind of ambulance except it was in the sky – I needed somewhere to stabalize patients before they could face being evacuated by helicopter ; But there seemed to be this indelible belief that if you got your wounded into a helicopter all would be well – after all that was the way it was in the movies .
For 4 days and nights I stayed in the ambulance in Ballinamore Square . By the end of the 2nd day my hopes for a shoot out were fading. On the 4thrd day O Hare was shot in an ambush in Cavan. He survived and Don Tidey was rescued.
The Cordon of steel around Darada wood was wound down and on Xmas eve I handed over duty to a colleague. But by then the IRA had long escaped through a maze of tunnels and undoubtedly with some not insubstantial local support.
A TV documentary was later made about the kidnapping and the siege and the rescue. It brought home to people how much the Army were resented in the area at the time.
It was alleged that soldiers were refused service in some shops which was denied by the local representatives- but I saw my own staff being refused cigarettes and minerals in at least one shop. Such was the feeling of IRA support in these republican enclaves around the country in the mid 80s and there e was a reciprocal antipathy to the Army and Gardai in these areas.
As 2000 ended I had declined to go forward for interview for promotion. Twice. The thought of returning to Dublin and all that entailed was something I just could not countenance.
Now the Lebanon was over and I was returning to a microcosmic world of peacetime – army life.
A life of petty jealousies, of small tyrannies , where the classic tensions of command structure vied with comradeship and collegiality.; where the ruthlessness of self promotion above personal loyalty were hard wired into the cultural ecosystem. Where the compensation culture had become endemic; where I seemed to be seeing more and more of those soldiers who would not stand up, and fewer of those who would not lie down , and where my personal sense of compassion was waning with all of these regrettable changes..
Lest I have given the impression otherwise, I should acknowledge that I have also been privileged to work and serve with the very best of Irish soldiery ; and it would be gravely unjust if I were to close without marking my personal respect to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of peace.
And for all the other soldiers who served as noble ambassadors in Lebanon and elsewhere; who give of their service, but much more – who give willingly of their magnanimity and their personal affection for those less fortunate than themselves. These I also applaud and revere.
But for me .the hum drum of barracks life was beckoning and a gloom seemed to be descending on army life for me
Army in peace time is like unscripted amateur drama. Prima donnas and pretentiousness, the pettiness of barrack life - ,the boots , and booze and the vacuous boastfulness and heroics lived out only in a delirium of spurned opportunity.
I could see myself slinking ever earlier in to the officers mess as the sun slid over the barrack walls , over the polished unplayed piano , along the freshly waxed corridors , through the squinting windows -and seasons would pass , the world would turn and old barrack room warriors would live out their delusions at the bar to a captive audience of timorous junior officers.
And so in 2002 I decided to retire and unlike General Mc Arthur I decided to just fade away .
Je ne regret rien.