Ulster: "Bloody Dodge City"

JOHN LARTER and Marta Doherty were both 19, she living in the Catholic Bogside section of Londonderry, he a private in the Royal Anglian Regiment, which arrived in Ulster almost two years ago to keep the peace. They met last March and got engaged in April, and John agreed to become a Catholic. Last May, while they were out walking, three gunmen of the Irish Republican Army stopped them and shot John in the hand. "Marta went to help him," John's stepfather said later. "But for her, he would have been killed. It proved to him that she should be his wife."

Last week, three days before the wedding was to take place, Marta underwent another, even more trying proof. Three masked women seized her at her home, sheared off her dark brown hair, tied her to a lamppost and poured tar over her head. For half an hour, until she was released, Marta slumped against the post while a band of 80 women shouted, "Soldier lover! Soldier lover!" A photographer, alerted in advance by local I.R.A. members, recorded the barbarous scene for the front pages of the world. Two other Catholic girls in Derry suffered similar treatment last week for the offense of dating British soldiers.

Bedroom Snipers. The state of affairs in the most bedeviled parts of Belfast and Londonderry is simple anarchy. Bombs explode daily in hotels, factories and supermarkets. School halls have become barracks; bedrooms have become snipers' nests. In Donegall Square, TIME Correspondent John Shaw cabled from Belfast last week, Bren-gun carriers stand guard over the crowds hurrying home in the autumn dusk before the city closes down for the night. Bus service stops at 7 p.m. because arsonists of the I.R.A. have been setting buses afire to lure security forces into ambush. After 10 p.m., all main roads leading to I.R.A. strongholds are closed to private cars, and no taxi will go near them. One who goes in on foot will be searched by patrolling British troops, or stopped half a dozen times in half a mile by I.R.A. women vigilantes, or even get caught in a sudden crossfire. Every night in the slums off Falls Road, all the walls at street corners are painted white to head height so that I.R.A. snipers can more easily spot troops on night patrol. The army usually repaints the walls in the morning, and the vigilantes repaint them again in the evening.

No Medals. The period of mob violence in Ulster seems to have ended. Instead, the battle is now between the British army, some 13,500 troops drawn from 20 different regiments, and I.R.A. gunmen. There are only about 500 of the gunmen, but they are well armed with tommy guns, rifles and gelignite, and they hold the initiative with their hit-and-run raids. "It's bloody Dodge City in there," said a corporal of the Green Howards regiment on a midnight patrol at the edge of the Ardoyne district, "full of cowboys wanting to be heroes. They'll shoot at any bloody thing."

Officially, this is not a war at all. There is no combat pay, and there will be no combat medals. In fact, the struggle for Ulster has many military points in common with the other antiguerrilla wars that the British army has fought in the past 20 years--Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. "The main difference," says a major in the Black Watch infantry regiment, "is simply that we are fighting in our own country."

Cheers to Jeers. When the army intervened two years ago, the Catholics of Londonderry and Belfast welcomed the soldiers with cheers and cups of tea. The army's first mission was to protect Ulster's 500,000 Catholics against raids staged by extremists within the 1,000,000-member Protestant majority. But the militant Provisional faction of the I.R.A. foresaw that provocation would breed repression, and repression would breed more militants. The "Proves" began sniping at the troops and the troops fired back; the army started making house-to-house searches and then interning suspects without charges or trials, a practice that touched off the current wave of violence. About 400 prisoners are now being held, and some of them claim that they have been tortured.

The Provos stand ready to terrorize moderate Catholics as well. A Belfast woman, mourning a son accidentally shot to death by soldiers, blames both "martial law" and "I.R.A. violence." But when she was asked whether her name could be used with such a statement, her husband quickly said: "For God's sake, don't do that. The Provos might blow the house up."

I.R.A. leaflets urge: "Hit the bastards hard and often. Get the tommy's tail between his legs and then drive your boot home to the third lace hole." Troops are spat at and sworn at by female vigilantes in language that makes tough sergeants blush, and young soldiers are taunted that their girls are being "screwed by the blackies" back home. Though some British units are one-third Catholic, a staff officer said: "By now, my chaps detest the Catholics."

By the standards of war, casualties have not been high. The army has lost 36 dead and 172 wounded this year; civilian deaths run to 76. That is partly because the army insists on a strategy of "minimum force." On a crowded street, soldiers may fire only when fired upon, only if they can see their attackers, and only in single shots. Every round must be accounted for in writing. The army claims that its troops have been fired on 1,363 times this year (and been the targets of 800 Molotov cocktails), but have fired back only 320 times.

The army's intelligence is improving, and in recent weeks has led to the capture of several senior I.R.A. leaders, including the gunmen believed responsible for shooting three Scottish soldiers on a lonely country lane outside Belfast last spring. Nonetheless, high officers say that it will take a good 18 months to neutralize the I.R.A. They do not expect "victory" in the military sense--only that the I.R.A. can be reduced to a "nuisance" that can be controlled by the police.

Despite the army's expectations, the gunmen keep striking back. Last week snipers shot down an 18-year-old signal corpsman strolling in a rural village and a 23-year-old corporal on patrol in Londonderry. In Belfast, just 50 yds. from a heavily guarded police station, four gunmen followed a pair of unarmed plainclothesmen into a liquor store, ordered the storekeeper to lie on the floor, and then machine-gunned the police to death.

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