"You Can't Shoot Kids"

The agony of Northern Ireland is generally dated from the sectarian riots of August 1969, when 300 British troops were airlifted in to restore order. Since then, by British army estimate, there have been 2,200 bomb explosions, an average of more than two a day, and 541 deaths. Ulstermen have had to accustom themselves to the surrealistic world of urban guerrilla warfare; violence has become almost as common as shepherd's pie, and assassination squads move through Belfast with ease. TIME Correspondent William Rademaekers cabled these impressions of a city that has in many ways become accustomed to horror. His report:

The scars of three years of bombing and shooting are obvious in the charred remains of buildings and the panorama of stores and shops with boarded fronts--and more subtle in the reaction of the people. Many quickly take advantage of "bomb salvage" sales, shopping behind barricades of wire and submitting to body checks at street corners. They have even formed their own vocabulary for what is happening around them. A building is not bombed; someone "puts the touch" to it. An army patrol becomes a "duck patrol" because the British soldiers, nervously fingering their weapons, walk the streets like sitting ducks. People who are murdered in their homes get "the midnight knock," while those killed in demonstrations are victims of "an aggro," meaning an aggravation. The conflict itself is called, with simple eloquence, "the troubles."

Urban life stutters along, but only barely. "You can't really enjoy a film when you are called out of the cinema three times for a bomb scare," observes one laconic citizen. Most pubs downtown now close at 6 for lack of business. The restaurants and movies are largely empty. People tend to lock themselves up in the ghettos that mark the residents as Protestant, Catholic or Jewish. "Like everyone else," says Shipyard Worker John Bleakley, "we stay at home at night with our own kind and don't answer the door."

There is one group of city dwellers who do not stay at home--the children. They move through the town like the mob in Lord of the Flies, carrying hate on their young-old faces like a bold banner. They wait for soldiers on street corners, flinging crisp insults: "Limey pig...soldier baastids...Up yours," and then bricks and rocks. "You can't shoot a kid, can you?" says a soldier wearing a flak jacket with the inscription CS IS A GAS, a sick pun. "But I know a couple I'd like to ship," meaning deport them.

In truth, the children of Northern Ireland are what one British colonel calls "the most depressing thing about this depressing place." "There is nothing to be done with them," says Mrs. David Brennan, "except get them out of here. When my three-year-old son came in from stoning soldiers, I knew we had to go." The Catholic Brennans are leaving and so are thousands of others. This emigration, unlike earlier ones, is made up of skilled workers and professional people, Protestant as well as Catholic, who are leaving because they see no future in Northern Ireland. "The people who are going now," says Hugh Wells, a Protestant telephone worker, "are the ones who can afford to leave. I can afford it, and I'll be gone before Oct. 1."

Perfect Place. Like everyone else, the 21,000 British soldiers here have learned to live with urban guerrilla warfare. Initially unhappy about their role as men in the middle, army officers are now using Northern Ireland as a training ground for what they believe will be the wars of the future. In his book, Low Intensity Operations, British Brigadier General Frank Kitson expresses the belief that internal subversion and civil war, rather than orthodox international war, represent the true dangers ahead. He believes that Northern Ireland is a perfect place to learn.

The army here is now experimenting with various methods of containing and combatting urban guerrillas in what one captain calls "very live circumstances." The six counties have become a testing ground for new weapons, such as rubber bullets, and new tactics, such as blocking off the centers of towns. One sees here the same enthusiasm as in the early days of the Viet Nam War, when the American Army was so eagerly experimenting with new weaponry and its own schemes for combatting guerrillas. One sees here also early signs of the same frustrations. The army has discovered that its vehicles are unsuitable for city warfare, that its men are untrained to handle hostile civilians, that it cannot prevent the "ultras" on both sides from moving through the cities like fish in a friendly sea. Still, at least the officer corps of the army has found that it can live with the situation. "This has become the duty in the British army," said a colonel who has served in Ulster for nine months. "Nobody wants to miss it."

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