CONTACT

Ulster terrorism--from the street-level vantage point of a former British army officer, who served two tours of duty there with the Parachute Regiment. Clarke's Ulster is ""an asylum of a place,"" totally removed from any political or historical context, where snipers shoot from church towers, bicycles explode, four-year-olds hurl rocks, and even the graveyards are booby-trapped. He vividly describes the everyday experience of being a British soldier: high-danger patrols in Belfast's Ardoyne and Shankill sectarian ghettos by teenage soldiers ""trying to look hard and unconcerned""; anxiety-filled bomb searches in derelict houses; terrifying street riots (""fright is not the word . . . . I know for certain that there is someone out there with a gun""); days in cramped, squalid observation posts; night patrols, stumbling through fields in the rain, in pro-IRA ""bandit-country"" around Crossmaglen near the border (""the only thing making us do this is discipline and lack of imagination""). And, as tension mounts, everyone prays for a ""contact""--""an opportunity to shoot at anything on the street, pump lead into any living thing and watch the blood flow."" (Remarkably, Clarke manages to make this ambition seem entirely reasonable under the circumstances.) While the portrait of the Irish, of any religion, is predictable (""most of these buggers would shoot me in the back soon as look at me""), certain clichÉs recur: the ""toms"" are always good lads; the senior officers are often fools; and the media are ""vultures."" And there is bravado aplenty: ""If I'm going, let's go out with a bang. Get spread out all over the place."" One-sided, profane (not the gift for one's cousin in the convent), and a trifle melodramatic; but in its way an extraordinary book--and unlikely to be topped in the soldier's-view-of-Ulster category.