An Cosantóir

An Cosantóir May 2018 www.dfmagazine.ie 28 | By PRoFESSoR DECLAn MCCABE "Transient ischemic attack" they said; TIA, a mini stroke my sister called it. My 83-year-old father awoke and I was happy to be there. Never before had I seen fear in his eyes. Slight of frame and vulnerable in his hospital gown, but larger than life in the way that good fathers are, he had a confident resilience born of adversity. Little could slow him down or dampen his determination and his hope — always hope; always optimism. When cancer had taken hold, he still exercised to preserve what grasp on life he could. The TIA had borrowed his voice and 69 years of smoking had been unkind to his blood vessels; no amount of aspirin or warfarin could reverse the damage. yet the doctors advised hope: "T is for Transient." When hours turned to days, hope was all we had. It was my deepest privilege to be there when patience paid off. He spoke! First a few words, as if finding his feet on dam- aged legs and surprised they still worked. Then paragraphs followed sentences and there was no stopping him. He said he felt like he was stuck down in a bog hole, and I briefly ques- tioned his mental state. He hadn't worked a bog in decades. But he lucidly likened his recovery process to emerging from deep in the bog, grasping for the light above. The analogy made perfect sense as fluency returned in leaps and starts. He spoke first of family: his pleasure that we all turned out well, his pride in his children and our happiness in our lives, spouses, children, jobs, all of it. And, of course, his be- loved Edna. He had no complaints about any of us and it gave him great comfort. The fear left his eyes, and the intensity and sparkle returned. He spoke and he spoke some more. These precious moments were worth far more than my journey from Vermont to Ball- inasloe. He told me of old friends: Noel Brett, 'Joxer' Keenehan, Brendan Connolly, Tommy O'Neil, Padraig Shine, scout camps in Cliffoney when Lord Mountbatten would show up on a horse and drink tea from a billycan with scruffy Athlone lads. And then he spoke of Jadotville. Had facing mortality re- turned him to where he faced it before? Or is the experience of hostile fire just below the surface for every soldier? Whatever the reason, there was urgency in his conversation and the stories he needed to share. And share he did, and please indulge this son of a soldier who needs to share them again. Fragments of battle as- sembled into a narrative that flowed long past the time when other patients slept. Names, locations, weapons, military jargon, and terms that were passingly familiar from my brief FCA service. Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Moïse Tshombe, Dag Ham- marskjold, Op- eration Morthor, some venom for Connor Cruise O'Brien, and some more for the newspa- per reporter who refused to smuggle letters from Irish POWs. Did I know that army medics carried scissors to slide in next to barbed arrowheads to ease removal? The Balubas were incredible archers. My father was one of 155 Irish soldiers sent by the UN to defend a Congolese town dubbed Jadotville by European colonists. Their position indefensible and exposed, they did what previous UN contingents had not - they dug in: defensive positions, trenches and foxholes. In a flat landscape, vertical structures stop horizontally traveling bullets. Lacking struc- tures, well-trained soldiers make them by digging holes, bag- ging, and piling sand and soil. I learned from my father than even a hung blanket can stifle a rifle bullet. Irish soldiers in Congo confused enemy snipers by hollowing out termite mounds to make bulletproof firing posi- tions that were literally part of the African landscape. From my father, details flowed on into the night. Near misses, a mortar shell that landed at his feet but failed to explode. (Smaller Irish mortars, launched with pinpoint accuracy, always exploded.) Rifle grenades crashed through vegetation but also failed to explode because some teenage soldier neglected to prime them; his young life ended by triangulated Irish rifle fire, his body never falling from the tree where his commanders had roped him in. He told me how snipers hidden in a building during a ceasefire fired on Irish positions. Orders were given to train fire from an antiquated, water-cooled Vickers machine gun, first in the air and then on the windows to keep enemy heads down. A second order directed a single shot between the windows from an 84 mm recoilless rifle. The anti-tank weapon pierced the wall, instantly 'neutralizing' the threat. He described the devastating effect of that shot on human bodies that they wit- nessed when they snuck into the building that night; horrors of war indelible in an old soldier's mind. In the Congo. Martin McCabe on the left with his good friend Paddy Neville on the right.

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