Gone To Iraq And Ruin

“IT WAS THE PERFECT KILLING GROUND. As the rounds slammed into my Toyota I knew that the ambush site was chosen with precision and deadly cunning. The insurgents had waited until all our security vehicles had stopped around the stranded front five trucks before they then unleashed their main weapon -- a Russian-made PK heavy machine gun set up on the roof of a two-storey building to our left. The instant that machine-gun opened up, it began to cut our convoy to pieces. We were now taking heavy fire from three sides.
The civilian drivers were either dead or dying. I can only guess but there must have been 50 or 60 insurgents surrounding our convoy and their fire was withering.
I was trying to return aimed fire -- but it was hard because I’d been shot in the right elbow. By now, my fatigues were covered in blood which was pouring from my elbow wound and from my bare arms which had been shredded as I combat-crawled along the glass-covered roadway …”

Sounds like an extract from a Jack Higgins novel, but Padraig O’Keefe’s Hidden Soldier is the real deal – Corkman O’Keefe served with the French Foreign Legion in a variety of hot-spots around the world, including Cambodia and Sarajevo, before heading to Iraq as a ‘security specialist’, where the attack described above happened. Headlined ‘There is nothing like the loneliness of realising that you’re the only one left alive on the battlefield’, the Irish Independent has a nice splash on Hidden Soldier, which is published by the O’Brien Press.

The True Crime Round-Up: It’s Crime! It’s True!! And It’s A Round-Up!!!

Some intriguing new Irish true crime offerings for your perusal, people: first up is Padraig O’Keefe’s Hidden Soldier, subtitled ‘An Irish Legionnaire’s Wars from Bosnia to Iraq’. Unable to settle back into civilian life after serving in Bosnia and Cambodia with the French Foreign Legion, O’Keefe became a ‘hidden soldier’ and wound up on ‘security operations’ in Haiti and Iraq. ‘An intense, exciting and vivid account of extraordinary and sometimes horrific events,’ reckon the blurb-elves at O’Brien, and if any of them are reading this, we’d love a review copy, ta very much … Minor Offences: Ireland’s Cradle of Crime is the title of Tom Tuite’s investigation into the underage criminals ‘who spend more time in the courtroom than the classroom’. Alongside the more lurid details of their criminal activity, Tuite explores the backdrop to juvenile crime, concluding that the one constant element that links anti-social behaviours is dysfunctional families. Gill and Macmillan are doing the honours … Finally, Brandon Books will publish James Monaghan’s Colombian Jail Journal in November. “Now, for the first time,” say Brandon’s blurb-elves, “James Monaghan tells the inside story of the Colombia Three: why they were in the demilitarised zone; what they discussed with the FARC rebels; how they survived the daily dangers of their time in prison. It is an extraordinary, unique account.” The burning question: were Monaghan, Martin McCauley and Niall Ferguson – allegedly IRA men advising the FARC rebels on how best to maximise their mass-killing capacity – really in the Colombian demilitarised zone for a spot of bird-watching? Only time, that perennial doity rat, will tell.