Its skipper was Mike Browne. Mike and Bob expertly steered their respective fishing boats on a heading into the wind without banging together while John made more than a dozen trips over eight hours. JC:My biggest challenge was figuring out what to say without incriminating myself or anyone else. The Irish Republican Army is still an illegal organization in Ireland and Britain. I hope I have managed to do that. Another challenge was simply remembering. Some of these incidents happened over 40 years ago. Having said that, many are seared into my memory and will never be forgotten. Furthermore, I had never previously written with a view toward publication and didn’t know if I had the ability to do so. As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.”

Crawley’s story is well told in The Yank. The writing is distinctly British — men are “lads,” a kindness is a “favour,” two weeks is a “fortnight”— and the author avoids commas even in compound sentences. I stumbled across occasional awkward sentences but was impressed by the quality of the prose from a man who is not a writer by trade. They know who to take out and they know who to promote and they do that, that's the way they operate." A young Irish-American man joins an elite US Marine unit to get the most intensive military training possible—then joins the Irish Republican Army, during the days of some of the bloodiest fighting ever in the Irish-British conflict.I would not have joined the IRA if I had have known that core members of the IRA leadership weren’t on the same mission I was on,” he says. The former IRA man explains how at times he had to "walk on eggshells" when around Bulger, who once asked him how to make an under-car booby trap bomb. He didn’t grasp the political considerations we had to factor in when planning or conducting military operations.

The Troubles” lasted about 30 years, from the late 1960s until 1998, and saw more than 3,500 people killed. Then came the Good Friday Agreement that restored self-government to Northern Ireland on the basis of “power sharing” with the U.K. The pact stipulated that Northern Ireland would remain in the U.K. until a majority of people in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland wished otherwise. A foot soldier in the Irish Republican Army delivers an unrepentant memoir. ... An in-the-trenches story of life as an ordinary soldier in a complicated set of circumstances." — Kirkus On the other hand, Crawley’s dialect lends character and authenticity to his tale. His life makes for an enjoyable, worthwhile study, and I’m a better man for having read about it. I couldn’t blame him for not having professional training but some of the stuff he came out with was baffling. I began to see a different side to him, a side that gave me my first niggling concerns about our prospects for victory,” he says. He would later be sentenced at the Old Bailey in May 1996 to thirty-five years for conspiring to blow up the electrical grid that fed south-east England and was released from a British prison on 22 May 2000, as a consequence of the Good Friday Agreement. In all, Crawley would spend fourteen years in prison for his IRA beliefs.Hours earlier, I had stepped off a plane at Kadena Air Base outside Okinawa after a twenty-four-hour flight from California via Alaska and Tokyo. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I wasn’t supposed to be in the Marines. I wanted to be a ‘Green Beret’ like my cousin Ken Crawley, who had spent seven years in that outfit. When I signed up at a US Army recruiting station in Chicago, the contract certified that, after basic training, I would be given an opportunity to attend Jump School, Ranger School and the Special Forces Qualification Course or ‘Q-Course’. There was no guarantee I would make it through this training, of course. Most didn’t. But they would permit me to try. However, while I had obtained the guarantee for assignment to Airborne, Ranger and Special Forces schools at the recruiting station, I had not yet signed the final enlistment papers when fate intervened. The crew from the Irish fishing trawler lined the gunwale of their boat. I didn’t recognise any of them. So we had people at the top, I'm not saying all of them, there were people who were on the same mission as us, but there were other people in crucial positions who are not on the same mission as us, who had a different agenda." I knew that if my Boston mission dragged on without something in it for him, I would eventually wear out my welcome. On more than one occasion, it crossed my mind that gun-running activities on his patch could one day cause him difficulties he would need to resolve.

In my time, just after the end of the Vietnam War, there were two types of Recon: Battalion Recon and Force Recon. The training was similar, and Marines would transfer between Battalion and Force regularly. Force Recon, however, was considered the more elite branch, with missions that took them deeper behind enemy lines than Battalion Recon. Force Recon had been disbanded in the 1st and 3rd Marine Divisions, leaving only the 2nd Force Reconnaissance Company at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Later, I would volunteer for the only Recon that existed in the 3rd Marine Division, the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion based at a small camp called Onna Point on the western shore of Okinawa. The 65-year-old went on to be a trusted member of the republican movement, eventually setting up a transatlantic gun running operation with the help of US Gangster James 'Whitey' Bulger. He also takes us to Dublin, where he is living with his parents. He writes of becoming increasingly aware of the conflict that was raging throughout Ireland and particularly in the North, which was being militarily propped-up by the British army. New York born John Crawley has revealed for the first time how he joined the Provisionals after serving four years with a US Marine Corps special forces unit known as Recon in the 1970s.Because of my blunder in enquiring about Recon, I was made a ‘House Mouse’. A House Mouse was a recruit tasked with cleaning out the drill instructors’ quarters at the top of the squad bay. There were three ‘House Mouses’. Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century. If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire. Thrilling… Crawley gets the reader’s heart pumping as he describes escaping shootouts with enemy troops, battling a hurricane in the North Atlantic while running guns from the U.S. to Ireland, and telling off a CIA agent who tried recruiting him.” — The American Military News