"Why join the IRA?" It is a question John Crawley hears a lot and which he now unapologetically answers in his searing memoir, The Yank. Crawley, born in New York in 1957 to Irish immigrant parents, moved to Ireland when he was 14 years old. Citing his Irish republicanism as a process rather than an epiphany, he drew inspiration from both the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic and the American Revolution. At age 18, he returned to America to serve in an elite U.S. Marine Recon unit and, after his enlistment ended in 1979, went back to Ireland. He brought with him valuable military knowledge and skills to join the Irish Republican Army and fight for a "thirty-two-county national republic."
Straightforward and unsentimental, Crawley's memoir contains squirmy moments, as when he recounts shooting a British soldier for the first time: "I didn't feel anything in particular about it... no triumphalism or gloating," he writes. "Neither did I feel any hypocritical remorse." Those unfamiliar with Irish history and politics might be lost at first, but Crawley provides enough context to understand the realities on the ground in the Ireland of the 1980s. Besides the British, Crawley reserves his ire for "incompetent" IRA leadership, those who consistently denied the need for proper field and weapons training. A return trip to the U.S. to purchase guns with the help of the notorious criminal Jim "Whitey" Bulger, whom he calls a "mercurial psychopath," serves as a chilling reminder of Crawley's calling. The Yank fascinates and repels in equal measure. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer and copywriter in Denver