“What is it to take a life?” Chips our tour guide postulated to the group in his thick Irish brogue. He did not seem like the type of man that would ponder this while was serving in prison. “To me, bullets and bombs are time machines.”
After taking us through the neighborhood in Belfast, Nothern Ireland where he grew up and subsequently defended with his life, amidst mural after mural dedicated to the bloody Cause, replete with balaclava-wearing soldiers and arms, he stopped us all in a small garden. He walked us in and showed us his brother’s grave, amongst the names of a dozen or so other volunteers. He wanted us to see where his brother’s story ended.
His brother joined the Irish Republican Army when Chips was just a boy. While the people in this neighborhood saw him and this group as freedom fighters, such as with most conflicts around the world, others saw them as terrorists. Chips did not get into the operations which his brother part took. It could have been anything from assassinations, bombings, kidnapping, transportation of contraband, or even financing. The IRA was versatile on this front. He also did not discuss why his brother left the organization. Even though his brother had been out of the IRA for a time, such as with conflicts that lasts for hundreds of years, people’s memories are long. Chips surmised that his brother was targeted for assassination by someone from the factory where he worked. Maybe it came up in conversation with someone he thought he could trust.
One day as he was coming home from work, two men stalked him to his front steps and placed a single bullet in his head. Although he did not say it, I imagine that given this particular brutality, it was a closed casket funeral. His family would not even get to see him to say goodbye.
Following a probable Irish wake, the bitter milk of grief and sorrow curdled to rage. Chips, already an impressionable boy, was thrust into manhood. He became a volunteer to the Irish Republican Army. Chips was unassuming. He was of average height and average build, with the features of an average Irishman from the neighborhood. But behind his glasses, he was primed for the Cause. He told us that he never directly killed anyone. But, his chosen task for Irish saoirse or freedom was to be a bomb courier. He had done dozens of missions, but one day his luck run out. He was caught by the British army, arrested, and imprisoned for over 10 years.
Having a lot of time to think, he traced all his and his family’s strife to one single bullet. The bullet that would make his brother never become an old man, would make his nieces grow up without a father, make his sister-in-law live without a husband, and would make him trade 10 good years of his life to the state he was fighting against.
“Bullets and bombs are time machines.” They change the future of everyone involved. But he continued that it is the choices that we make that define the rest. And it is for that reason when he was finally free, he laid his guns down.
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