Between Community and Command: British Enlisted Soldiers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles

Between Community and Command: British Enlisted Soldiers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles

The lived experience of British Army enlisted soldiers, especially the Royal Green Jackets, during Operation Banner in Northern Ireland (1969-2007), recovered through oral history interviews with veterans.

2026-10-08

Dr Elizabeth Egan (project supervisor), Department of History, University of Warwick

Histories of the British Army in Northern Ireland have tended to focus on officers, strategy and tactics, leaving the experience of the enlisted men who made up most of the force largely unheard. This project begins with one of those men, my grandfather, a Royal Green Jackets warrant officer whose 1972 MBE for operational service in Northern Ireland has never been explained, and asks what oral history can recover where the institutional record is silent. Drawing on five oral history interviews with veterans of the Royal Green Jackets and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, whose service ranged from 1969 to the mid-2000s, the project takes a social history approach to their lives before deployment, their conditions of service, their relationships with the communities they policed, and their reflections decades later. It argues that many enlisted men shared more materially with those communities than with the officers who commanded them; that Irish heritage pulled soldiers in very different directions; that community attitudes towards the Army shifted sharply across the conflict; and that much of the practical knowledge shaping soldiers’ conduct was passed on informally and never recorded. The project complicates the image of the Army as a single institution, and shows how oral history can recover what the archive leaves out. Keywords: oral history; British Army; Northern Ireland; Operation Banner; the Troubles; social history

oral history, British Army, Northern Ireland, the Troubles, Operation Banner, social history, enlisted soldiers, Royal Green Jackets, veterans, class, Irish identity, memory, counter-insurgency, military history, URSS 2026