Author: Ray Lane
ISBN No: 9781 804580561
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 256
Publisher: Gill Books
Publisher URL:
https://www.gillbooks.ie/biography/biography/bomb-disposal-army-memoir
Year of publication: 02/09/2024
Brief:
price
£18.99 euros
While private security readers of Ray Lane’s memoir will gain most from the final chapter, the bulk of the book – about the Irishman’s 45-year career as a bomb disposal man in the Irish Defence Forces – has plenty for the British reader.
For one thing, as a young man lane trained with the British Army, which ‘had a purpose-built village, the Felix Centre, at Kineton, with an airport, fire station, supermarket, everywhere somebody might think to put a bomb’. If readers with long memories are wondering about bad feeling between the two nations, Lane does tell of how he had to confront a prejudiced British sergeant who was about to pronounce he had failed a final test of making safe a bomb on an aeroplane, harming Lane’s career. It’s only one of many episodes where the unarguable science of bomb disposal jars with the petty, amusing or nasty sides of human nature.
After serving in Bosnia during the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s, Lane recalls that he ‘simply hadn’t been prepared for the savagery’. Because trauma ‘wasn’t really a thing in my time’, ‘I had nobody to talk to. I had to process these horrors by myself, as we all did on that mission’. Much later – in fact while serving in Afghanistan – Lane went to The Hague to give evidence to the International Criminal Tribunal. That process of prosecuting war-criminals from all sides was not perfect, Lane reflected, ‘at least it exists …. it beats the alternative, which is that we learn nothing’ (page 192). In fact the author concludes in much the same terms. Well into retirement, the United Nations agency UNOPS asked him to go to Ukraine to advise the embattled country on countering mines and improved explosive devices (IEDs). He’s been in numerous conflicts, whether serving in NATO as in Afghanistan or as part of UN peace-keeping forces in Lebanon; ‘I can say that I’ve seen nothing good come out of any of it’.
Why did Lane devote his career to the military, then? To serve; and because as in any institution, the people (of all ranks) are at once the bane and the saving joy of your life. One particualrly amusing story is from Lebanon when Lane was in charge of the food procurement, and set up a wine tasting competition; Italy came first, and the hosts Lebanon second, then South Africa; the French were furious. Readers may wonder at how nationalisms could get so out of hand while on a United Nations mission, though that something so trivial could led to tantrums speaks also to the stresses of peace-keeping. Lane bore ‘physical and mental scars of my service’; like many bomb disposal people, he had the ringing ears of tinnitus.
A story from October 2001 (that is, just after the 9-11 acts of terrorism in the United States) begin a chapter on ‘the hybrid threat’ of a case of powder which was potentially a CBRN incident. First at a school, after taking a mobile phone off a student who was giving a running commentary on national radio, ‘we had to set up a mini-village for triage and every person in that school went through shower decontamination, reclothing in specialist kit and a transfer by ambulance’ to a hospital in Dublin for blood tests. A call straight after at Dublin Airport turned out to be ‘an employee had wanted to go home early and figured that an anthrax scare was the ideal way to do it’.
Whereas bomb disposal requires a team of three, Lane says, CBRN takes about seven (CBRN, chemical-biological-radiological-nuclear, is explained in the two-page glossary at the very end; sadly, the book like so many does not run to an index). Lane goes on to talk about the Manchester Arena terror attack; and training on dealing with marauding terrorists. He makes the case for exercises; one, he admitted, if real, ‘would have been a disaster, but it provided us with a huge amount of information’.
That the Republic of Ireland ever since independence, a century ago now, has chosen to be neutral, does not mean that the Irish are avoiding responsibility. However, Lane closes his book with some searching points about how Ireland needs to make its Defence Forces relevant, ‘to meet specific global security threats’. The ills he describes of the IDF sound much like Britain’s, though on an even smaller scale: too few weapons such as naval vessels to be more than a token presence; the sadness of physical camps looking run-down.
Contrast in jobs
Lane opens his memoir by contrasting his first job, on the border with Northern Ireland in County Cavan, ‘to defuse a 1000 kg bomb, planted by the IRA’, with the last, in 2011, when he has to take a break (as is normal in bomb disposal, though it doesn’t translate well into the movies) and puts on his spectacles. He knows he’s become too old, and weary. He wonders if mankind ever learns from mistakes, and learns better than to cover up mistakes. Like so many Irish stories of his generation, in passing he has shown the colossal changes in society – from education and the entire country in thrall to Roman Catholicism, taking in the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979. As raised by Lane, Ireland has the same problem as the UK militarily, only greater; if its military is only small, that implies it has to be agile in its response to risks; yet armies are not good at being dynamic. As Lane shows from his time in Afghanistan, the casualties arose mainly from Taliban IEDs, expensive drones and tanks were neither useful for fighting the bomb-makers, nor did they protect troops from explosions. Future wars will not be fought in ways helpful to western weaponry either.
