JOHN LARTER and Marta Doherty were both 19, she living in the Catholic Bogside section of Londonderry, he a private in the Royal Anglian Regiment, which arrived in Ulster almost two years ago to keep the peace. They met last March and got engaged in April, and John agreed to become a Catholic. Last May, while they were out walking, three gunmen of the Irish Republican Army stopped them and shot John in the hand. "Marta went to help him," John's stepfather said later. "But for her, he would have been killed. It proved to him that she should be his wife."
Last week, three days before the wedding was to take place, Marta underwent another, even more trying proof. Three masked women seized her at her home, sheared off her dark brown hair, tied her to a lamppost and poured tar over her head. For half an hour, until she was released, Marta slumped against the post while a band of 80 women shouted, "Soldier lover! Soldier lover!" A photographer, alerted in advance by local I.R.A. members, recorded the barbarous scene for the front pages of the world. Two other Catholic girls in Derry suffered similar treatment last week for the offense of dating British soldiers.
Bedroom Snipers. The state of affairs in the most bedeviled parts of Belfast and Londonderry is simple anarchy. Bombs explode daily in hotels, factories and supermarkets. School halls have become barracks; bedrooms have become snipers' nests. In Donegall Square, TIME Correspondent John Shaw cabled from Belfast last week, Bren-gun carriers stand guard over the crowds hurrying home in the autumn dusk before the city closes down for the night. Bus service stops at 7 p.m. because arsonists of the I.R.A. have been setting buses afire to lure security forces into ambush. After 10 p.m., all main roads leading to I.R.A. strongholds are closed to private cars, and no taxi will go near them. One who goes in on foot will be searched by patrolling British troops, or stopped half a dozen times in half a mile by I.R.A. women vigilantes, or even get caught in a sudden crossfire. Every night in the slums off Falls Road, all the walls at street corners are painted white to head height so that I.R.A. snipers can more easily spot troops on night patrol. The army usually repaints the walls in the morning, and the vigilantes repaint them again in the evening.
No Medals. The period of mob violence in Ulster seems to have ended. Instead, the battle is now between the British army, some 13,500 troops drawn from 20 different regiments, and I.R.A. gunmen. There are only about 500 of the gunmen, but they are well armed with tommy guns, rifles and gelignite, and they hold the initiative with their hit-and-run raids. "It's bloody Dodge City in there," said a corporal of the Green Howards regiment on a midnight patrol at the edge of the Ardoyne district, "full of cowboys wanting to be heroes. They'll shoot at any bloody thing."
Officially, this is not a war at all. There is no combat pay, and there will be no combat medals. In fact, the struggle for Ulster has many military points in common with the other antiguerrilla wars that the British army has fought in the past 20 years—Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. "The main difference," says a major in the Black Watch infantry regiment, "is simply that we are fighting in our own country."