David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

Freeland bought in soldiers from the Royal Scots—one of the most obviously and self-consciously Protestant regiments in the entire army. Army helicopters circled overhead, ordering the residents by megaphone to stay inside their homes. Roadblocks were placed at every exit. A curfew was declared, and a systematic house-by-house search began. Twenty- and twenty-one-year-old soldiers, still smarting from the indignity of being pelted with stones and petrol bombs, forced their way into home after home, punching holes in walls and ceilings, ransacking bedrooms. Listen to one of those British soldiers, looking back on what happened that night:
    A guy still in his pajamas came out cursing, wielding a lamp, and whacked Stan across the head. Stan dodged the next one and decked the bloke with his rifle butt. I knew full well that a lot of the lads were taking this opportunity to vent their anger over things already done. Heads were being cracked and houses trashed from top to bottom. Everything in the houses became a mass of rubble, but, out of the blur, little sharp details still cut through: school photos; smiley family pictures (cracked); trinkets and crucifixes (snapped); kids crying; crunching on the glass of the Pope’s picture; unfinished meals and bad wallpaper; coloured toys and TV noise and radio crackle; painted plates; shoes; a body in the hall, flattened against the wall.…This is when I did feel like we’d invaded.
    Three hundred and thirty-seven people were arrested that night. Sixty were injured. Charles O’Neill, a disabled air force veteran, was run over and killed by a British armored car. As his body lay on the ground, one of the soldiers poked a bystander with a baton and said, “Move on, you Irish bastard—there are not enough of you dead.” A man named Thomas Burns was shot by a soldier on the Falls Road at eight p.m. as he stood with a friend who was boarding up the windows of his store. When his sister came to pick up his body, she was told he had no business being on the street at that time. At eleven p.m., an elderly man named Patrick Elliman, thinking the worst was over, went out in his bedroom slippers and shirtsleeves for a pre-bedtime stroll. He died in a burst of army gunfire. One of the neighborhood accounts of the curfew says of Elliman’s death:
    That very night British troops actually entered and quartered themselves in the shot man’s home, the distraught sister having been moved to the other brother’s up the street. This tasteless intrusion into the abandoned home was discovered the next afternoon during the interval in the “curfew” when the brother, with his daughter and son-in-law, went down to the house and found the door broken down, a window broken, kit lying on the floor, shaving tackle on the settee, and used cups in the scullery. Neighbors informed them that the soldiers had dossed down in the upstairs rooms as well.
    A door broken down. A window broken. Dirty dishes left in the sink. Leites and Wolf believed that all that counts are rules and rational principles. But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do—or don’t do—to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.
    By Sunday morning, the situation inside the Lower Falls was growing desperate. The Lower Falls was not a wealthy neighborhood. Many of the adults were unemployed or, if they were not, relied on piecework. The streets were crowded, and the homes were narrow—cheaply built nineteenth-century terraced redbrick row houses, with one room to a floor, and bathrooms in the backyard. Very few houses had a refrigerator. They were dark and damp. People bought bread daily because it grew moldy otherwise. But the curfew was now thirty-six hours old—and there was no bread left. The Catholic neighborhoods of West Belfast are packed so tightly together, and linked by so many ties of marriage and blood, that word spread quickly from one to the next about the plight of the Lower Falls. Harriet Carson walked through Ballymurphy, banging together the lids of pots. Next came a woman named Máire Drumm. 8 She had a bullhorn. She marched through the streets, shouting to the women: “Come out! Fill your prams with bread and milk! The children haven’t gotten any food.”
    The women started to gather in groups of two and four and ten and twenty, until they numbered in the