I couldn’t blame him for not having professional training but some of the stuff he came out with was baffling. I began to see a different side to him, a side that gave me my first niggling concerns about our prospects for victory,” he says.

Q: Having successfully written a first book about your own life, do you have an idea for a second book yet? And if so, how might you approach its writing differently from your writing regimen for THE YANK? feels compelled to share. At its core, The Yank is an adventure filled with scenes of combat, espionage, and smuggling,That's why they are chasing the royal family all over Ireland when they come here and shake their hand. But I would never have joined the IRA had I known that they were going to settle for an internal settlement on British terms. In the years that followed, the rigorously trained Crawley was repeatedly frustrated by the unevenness of the IRA. Many fighters had little or no training. The weaponry included every kind of firearm known to man. IRA commanders ranged from professional to incompetent, with dedicated amateurs comprising the majority. Worse, the Irish in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland were divided in their aims: Some wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic, others hoped for continued British control, and still others wanted different arrangements altogether.

Although many will say that Crawley’s conscience should be tormented for the rest of his life, he insists he has “no regrets”. What plays most on his mind is the informers in the IRA. “There’s people at the top who were at their skullduggery, but hopefully in the fullness of time that’ll come out. They were deeply embedded. I trusted some people who couldn’t be trusted.” His life makes for an enjoyable, worthwhile study...." — The Washington Independent Review of Books New York-born Crawley describes his life with a lean style and at a clip. The reader can’t help being carried along. Crawley leaves Ireland in the 1970s to enlist in the Marine Corps with the idea of returning to join the IRA, the story finding its flow with him signing up in 1979. The Yank gives us an inside account of the realities of guerrilla warfare, with none of the romanticism attached. The small, circumstantial details of such a life stay with you: a transient existence, yet often made up of waiting and frustrations, whereas “the action” comes fast, fleeting. I wasn’t very interested in the criminal underworld except what they could do for us. Buying guns was illegal so we had to have somebody who was willing to break the law to do it. They say, ‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ and that’s what we had to do,” says Crawley. The IRA split over how to react between the old-line IRA, and the new Provisional IRA — the Provos, mostly impassioned young men who were not hesitant to resort to violence.Whitey suggested he could arrange for IRA men on the run to move to Boston, where he would supply them with false identifications, work and places to live. A foot soldier in the Irish Republican Army delivers an unrepentant memoir. ... An in-the-trenches story of life as an ordinary soldier in a complicated set of circumstances." — Kirkus While in the states he was introduced to James 'Whitey' Bulger, who at the time was one of the most ruthless mobsters in Boston.