The land around Altnaveigh - rolling green country outside Newry, looking south toward the border - was by 1981 one of the most heavily contested places in Western Europe. The IRA's South Armagh Brigade had been waging a roadside-bomb campaign against British Army and RUC patrols for over a decade. In April 1979, four RUC officers had been killed by a roadside bomb at Bessbrook. That August, eighteen British soldiers had died at Warrenpoint in the largest single attack on the British Army of the entire Troubles. South Armagh had become known to the army as 'bandit country' - a phrase the soldiers used and the locals resented. The hunger strike intensified everything. By May 1981 the IRA prisoners in the Maze had been refusing food for two months in their demand for political status, and the political temperature in Northern Ireland had risen close to boiling.

Sometime before the convoy passed, an IRA team had dug the landmine into the road and laid a radio command wire to a hidden firing position. They watched the first vehicle go by. When the second came over the spot, they pressed the button. The blast was vast - the explosive yield reportedly around a thousand pounds, comparable to the largest IED detonations in modern military experience. The vehicle's engine cleared the Belfast-Dublin railway embankment. The crater filled the road. Helicopters and a spotter plane were in the air within minutes, sweeping the countryside; the South Armagh Brigade had melted away across the border or into the network of farms and fields they knew far better than the army did. The five soldiers were all from England - four with the Royal Green Jackets, one with the Royal Corps of Transport. Their bodies were not removed for several hours while security forces checked for secondary devices.

The IRA's South Armagh Brigade claimed responsibility almost immediately with a statement that was both political and brutal: 'British soldiers should realize that the English public and the English politicians do not give a damn about their lives. You are fighting a war which you cannot win.' Raymond McCreesh, from Camlough less than ten miles away, died on hunger strike on 21 May, two days after the bombing. By the time the hunger strike ended in October, ten men had starved themselves to death, beginning with Bobby Sands. Margaret Thatcher's government refused to grant political status. The cycle of violence intensified through the rest of 1981 and into the years that followed. The Altnaveigh bombing was the deadliest attack on British troops since Warrenpoint, and it cemented the South Armagh Brigade's reputation - among friend and foe - as the IRA unit the British Army most feared.

What gets lost in the operational arithmetic - the explosive yield, the radio detonation, the statement after - is what the soldiers' families lost. Paul Bulman, the driver, was nineteen. Andrew Gavin was also nineteen. John King was twenty. Michael Bagshaw was twenty-five. Grenville Winstone was twenty-seven. They came from England. They had families, parents, in some cases siblings; some had spouses. They were doing the job they had signed up for. The five names are recorded on rolls of honour and on the Royal Green Jackets and Royal Corps of Transport memorial sites. The road outside Newry - quiet now, fields and hedgerows on either side - holds no obvious marker, but locally the spot is known. Three days later, the May funerals in five English towns held the kind of grief that does not heal quickly. McCreesh's funeral, a few days after that, drew tens of thousands in Camlough. Two different mourning ceremonies for two different communities, in the same week, in the same border country, with the same conflict running through them all.