The Irish Times would observe afterward that 'this stretch of road has been a favourite ambush spot for successive generations of IRA men since the 1920s.' The geography of east Tyrone made it so - hedgerows, country lanes, sight lines, escape routes south toward the border or east into the hills. The IRA's East Tyrone Brigade and South Armagh Brigade had been running roadside bomb operations against British forces for nearly two decades. In August 1979 the Warrenpoint ambush had killed eighteen soldiers in a single attack. In December 1979 four soldiers died on the Ballygawley Road in the Dungannon land mine attack. In May 1981 five died at Altnaveigh. In July 1983 four UDR soldiers died near Ballygawley. In December 1985 the Ballygawley police barracks itself was bombed, with two officers killed and the building destroyed. The pattern was so dense it had its own grammar.

The Light Infantry's 36 soldiers on the bus that night came from England. They had just finished a short holiday at home. They were riding in an unmarked civilian-looking bus precisely because military vehicles drew attacks. The bomb, planted in a car beside the road, was detonated remotely as they came past. The blast hurled the bus thirty metres down the road and split it open. Eight men were killed outright; 28 more were wounded, many seriously. One former IRA member would later say, almost coldly, that Semtex had been unnecessary for the result: 'we were having plenty of success without Semtex. At Ballygawley we only got eight, but it was a bus of about fifty-six. If we'd used a fertiliser bomb, the whole bus would have been destroyed.' That kind of statement, made years later, is hard to read and gives some sense of the violence's machinery. Eight young men, sons and brothers, dying on a country road in a place they did not know.

The British military response was immediate and lasting. From the morning of 20 August 1988, the British Army began ferrying troops in and out of County Tyrone by helicopter rather than road - a fundamental change in how the army would operate in the Province for the remainder of the conflict. Ten days later, on 30 August, three IRA members - Gerard Harte, Martin Harte, and Brian Mullin - were ambushed and killed by the SAS at Drumnakilly, County Tyrone. According to author Nick Van der Bijl, British intelligence identified the three as the perpetrators of the Ballygawley attack; other accounts say only Mullin was suspected, and that the SAS operation was already planned. The mother of one of the soldiers killed in the bombing accused the British military of negligence and claimed it was 'trying to conceal the truth' about how the bus came to be on a forbidden road.

Two months after the bombing, the British Government introduced the broadcasting ban that prevented the voices of Sinn Féin and IRA members from being broadcast on television or radio in the UK. The ban, in place from 1988 to 1994, was widely understood as a direct response to the public horror generated by the Ballygawley attack and the Lisburn van bombing of June that year (in which six off-duty soldiers had been killed running a charity marathon). The eight soldiers killed at Ballygawley are remembered on Light Infantry rolls of honour and on memorials in their home towns in England. The road outside Curr is quiet now, with no obvious marker - just hedges, fields, and the long sight lines that made it useful to whoever planted the bomb. Three IRA members died at Drumnakilly ten days later. The arithmetic of violence in Tyrone, even after the Good Friday Agreement, has been very difficult to settle.