Strabane in the 1980s was a town on edge. Sitting directly on the border with the Republic, with Lifford visible across the Foyle, it was a place where the IRA could attack and disappear in minutes. Between 1971 and 1991, sixteen separate Republican attacks killed at least one member of the British security forces. RUC and Army bases were targeted with sniper fire, mortars, RPGs, grenades, and bombs - sometimes several times a week. Strabane was, in proportion to its size, the most bombed town in Europe. The Town Hall had been destroyed in 1972 and the rebuilding had barely caught up before more damage. The town's unemployment rate became the highest in the industrial world. A few weeks before the February ambush, in December 1984, the SAS had killed four IRA Derry Brigade volunteers in two separate ambushes - the Kesh ambush and the Gransha hospital shooting four days later. The IRA in West Tyrone was already grieving.

On the morning of 23 February 1985, the three Strabane volunteers were either returning weapons to an arms cache off Plumbridge Road, or collecting fresh ones - accounts differ. As they entered a field beside the road, an SAS unit opened fire. Local witnesses said no warning to surrender was given. The Devine brothers and Charlie Breslin were killed where they stood. Over one hundred rounds were fired in seconds. The pathologist who conducted the inquest in February 1987 told the court that the victims had been hit while down, that the wounds suggested deliberate finishing shots, and that all three had been struck once in the head. Families and Republican commentators argued the ambush was part of a wider British 'shoot-to-kill' policy - a phrase that defined much of the legal and political argument of the period.

On 7 May 2002, more than seventeen years after the shooting, the Ministry of Defence settled a case brought by the families of the Devine brothers and Charlie Breslin in Belfast High Court. The sum was undisclosed. The settlement did not amount to an admission of wrongdoing, but for the families it was the closest acknowledgement they would receive that something - whatever the official term - had gone wrong in that field. The legal battle, by then, had outlasted the conflict itself: the Good Friday Agreement had been signed four years before. The Devine brothers had been buried as IRA volunteers; their families had spent two decades trying to reframe how they were killed. Three men in a field, dozens of bullets, and a courtroom on the other side of the Province where the truth got partially recorded in the lawyer's language of 'an undisclosed amount.'

The Strabane ambush was the first in a long sequence of SAS and undercover operations against the IRA between 1985 and 1992, concentrated along the Fermanagh, Tyrone and South Armagh borders. A year later the IRA's Fermanagh commander Séamus McElwaine was killed in an ambush. In 1987 the Loughgall ambush killed eight East Tyrone volunteers. In 1988 three more were killed during Operation Flavius in Gibraltar - the case that would generate the famous European Court of Human Rights ruling. That August, three IRA men died in the ambush at Drumnakilly. In 1991 three more died at Coagh. In February 1992 four were killed at Clonoe. The campaign had become, in effect, two intelligence wars layered on top of each other. Strabane today is a quieter town, with no British Army presence since the Good Friday Agreement, but the field off Plumbridge Road still carries the weight of a morning in 1985 when three men - the youngest still a boy - died there.