American Shooter by Gerry Souter

Author:Gerry Souter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
Published: 2012-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

8

THE ME GENERATION UNDER FIRE

After a few years of world travel and adventures with my cameras—in “The White Man’s Grave” along the coast of West Africa; the cracked and wasted desert of Tunisia; Madrid, where my Spanish took on a lisp; Copenhagen, where I shot stories of expatriate Americans—I won my dream job: telling the story of an entire country. The Society for Visual Education, a division of the Singer Corporation, wanted a series of filmstrips shot in the British Isles. After Janet and I treated the girls to a vacation in the Hawaiian Islands, in May 1974 I packed my cameras, a British-to-American dictionary, a new pair of sneakers, and the shooting outline of a dozen stories, and departed. My contact in London was the Central Office of Information on Lambeth Road, a short walk from my hotel at Elephant and Castle. They made the assignment a success, passing me from England to Scotland to Wales with helping hands and infinite patience.

I burned through a hundred rolls of 35mm film and wore out my new sneakers in the first month. London, Bath, Edinburgh, and then off to the Orkney Islands for hours in the North Atlantic with the fishing fleet. The quirky English weather held, and frame by frame each story was told. Melancholy Wales, with its village names that sounded like someone having a coughing fit, offered up starkly beautiful images. After documenting the queen’s birthday and crawling into excavated Viking burial mounds, I returned to London. On August 8, 1974, I stayed up late in my Basingstoke hotel room to listen to Richard Nixon resign the presidency. That event marked my final two stories: the north and south of Ireland.

The ferry from Great Britain bumped along the quay of the terminal in downtown Belfast. My assistant at this time was a young lady from Edinburgh who had offered her estate van (small station wagon) as transport, and it was loaded full of our gear as soon the boat’s ramp lowered to the dock. That was the last easy time we had after arriving on the Emerald Isle. This was during “The Troubles.” At once, the British soldiers who met each ferry gave our car a going-over while other soldiers waited with their FN rifles unslung. My papers from the COI bought us some directions to our hotel and an introduction to the army public relations officer in the morning. It was suggested we not leave the hotel for sightseeing that evening, the city being still “a bit unsettled.” The Catholic Irish Republican Army (IRA), fighting for the reunification of largely Protestant Northern Ireland, ruled by the British, and the independent Republic of Ireland, was in bitter conflict with UK security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.

After an uneasy night listening to some distant tat-tat-tats and muffled booms somewhere out in the dark, we trimmed our equipment to a portable minimum and set out for downtown Belfast as a squadron of gray clouds swept in from the sea. We drove

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