In New York, in late 1994, I was chatting about the new post-ceasefire situation in Northern Ireland with a prominent Irish-American businessman. He assured me that while his own personal preference was for a united Ireland, he would happily give his support to any political arrangement that had the backing of a majority of people within each of the two Northern communities, writes David Adams
He was adamant that then president Bill Clinton held the same view and intended doing everything he could to help the British and Irish governments bring about such a settlement. He then went on to say something that seemed so odd at the time it has stayed with me ever since.
"While I have a deep affection for Ireland," he said, "I am an American first and foremost. My first loyalty is and always will be to America." "We [ the USA] simply cannot afford for the Troubles to continue any longer. We cannot afford to have our closest and most reliable ally's troops bogged down in a local dispute when all of this Islamic stuff in the Middle East is about to get very messy."
I nodded in agreement, pretending I had at least some notion of what he was talking about. It would be a few years before it became very clear just how messy the "Islamic stuff" was to get, and not just in the Middle East.
My friend's words have returned to me a few times since 1994, particularly in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York's Twin Towers, and when America and Britain invaded Iraq. With the official ending this week of Operation Banner, the British army's name for its 38-year role in support of the civil powers in Northern Ireland, I thought of them again.
It struck me that now, at last, the US's closest and most reliable ally was finally freed from its military-sapping commitment to a local dispute. And not for the first time I thought about how, where governments are concerned, the "bigger picture" invariably stretches beyond the apparent.
In Northern Ireland, however, interest seldom wanders outside the parameters of our own region. And so it proved again this week when radio phone-in programmes were swamped by local politicians and members of the public eager to give their assessment of the military's contribution to our recent past.
That, for many soldiers, service in Northern Ireland has been replaced by tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't get a mention. The issue under discussion was more important than that of soldiers being removed from one set of dangers only to be confronted by others.
Where Catholic/nationalist/republican contributors were concerned, little good could be said about the British army. For the Protestant/unionist/loyalist community, there was little that any fair-minded person could find to criticise.
It all chimed so predictably with religious and political affiliation you could have written the scripts. Very depressing, but hardly surprising.
After all, a large chunk of recent history is up for grabs, with an opportunity to try to bend it in one direction or another. Yet history, as we know, has at best only a tenuous connection to the truth. And the truth is never so simplistically black or white.
The British army's record in Northern Ireland is indeed far from unblemished. It did make a number of terribly tragic "errors". Some were the result of plain arrogance and stupidity, some of negligence, and a few were undoubtedly criminal: none more so than Bloody Sunday.
But its sacrifice was also great (763 members were killed and thousands more physically and psychologically maimed) and there were numerous individual acts of heroism where soldiers knowingly sacrificed themselves to protect civilians. It is beyond dispute that the army did save innumerable lives.
Many of those politicians who were loudest this week in denouncing past misdeeds by the army had, themselves, previously put a lot of effort into trying to create situations where military overreaction would occur. It suited their purpose, at the time, for the army to wreak havoc within nationalist communities. Some of the same people have very little room to criticise anybody when it comes to civilian casualties or the violation of human rights.
On a wider front, those who bemoan the fact that British troops were ever deployed in the North are noticeably shy about suggesting any realistic alternative. In 1969 there was simply no other option if the RUC was not to be completely overrun and a full-blown civil war was not to break out.
In the end, though, it is pointless cogitating on the British army's role in the North. Every bit as pointless as speculating on how many Border Protestants might still be alive today or how much sooner the conflict might have ended if the Irish Army and the Garda had been a little more active throughout the Troubles.
We all know the history and will form judgments that suit. Yet history is one thing; do we really know the truth? Perhaps the Troubles ended only when the American government decided, for its own selfish reasons, to put pressure on all concerned.