British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as “the reservation”—Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all. Among themselves (and occasionally in the press) the soldiers would decry their adversary’s lack of humanity, saying, “These people are savages.” Hughes and his men were out there, invisible and silent, embedded in the community. At Palace Barracks, outside the city, where many of the soldiers were stationed, you could hear the bombs going off in Belfast at night. The windowpanes would shudder.
