One bloody Sunday: 35 years ago, British soldiers opened fire on Irish protesters: it's an old story, of many times, many places

He should have died that day. His hands were in the air and an assault rifle was pointed at his head. Around him, people were so terrified that they were tripping out of their shoes as they tried to run away. Mismatched loafers and pumps and sneakers lay scattered across the road as bullets continued to zip around the courtyard. Many of the wounded were pulled to safety. A priest, Fr. Edward Daly, would soon wave his handkerchief as if signaling surrender.

Liam stood there--his hands in the air--while the British soldier 20 feet away squinted down the barrel of a warm gun. It was a 7.62 mm self-loading rifle. For several long seconds Liam didn't know what would happen. He had already seen his friends, Joseph Mahon and Jim Wray, shot within minutes of each other. This British paratrooper, known today as simply "Solider F," examined Liam carefully. Time stopped. The gulls were screeching overhead.

And then, very slowly, Soldier F lowered his gun and seemed to shrug. He turned away and strolled toward the armored barricade as if nothing had happened. Maybe he felt that his job was done or maybe he was satisfied with his tally for the day. Sirens began to fill the air. Seventeen people were wounded, 13 were dead.

This happened 35 years ago and I'm standing here in Derry with Liam (name changed for his protection) where it all took place. Bullet holes are still in the wall and if you look hard you can almost see the body of Jim Wray on the curb in front of us. I've been trying to make sense of Bloody Sunday for a long time now. My family is from Northern Ireland and what happened on that day changed the country forever. Most of my professional life has focused on the history of Northern Ireland. I know all the facts and figures, I can talk confidently to reporters and students about the Troubles, but I can't say that I really understand what happened here between 1972 and 1998. Not really. My head understands, but not my heart.

I'm in love with Northern Ireland. It's my ancestral home, my genealogical grounding, and if things had gone just a little bit differently, I might have been raised here and not in Minnesota. Back in 1620, my family settled outside Belfast in a little village called Aghalee. My clan got a charter from King Charles I and began to build a home, which would eventually become a massive farming estate known as Beechlawn. It was eventually sold to another family in 1952. There is a Protestant church nearby with a graveyard that holds the bones of my ancestors and whenever I visit Beechlawn, I make sure to linger at the family plot. I try to wrap my imagination around the idea that my relatives, for three long centuries, have been buried here, bone upon bone. My people, deep in the soft.

I went to Northern Ireland for the first time in 1986. I was a teenager and I didn't know what to expect. The American news made it seem like bombs went off every hour and that just about everyone had machine guns in their houses. Catholics and Protestants were always at each others' throats. When I arrived in Northern Ireland, I noticed that British troops patrolled the sweets, tank-like police cars lumbered down the road, and there was the constant thumping of helicopters in the sky. It seemed that my expectations about the place were accurate but when my relatives welcomed me like a prodigal son, and not one of them seemed to care that I was Catholic, I realized that Northern Ireland would not be an easy place to understand. Such reductive thinking of a complex political situation embarrasses me now. I've never looked at world events, or the American media, quite the same since.

I've returned to Belfast almost every year. I've seen car bombs, a number of riots, burning buses and the aftermath of two murders, and, I hasten to add, I've also seen a world brimming with laughter and good friends and kindness and hospitality and clemency. Belfast is a good place with an evil history chained around its neck. I've worked hard to straddle the ideological divide in Northern Ireland and I've listened to both sides of this torn community as carefully as possible. In 1993, I became a citizen of Ireland. I lived in England for three years. My wife is British. I'm not sure how all of this influences my relationship with Northern Ireland, but I know that it does.

The facts behind Bloody Sunday are documented in both the Widgery Report as well as the more recent, and more accurate, Saville Report. Almost 40 years ago, Catholics in Northern Ireland were marching for voting reform, fair employment, fair housing, and fair education. They were inspired by the civil rights movement they saw happening in the United States. The protests in Belfast and Derry were largely peaceful. The march that was organized for Jan. 30, 1972, appeared to be no different.

The British army had initially been brought into Northern Ireland to protect the Catholics from the Protestants. Even those labels--"Catholic" and "Protestant"--conjure up a backwards society that is still grousing about a religious schism that occurred more than 400 years ago. This is not a holy war. No, we would be better served to see Catholics as largely wanting a united Ireland, and Protestants largely wanting to remain a part of the United Kingdom. Regardless of what labels we use (and there are always plenty of nasty labels we could use), a civil war has been smoldering in Northern Ireland since it was first created in 1921. It is a civil war that has been fought in slow motion. I suppose you could say it began when Protestants created laws that prevented Catholics from assuming positions of power. By the late 1960s, Catholics were demanding their civil rights, but the Protestants, who controlled virtually everything, were reluctant to give " them their rights. It's an old story. The haves versus the have-nots. The entitled versus the dispossessed.