The Yank: My Life as a Former US Marine in the IRA

April 1975. A young Irish-American from Long Island, NY, is on a mission to enlist in an elite unit of the US Marine Corps. His goal: to receive the most intensive and rigorous military training possible, and then move to Ireland to join the IRA and fight to end British occupation of the six counties of Northern Ireland.

In this powerful and brutally honest memoir of his extraordinary experience, John Crawley details the gruelling challenges of his Marine Corp boot camp; then not long after joining the IRA Crawley is sent to Boston to work with notorious American mobster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger to amass an illegal shipment of weapons for the IRA; then captured on the ‘Marita Ann’ gun running trawler off the Kerry coast, imprisoned, and upon release became one of the masterminds behind a campaign to knock out London’s electrical system.

Crawley is blisteringly candid about the people he worked with, including fascinating portrayals of IRA leader Martin McGuinness, and of the psychopathic Whitey Bulger. Crawley is unflinching in his commentary on IRA leadership and their tactics, both military and political, and through it all comes the steadfast voice of a man on a mission, providing an evocative and passionate account where that mission led him and why. To this day, he remains committed to the establishment of all-Ireland Republic.