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This story is taken from an interview with Geraldine McGee and Seamus Clenaghan, and has been added to the site with their permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions. The interview and transcription was by Bruce Logan.
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[Geraldine]
Wasn’t your cousin, was he killed, was that during the war?

[Seamus]
Eddie Clenaghan. Eddie was killed by the Americans. Troops. They were drunken men.

[Geraldine]
My father — talking about the Americans. The place they were stationed, where were the Americans stationed?

[Seamus]
Aghilee.

[Geraldine]
My father used to, when the other place was bombed he got work in there.

I suppose they shared them out with other people. Tins of pineapple, and tins of fruit that you would never, ever — luxuries! You would have thought you were in Buckingham palace, coming from the Americans … but they were very good to him. They knew what they were doing.

[Seamus]
The Americans seemed to be well looked after. They had things to give. Chocolate …

[Geraldine]
Chocolate. I remember Chocolate. I remember at Christmas time, getting boxes of goodies, we didn’t know what they were, wrapped up in a big red ribbon. You know, something like that.

[Seamus]
They’re willing to help the people by their generosity. We didn’t have anything round at our place.

We didn’t seem to have an awful lot of Americans, except the Belfast ones being moved from one place to another. There was an American base in Aghillee, and they used to come up to a place called Soldierstown — you probably haven’t heard of it. Soldierstown is about a couple of miles out of Aghillee. It was a small pub and a shop that had everything, and that was owned by relations of mine. And they used to come up there in the evening time, be a bit drunken … and one of my relatives was killed by one. He found there was some difficulty around the pub, and he went down to Aghillee to get the Police to come remove them so he could close the pub. In those days they closed at 10 o’clock, something like that. And then, coming back from Aghillee, they attacked him and they killed him on the spot. I don’t know what exactly happened, but it’s one of the tragedies of the time.

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