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In my naiveté, I thought it would take no time to answer. It is not, after all, a difficult historical point. Death is so final that surely there could be no problem over such a basic building block of history. Six months later, I feel quite different. Far from being basic, it has proved to be pregnant with prejudice and obfuscation, and has left me deeply suspicious of the Ministry of Defence's attitude to remembering those who gave their lives in uniform throughout the Troubles.

One would have thought it simple to keep records at the MoD of those who died as a result of Irish terrorism. The current round of Troubles in Ulster began only in 1969, with the first serving military victim dying on February 6, 1971, when Gunner Robert Curtis was shot by an IRA gunman in north Belfast. Yet when I approached the MoD, I found that its records were far from complete. I gave the head of its news department my request for details of serving personnel killed by Irish terrorism and, after a bit of bureaucratic delay and muddle lasting three weeks, an answer of sorts was forthcoming.

It arrived in the form of a 21-page fax listing Gunner Curtis and working through the years to the most recent death in 1998. The list had 651 names, but closer scrutiny raised doubts. Where were the RAF victims? And what about the Royal Navy? Where were details of those terrorist landmarks, the Hyde Park bomb, the Regent's Park bomb, the Guildford pub bomb, the Deal bomb? And what about the Servicemen killed in West Germany and Holland? 

When I put this to the senior civil servant, I was told that no full list of all terrorist victims had ever been compiled. This came as a surprise, but he said that the only list on offer was one with the 651 names, which covered the Army and Royal Marines in Northern Ireland itself. The MoD simply did not keep a full list of all service personnel killed by Irish terrorism no matter where. 

There was no call for such a list, he said. When I asked if the relevant departments of the ministry could be asked to put one together, he refused. The list of 651 was as much as I was going to get. I set about  researching the missing bits, and initially trusted that the MoD list would at least be reliable - another senior civil servant had described the 651 as the ministry's "gospel". I could not have been more wrong.

As well as going laboriously through newspaper cuttings, the best way to learn anything about the Army was to do what I always do, and ask the regiments. The regimental structure would surely make up for bureaucratic muddle at the MoD, I thought, as I set about ringing the regimental colonels of more than 70 units.

Since 1971, some regiments had been merged and renamed, but surely it would be easy to track down an authoritative regimental source and confirm each unit's losses. The regiments are bound, I thought, to have
comprehensive and accurate records.

Sadly this was true in only a handful of cases. Some regimental colonels knew the answer immediately and even knew the victims personally. As senior officers in 2000, they had often been young subalterns in the early 1970s, and some remembered full well the horror when colleagues were shot or blown up in the violent early days, when the Army was losing more than 100 people a year.

But some regimental contacts were very poorly inforrned. I lost count of the number of times I was sent supposedly definitive accounts of a regiment's dead, only to find later that the regiment had forgotten a soldier here or a detail there. 

One corps suffered only one fatality, but its central archive managed to forget him: another corps has spelt the name of its sole victim incorrectly for 27 years; an infantry regiment carved an Ulster roll of honour on a granite stone in Belfast and yet still got three names and a rank wrong.

There were numerous glitches, but the low point came when an officer from one of the Foot Guards regiments spoke to me with a clear tone of impatience in his voice, saying "stop wasting my time". He clearly had better things to do than account for those few members of his regiment who had been murdered by terrorists.

I was stunned. It got worse, though, as it became apparent that the MoD's original list was wrong. It omitted at least eight soldiers, and included some but not all road traffic accidents, and some but not all "friendly fire" incidents. The inconsistencies needed checking and the typographical errors correcting.

There were numerous spelling errors and mistakes with dates. This may sound trivial but, for one widow I interviewed, details are one of the few things that she has left of her husband. For this victim, and thousands like her, the best way to draw a line under the past is to commemorate their loss with dignity. This is frankly impossible, given the current state of central MoD records.

As I say, what hope is there for Northern Ireland if we cannot even remember our dead?