Picture a general in his army boots trying to tiptoe over the eggshell that is the Northern Ireland story of the past 38 years - and the military's part in all of that.

At the end of that very long war, which Nick Parker prefers to call a " campaign" or a "mission" or a "challenge" or a " fight" or really anything but a war, the Army is getting ready to switch the lights out on Operation Banner.

It's the longest running operation in British military history, and it is how it describes all those years in a support role to the police here.

There is a symbolic significance to all of this, of course there is.

It is a further clearing of the battlefield, and it means an entirely different role for the Army in Northern Ireland and for the 5,000 soldiers who will remain in a peacetime garrison.

This has been a learning ground for the British Army, and also a playground for the war games that were part and parcel of a 38-year fight.

Lieutenant General Nicholas Parker is the most senior army officer in Northern Ireland today - the GOC or General Officer Commanding.

My interview with him was a kind of sword fence in which I sensed he was always on his guard.

It was a military interview with an eye to the political picture.

So, there was no straying into the language of war, no verdict on winners or losers, no detailed description of the IRA as an enemy other than a comment, "Well it's taken 38 years. So, it would be totally wrong for me to sit here and someway say, 'Oh no they were irrelevant'. Of course that's not the case."

On all of this, he knew those army boots could with one wrong step crush the eggshell.

Rather he chose to put the Army's role in the context of helping to create an enabling security environment that allowed for political progress.

That stable security situation was the "carpet" on which others could arrange the political furniture.

"I think at the highest level we've learned that security is simply an enabler," the General told the Belfast Telegraph.

"You have to work as part of a general consensus. You need to support the police. You produce a carpet, which other people can then move the furniture around on," he continued.

"And it's that, it's the social, political, economic programmes that need to be woven into what you are doing, which will eventually bring you to a conclusion - whatever that conclusion is. And I think we've learned that, and I think that is the sort of lesson that we should have been taking to other places, because it seems to apply wherever you go."

The General believes that the argument or debate about winners and losers here is used to "aggravate" and is not "a responsible way of looking at what's been going on, which has been a highly complex process."

So, I try again - Would it be better described as a war with no winners?

He's not going there -well trying not to go there, not wanting to get involved in this "war" discussion, always wanting to get away from that word as quickly as possible, and to set a different context, and a different tone.

He is more comfortable with his words - his description of events.

"To a section commander on Leeson Street in 1972 with a sniper firing at him, he, as far as he is concerned, is in a war," the Army's most senior officer in Northern Ireland responds.

"So, in those terms, yes, it's a fight, but if you take it to the bigger stage, it's not a war. It is a challenge of some sort that you've got to build the jigsaw round. And if you treat it as a war, some of the pieces of the jigsaw won't fit, because there will be this sense of conflict."

That's the jigsaw in which the creation of a stable security environment is the "enabler" - the piece that allows the picture to develop.

But there are many pieces missing - Army pieces, police pieces, IRA and loyalist pieces - that off stage scene that is the dirty war.

I then quoted to the General a document - "an analysis of military operations in Northern Ireland" - written last year, and which says the British Government's main military objective in the 1980s was "the destruction of PIRA rather than resolving the conflict".

My argument was that it sounded like the language of war - that it had the ring of winning and losing - and was the stuff of victory and defeat.

"Your point is an entirely fair one," the General accepts, on the basis of what I read to him, but then he went on to offer further explanation.

"If you look at the campaign, if I may call it a campaign. In the seventies there was a lot of action, reaction, trying to establish the carpet. The eighties, I think, was the laying of the carpet, and in that sense it is entirely legitimate that somebody says my priority at the moment is to achieve a level of security which will then allow me to shift the furniture... But if you read it as defeat then you are slightly missing the point. That's the way that they were expressing the need to provide a security environment that would let their other programmes progress."

So was the IRA "destroyed" when it left the stage in that statement of 2005 that ended the armed campaign?

"I don't think that's a helpful interpretation," is the soldier's response.

"Because you are going back to the winning and losing, you're going back to the war. What has happened is that we have created a security environment where now the PSNI are able to do this on their own."

It was obvious that the war - the dirty war - was not what the General wanted to talk about.

He wanted to look forward - to the significance of July 31 and the ending of Operation Banner.

The Army's role now - in its peacetime garrison - will be very different, set in a context that looks outside Northern Ireland and to other missions in "some pretty challenging areas".

After nearly 40 years, Banner is ending - the war is over - or is it the challenge, or the fight, or the mission or the campaign?

Those army boots are going elsewhere - and all sides have brushed much under that "carpet" that the General talked about so many times. There will be other questions on another day.