My War Gone By, I Miss It So

by Anthony Loyd

Born to a distinguished family steeped in military tradition, raised on stories of wartime and ancestral heroes, Anthony Loyd longed to experience war from the front lines—so he left England at the age of twenty-six to document the conflict in Bosnia. For the following three years he witnessed the killings of one of the most callous and chaotic clashes on European soil, in the midst of a lethal struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims. Addicted to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to wage a longstanding personal battle against substance abuse.

These harrowing accounts from the trenches show humanity at its worst and best, through daily tragedies in city streets and mountain villages during Yugoslavia’s brutal dissolution. Shocking, violent, yet lyrical and ultimately redemptive, this book is a breathtaking feat of reportage, and an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Memoir, Journalism, Military Fiction, Biography

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 1999

About the author

Anthony William Vivian Loyd is an English journalist and war correspondent, best known for his 1999 book My War Gone By, I Miss It So. He gained prominence in February 2019 when he tracked down a British ISIL bride, Shamima Begum.

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

ERA LA MIA GUERRA, E MI MANCA DA MORIRE



Esistono tanti libri sulla guerra, su tante guerre.
Tanti su quella in Bosnia, un po’ meno, ma sempre numerosi, su quelle in Cecenia.
Tuttavia, questo libro di Anthony Loyd è diverso dagli altri, esce in qualche modo dal coro: è diverso perché è particolare il suo punto di vista e approccio, da ex soldato diventato giornalista, così ‘dentro’ da essere parte di quello che testimonia e racconta.


Una donna all’interno della Biblioteca Nazionale di Sarajevo dopo il bombardamento. 1992

Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa.
Appena possibile si arruola, partecipa alla Prima Guerra del Golfo:
In realtà, non pensavo che importasse granché per chi o per cosa combattere, purché si indossasse una divisa e ci si battesse con coraggio. Mi innamorai inevitabilmente dell’idea della guerra senza nemmeno sapere cosa fosse.
Poi, dopo qualche anno, lascia l’esercito.


È stato annunciato un film tratto da questo libro e Tom Hardy sarà Anthony Loyd.

A quel punto tenta l’avventura col fotogiornalismo, e all’inizio è piuttosto spaesato, ma possiede comunque un approccio alla guerra che è pressoché unico, un modo di sentirla viverla e parteciparla che lo fa presto emergere tra gli altri reporter:
Avevo appena letto ‘Dispacci, il libro di Michael Herr sul Vietnam, reclamizzato da John Le Carré come il miglior libro sull’uomo e la guerra nel nostro tempo. Quel testo ebbe profonde ripercussioni su di me, e mi mostrò l’esistenza di una tribù per la quale disciplina e autorità erano concetti astratti: i corrispondenti di guerra.


Soldati russi in Cecenia, dicembre 1994.

Alcol e droghe, erba ed eroina, mai polvere in vena però.
La guerra è un’altra droga, anzi è il modo per restare lontano dalle droghe pesanti:
La guerra è come il consumo di droghe pesanti, è uno sballo di sentimenti contraddittori, agonia ed estasi che ti trascinano…
Durante le battaglie e il lavoro da giornalista fotografo ‘solo’ tanto alcol e tanto fumo.

Per anni in Bosnia, ‘dentro’ l’assedio di Sarajevo, in tante campagne militari, parteggiando apertamente per i musulmani.
Parlando la lingua, iniziata a studiare prima di lasciare Londra, vivendo il più possibile con e in mezzo ai locali, invece di rinchiudersi nelle enclave giornalistiche.


Sarajevo, inverno 1992-1993: il giornalista olandese Robert Dulmers presso la tomba di Hakija Turajlić nella moschea Ali Pasha.


Poi in Cecenia, anche a Grozny, dove i cadaveri abbandonati diventano punti di riferimento stradale:
svolta a sinistra dopo il tizio morto con la borsa della spesa gialla e la moglie, poi a destra per Minutka…

Loyd vive e descrive al limite del voyeurismo, rasentando la pornografia:
Da viva la ragazza era sorprendentemente carina. Morta, era così bella da indurti ad assoldare un esercito e saccheggiare Troia per averla.

Ma trovo che la vera pornografia sia tradurre il titolo originale ‘My War Gone, I Miss It So’ in Apocalisse criminale.


Esumazioni a Srebrenica nel 1996.

Anthony Loyd sa, invece, restare lucido anche nel delirio, sa trasmettere umanità anche descrivendo l’assurdità e la brutalità selvaggia della guerra, di queste due guerre in particolare, più brutali e violente di altre, sa confezionare un reportage e memoir che mi resterà dentro.

Guerra e roba. Spero sempre che l’una o l’altra mi mostrino la strada, ma non si verifica mai. Pensi di aver toccato il fondo molte volte e invece scopri sempre qualcos’altro da perdere. E dopo un po’ ti accorgi che quello che un tempo ti sembrava il fondo è ora un’altitudine verso la quale stai arrancando.

PS
'Dispacci" di Michael Herr rimane comunque il più bel libro sulla guerra che io abbia mai letto.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 3 out of 5]

”War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out but it never happens. You think you have hit the bottom many times then always find something else to lose, till after a while what once seemed like the bottom is an altitude that you are trying to scramble back to. Even in my deepest moments of fear, retreating or withdrawing it’s all the same, when I see those flashes of hope and swear never again, promise I’ll keep away the front or stay clean tonight, I know they are just illusions, flotsam in the river I pull myself up onto just so I can catch enough breath to last me for the next dive down.”

Anthony Loyd’s family idolized their war heroes. He grew up hearing about their exploits in particular one great grandfather who was a hero of several wars. A man that basically signed up for any war he could and whichever side took him first was the one he fought for. He was bemedalled and bejewelled with war wounds and veneration. We love our war heroes even if there is this underlying hum of death and destruction resonating in some of their souls. Ultimately...they aren’t supposed to like it. Anthony or Ant as he is called by his friends is estranged from his father. His sister is anorexic. He is beginning a long, loving relationship with drug use. He decides his life is going nowhere so in the tradition of his ancestors he goes and finds a war.

He finds two in fact.

He goes to Chechnya.

He goes to Bosnia.



He doesn’t have a job. He doesn’t have a real reason for being there. ”I was delighted with most of what the war had offered me: chicks, kicks, cash and chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real and wreathed in gunsmoke. It was an environment to which I had adapted better than most, and I could really get off on it. I could leer and posture as much as anyone else, roll my shoulders and swagger through stories of megadeath, murder and mayhem; and I could get angry about the poignant tragedy of it all. But what did it amount to? Everything I had seen and experienced confirmed my views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe.”

I could understand going to war because you believe in the cause of one side or the other. I still think it is nuts, but at least I can wrap my head around it. To go and just hang out, experience a war like a cinematic experience...well... that is verging on immoral. He has this vague idea that he may get a job as a journalist or a photographer while over there, but the goal is to experience war.



The Bosnian War was over the breakup of Yugoslavia and lasted from 1992-1995. Three armies were formed along ethnic/religious grounds: the Army of Republika Srpska(VRS) or Serbs/Protestants on the one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) which was largely composed of Bosniaks/Muslims, and the Croat/Catholic forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side. Loyd came there thinking he had the most sympathy for the Muslim side, but as he finds in war when one side commits an atrocity and then the other side responds with something equally horrendous it is hard to know which side is more morally right. ”You could take sides in Bosnia easily enough if you wished, but it never allowed you complete peace of mind.”

In the short span of this war which I’m sure felt very long to the residents over 100,000 people (some reports as high as 250,000) are killed, 20,000 to 50,000 women are raped, and 2.2 million people are displaced. Villages were torn apart, no one was allowed to be neutral. Sometime your name determined the army you would be forced to fight for. ”Many people found themselves carrying a gun whether they liked it or not. If you were of combat age, meaning only that you possessed the strength to fight, kill and possibly survive, then you were conscripted into whichever army represented your denomination, Muslim, Serb or Croat.”

Loyd witnessed a moment when a weeping Croat brought his Muslim neighbors to the Swiss UN troops for safety. People who have lived together in harmony for generations suddenly found themselves on opposite sides of conflict they could barely understand. When someone died there was grieving on both sides of the battle line. Everyone is trapped, but not Anthony Loyd. He knows whenever the war gets “too heavy” or he needs a break he just hops a plane back to London.



”Marko was doing his best to kill somebody for my benefit. Twenty-four years old, trilingual, well educated, he was a sniper for the HOS, the extremist Croat militia which was still managing to maintain a loose affiliation with the government army in Sarajevo. We had met in the city’s one remaining nightclub, the BB, a sweltering basement venue that afforded an outlet for easy pick-ups among Sarajevo’s youth as the war stoked desire with one hand while unbuttoning restraint with the other. “

Anybody else feel a little queasy, like watching two teenagers playing video games only we are talking about human life. I had a hard time liking Loyd. It was too much like the war was there for his entertainment and early on I wondered if I was going to be able to finish this book.

”If you stuck around long enough, the dead and wounded piled up so quickly they squeezed one another off the narrow platforms of your memory.”

Drugs are cheap and readily available in a war zone. Anthony soon develops a heroin addiction. In fact he writes rather lovingly about it.



”I sucked in the smoke greedily, and the cold wash of anaesthesia hit me. It swept over me, a wave that started at the tip of my nose, rushing across my face to encircle my head, running down my neck through my chest, crashing into a warm golden explosion in my stomach, my groin, a blissed sensation beyond the peak of orgasm and relief of nausea, as every muscle in my body relaxed and my head lolled gently on to my shoulder, every sense unwinding, unburdened of the crushing weight of pain I never even knew I had: the rush, the wave, death, heaven, completion. For hours and hours.
The hit. Sensual ultimatum. You can argue over every other aspect of heroin, but you can never dispute the hit. Get it right and you may never look back. Except in regret. As I write now, just thinking about it makes my skin crawl, and the saliva pumps into my mouth like one of Pavlov’s Dogs.”

Reading about him running around desperately looking for his next war rush; his next heroin high; his next Red Cross Nurse orgasm I realized that there is addiction and then there is Anthony Loyd addiction. With this realization I started to understand the book and more importantly to understand the writer. I don’t agree with his methods nor do I like him very much, but in the end I can’t condemn him. He didn't pull any punches. He looked at his image in the mirror and told us what he sees.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Born of a prestigious English military family, Loyd was enamored of war until he enlisted in the Bosnia conflict. Fresh with a degree in photojournalism and no prospect of a job, Loyd decided to go to Bosnia, where the war had been going on for about a year in 1993. Freshly arrived in Sarajevo, he was almost immediately introduced to the irrationality of the situation. Looking for a guide to help him find the house a contact in London had provided, he soon found one who was more than happy to help, insisting that no remuneration was necessary — indeed, Loyd discovered that despite outside world assumptions of universal hatred, his experience was that as long as religion, politics, and war were not mentioned, the residents would s soon adopt any stranger as almost a member of the family.

From the hotel, they needed to cross “sniper’s alley,” a dangerous section of street open to constant sniping. Loyd’s guide made it clear that he would not run in front of “those people.” Loyd could see that any rational person would want to break the four-minute mile getting across and hated the thought of dying on his first day because of a need for politesse. They settled on a crab-like compromise. Soon after arriving, he discarded his flak jacket not just because it was heavy, but because it placed a barrier between him and the residents who had to survive the horrors on a daily basis. He could get on a plane at any time and return to London in just two hours.. There were numerous groups of men surrounded by cadres of armed bodyguards who created their own little fiefdoms, and allegiances shifted more frequently than a river’s bottom.

Mass graves were all over, hidden in the forests, and relatives would search for bodies of missing kin. The bodies had been looted and ID cards were scattered all over; sometimes the faces were almost unrecognizable as war changed them. “It’s not what people lost; it’s what they gained.” Evil , Loyd notes, makes an indelible impression on the eyes.

Mercenaries flocked to Bosnia from everywhere seeking action and excitement. One he met was a French Foreign Legion deserter (killed not a few weeks later). Loyd was shot at within days of his arrival. He met a beautiful young woman in a bar, a Croatian who, it turned out, was a sniper. Loyd asked her if she knew any Serbs or had any Serbian friends. She said the only ones she hoped to see again were those she would kill.

This is merely one example of the horrific cruelty and irrational hatreds created by the conflict between a desire to have an ethnically pure nationalistic country and those who desired a secular multi-ethnic society. Of course, nothing can be that simple, and one wonders if the thugs hadn’t taken control. Horrors abound as humans are turned into weapons. Loyd witnessed one particularly wanton and cruel act as groups of Serbian soldiers bound the arms of some Croatian prisoners and then taped Claymore mines to their bodies connected by wires to their own lines. They forced the prisoners to walk toward the enemy lines, assuming the prisoners would not be fired upon. The inevitable end left only minor pieces scattered around and parts of legs.

The body of one who had weighed some 200 lbs. before he was captured weighed only thirty lbs. when buried, and that included the weight of the coffin. In another example of life’s randomness, the only prisoner to survive was one who had been beaten so badly that he could not walk. Loyd wonders what to say to the parents of these mere children, barely 21 years old. Ordinary items became instruments of death. The U.N. insisted that all Coke cans be squashed because both sides would use them to create grenades. Television sets were gutted and filled with explosives.

Loyd is both repelled and fascinated by what he sees firsthand. He admires the marksmanship of a Serb who climbed to the top of a tower and, using a .50 caliber rifle, shot an international aid worker. The bullet traveled through the back of the Range Rover, through the seat, through the man’s flak jacket, and then out the front of the vehicle. An awesome weapon. Bosnia was "a playground where the worst and most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted out."

Loyd despised the regular media correspondents who would wander periodically via armored personnel carrier into U.N. headquarters for a few sound bites and then return to the safety of a Holiday Inn, “to file their heartfelt vitriol with scarcely a hair out of place.” His big break came when he was asked to substitute for a wounded British writer and then he began to sell his stories as well as photographs.

The horror of this beautifully written book (hard to describe such a book thusly given the content) is that Loyd found the war somehow appealing, a high close to that of his former heroin addiction. "I had come to Bosnia partially as an adventure. But after a while I got into the infinite death trip. I was not unhappy. Quite the opposite. I was delighted with most of what the war had offered me: chicks, kicks, cash and chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real and wreathed in gun smoke." All social constraints are abandoned in war. Scoffing at the idea of objectivity, he lobbied against the Serbs and was embarrassed not to be shooting at them himself. "I felt I was a pornographer, a voyeur come to watch."

Whether 9/11 and its aftermath will generate future war addicts remains to be seen.

[Clouds · Rating 5 out of 5]

Following the resounding success of my Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my GIFTS AND GUILTY list.

Regardless of how many books are already queued patiently on my reading list, unexpected gifts and guilt-trips will always see unplanned additions muscling their way in at the front.

I’m a sucker for confessions. Have you ever heard of a website called PostSecret? People create these miniature artworks to anonymously whisper their deepest secrets to the world. Some weeks they’re funny; some weeks they make my chest ache in sympathy. On the surface, Anthony Loyd has written a book about the Bosnian war, but as the pages flicker by it doesn’t take long to realise that this book is a confession. He’s shone a light into the darkest corners of his psyche and smeared his beating heart across the page. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is brutal, it’s powerful and it turned me inside-out. Oh – and if you didn’t know already – it’s a true story.

Ant was a child from a broken home, who left the British military without seeing conflict. His London social circle was in a slow downward spiral of drugs and isolation. Ant decided to go find a war. Now, he does his best to rationalise this decision, delving into his formative years for memories of his venerated, mercenary-solider great-grandfather – but that whole line of reasoning never really flew for me – it felt too much like an attempt to squeeze emotional instinct into a nice, neat framework of cause and effect. The way I read it was simple: Ant felt great conflict inside, and sought an environment that would reflect that externally, as an attempt to understand it.

He gets himself a bare-bones qualification in photojournalism, a smattering of Serbian from a restaurant-owner’s daughter, throws some bags in the boot of a mate’s car, and heads off to the new war in Bosnia. He has no affiliation with a news agency, little money and some sketchy press papers – little justification and no safety net, but he goes – because he has to.

War... changes him. As a photojournalist, selling pictures of conflict, you need to get to where the action is. For someone with a borderline deathwish like Ant, this is not a problem – but taking decent pictures is. Ant scrapes by, pinballing from one battle to another, learning how to act cool and get by. At some point he gets a gig as a written journalist, something he’s never done before, and he just tells them straight-up what he’s seen. The newspapers like it, and the work gets steadier. Most reporters stay in the safe zones and write about what they hear, what they’re told – but Ant still works like a photographer, he gets right out in the thick of things and writes about what he’s seen. It’s an important difference.

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll learn a lot about the Bosnian war by reading this book, but it won’t be an analysis of political forces and tactical manoeuvres – this is a story of individuals, moments, sights, sounds and feelings. This is a very personal story of war.

Whenever it gets too much, Ant bolts back to London and his ever-quickening smack addiction. It’s either one or the other – war or oblivion – he simply cannot cope with the peaceful, civilian life going on around him. He cannot understand it, cannot connect with it and cannot endure it. Avoiding peace is Ant’s compulsion.

He’s a bright, articulate, passionate and at times darkly funny man. If this all sounds a bit grim and bleak – it is – but he writes with a rare and startling honestly which makes it eminently readable. As fubar as it seems, this is where Ant needs to be – this is the home he’s chosen and he’s in his element.

There’s a brief detour into Chechnya – the Russian separatist state – during a winter long ceasefire in Bosnia. The war there is a nightmare. They’re shelling the city into oblivion but the rebels are performing miracles. He doesn’t stay long – this isn’t his war.

Everywhere Anthony Loyd goes, he keeps his eyes open. He sees horrific things, but he also sees acts of kindness and strength. He remembers. He respects. He learns. These are the events which shaped the man who became a great journalist, The Times’ lead war reporter and winner of the Amnesty International Award.

I have my own personal connections with addiction and compulsive behaviour – which may well account for the empathy I felt towards this writer. I’ve never met the man, but I am proud of him for staking his naked soul to the page like this. I love the way this book does not end with a happy ever after, or a twist, or a symbolic dénouement; Ant’s conflict is not resolved, his journey is not over. His war is, and that’s going to necessitate a massive upheaval in his coping mechanism - or a new war!

I’ve not been to Sarajevo, but I have visited some of Serbia (Novi Said in particular) and that made it particularly easy to picture the landscapes and the hospitality of the people.

I can easily understand some/many people not liking this book and not liking Anthony Loyd – but this is one of those books I’m always going to defend. I felt a connection with the words that made me want to simultaneously give the man a hug and find my own war. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is well worth a read.

After this I read: The Book Thief

-------------
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I decided to make the most of the baby's morning nap and get this review, which has been cluttering up my thoughts for the last week, written. I was most the way there when suddenly the PC makes a chiming sound - "Your computer is shutting down, do you want to save?" - I clicked yes, of course, because I had not saved it yet - so it ignored me and shut down without saving. Seriously? Wha-tha-fu?! Angry. Yes. I'm going away now.

[l · Rating 1 out of 5]

"I wanted to throw myself into a war, hoping for either a metamorphosis or an exit. I wanted to reach a human extreme in order to cleanse myself of my sense of fear, and saw war as the ultimate experience.
Hindsight gives you a strange wisdom. In some ways we all get what we want. I have so few regrets, even now."

If an asshole acknowledges that he's an asshole, does that make him less of an asshole? (No, the self-aware asshole is the worst asshole of all)

The book begins by showing you what an ass Anthony Loyd is - he presents himself quite honestly as a war tourist - flying out to Sarajevo to see some action! Gradually, Loyd begins to realize that it's not just Manly Times and becomes a bit preachy about it (eheu eheu his friends back home can't understand how REAL the issues in Bosnia are as they are 'consumerist children of the sixties with an appetite for quick kicks without complications' - they don't underSTAND how Lloyd has discovered that the war was about Things That Mattered and not just a machofest with hot chicks (the number of times he talks about the beautiful modelesque women he sees is eyerollworthy)) at which point we get reflective chapters that are intended to make you understand where he's coming from and I suppose, stop hating him. But really, I can't bring myself to feel sorry for this Eton-educated kid (eheu eheu, his parents were divorced and he hated his fancy prep school, how terrible for him) who joined the army to kill some people and was so disappointed that he didn't get to kill anyone that he had a mini-breakdown on getting back from his assignment. After which he promptly sets off to Bosnia. We're clearly supposed to grow to like him and gosh, he develops an addiction to heroin! Poor dude, right? He just wanted to kill some people and see some people being killed and now look at him - 'pulled in by the undertow' - but you know, that's the price of living 4real and he wouldn't change a thing. Tch.

How someone could admit to thinking like this post WWI, nevermind post WWII is beyond me. This ~conflicted morality~ angle he's clearly going for is repulsive. I kept reading because I thought he would eventually be yelled at by someone but nope.

Oh, he also talks to a war criminal, who knows that he's a journalist yet tells him where he's going into hiding and good old Loyd tells us that though he knows people are looking for this war criminal, he's not going to give him up because "he had always looked after me on the line and that carried more weight in my judgment than his barbarous killings of people I had not seen."

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brutal details of a photographer's experience of the war in the Balkans in the '90s.

[Fede · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There are no innocent bystanders... what are they doing there in the first place?"
(W. Burroughs, 'Exterminator!')

It would be hard to deny that Anthony Loyd is possibly the most despicable writer one could ever come across: a former arny officer who, for reasons we can't even start to fathom, leaves London with a rucksack and a postgraduate course in photojournalism, headed to besieged Sarajevo with no professional assignment whatsoever to witness a war he knows nothing about. What he's actually looking for is the thrill only a war could give him, the intensity he would never experience in normal circumstances. Or so he thinks.
Such an aim, fuelled by a family tradition of war mavericks, is at the very least ambiguous, devoid as it is of any real motive. Even greed would be somehow acceptable, compared to the psychological void of a 27 year-old guy who deliberately plunges into the horror, hunting it down in the Bosnian killing fields and shelled towns to fill the gap in his soul. A gap that - as the title suggests - is bound to reopen as soon as the maelstrom subsides, just like a junky's withdrawal:

"It was not necessarily that I had 'found' myself during the war, but the conflict had certainly put a kind of buffer zone between the fault lines in my head. Without it, or any narcotic relief, they ground away with renewed vigour."

In fact a more pedestrian skag addiction is awaiting him at home.

After having sufficiently slandered the man (a well-known war correspondent for 'The Times', with missions in Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq under his belt) there are two things I'd like to point out about the writing, which are basically the reasons why I rated this book so high despite the ferocious antipathy I feel toward the author.
First of all, this book is hugely informative. It sheds light on a historical and human tragedy whose details are still largely unknown, no matter how massive the media coverage was at the time; and it does so from a perspective I can't quite define, between smugly egotistic and rationally detached. In short, a unique voice in the chorus of talk-show mourners and fundraising hyenas we're so familiar with nowadays.
The Balkan wars have always seemed too perversely complicated for me to fully grasp what actually happened between 1991 and 1995 - what with the ever-shifting alliances between the armies, factions, gangs, ethnic groups and mercenary troops involved in the conflict: Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs. I can safely say I didn't know anything about those events, apart from a handful of randomly picked-up notions. Far from having a thorough knowledge of what lead to four years of massacres, I was content with the basic information I'd been provided in school and never felt the need to further expand it.
It wasn't until I discovered this war memoir that I found out how little I knew of that period, how much I needed to learn about it and how erroneous my convictions were as to who was who, who did what and why Bosnia turned into the worst inferno Europe had witnessed since WW2.
Althoug being a first-person report rather than an exhaustive overview of political and military facts, Loyd's book is a very good introduction to the subject, due to his being so self-centred no ideological bias seeps through the text. The author constantly reminds the reader of his lack of idealistic motives: there's simply no room for sentimentality or moralism. He describes what he saw and heard and did over there, and that's all as far as he's concerned. No conclusion can be drawn. On the contrary, Loyd doesn't try to hide how apparently inappropriate his emotional responses were:

"The dynamic of my life in Bosnia (...): to reach the edge of the abyss in which people were getting killed, stay teetering there for as long as possible without dying, leave, then do it all again as quickly as possible. It was a solitary state whatever the company, and there were darker things than lead that could whack into you out of that void."

Secondly, the writing in and of itself is amazingly good. Not only does it portray the horror through images of murder and devastation; it also describes the insanity of daily life behind the frontlines: an army jeep with a skull stuck to the bonnet, psychotic fighters wearing ladies' hats and black sombreros, a female journalist thriving on mayhem and abjection, foreign correspondents partying while the mortars bring death all around them:

"You could have a good time in Stara Bila that summer, providing you had not been born in the place. Congregated there were every type and nationality of journalist, photographer, cameraman (...). The fighting spilled further into the hills around us; they glowed with burning villages at night, and echoed with firefights by day. We sometimes watched it over barbecues. At dusk, we would choose our company, load up on whatever was going, and party to excess. We would fade out what the war meant to us and turn up the volume on the generator-run sound system."

If you can stomach this sort of thing, then you'll be rewarded with some truly beautiful pages, especially when Loyd manages to convey the atmosphere of 1993 central Bosnia:

"There was something more than what you saw, smelled and felt inside. The atmosphere. It chainsawed through your senses and squirmed glass over your body; shut your eyes and you could still hear the screaming. For whatever had been sucked out of that place, something else had been pumped in. An open scar in the ether; pleading chokes scabbing the edges. Some empty black infinity inside that spat and laughed. Ever had a bad hallucination? You've seen nothing. Nothing."

Moreover, his war memories are interspersed with recollections of private moments such as his frantic junk-scoring in London and catastrophic family background, which perfectly fit into the overall sense of doom. One chapter is also dedicated to his experience in Chechnya, to where he flew during a truce - before the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement put an end to the Balkan bloodbath.

For all these reasons, this is not your average war memorial. It's a much more disturbing experience, one that stirs up quite a few perplexities as to the role played by war correspondents, cameramen, photojournalists, and all sorts of willing witnesses to mankind's tragedies:

"Love hate, war peace, life death, crime and justice: to say my mind was stretched by trying to figure it all out would be an understatement. I tried to cling on to the values I learned in peacetime (...) but behind it all I and others shared the turmoil of an inverted morality. War: don't believe the hype: it could be heaven as well as hell. Some people snatched themselves back from its mental tumult, got on with their lives and kept their perspective. If you want to call people heroes then these are your candidates. Others died: they are your victims. Too many like me, threw themselves into the waves and never looked back until the undertow kicked in."

One can't help but despise such an attitude. What truly offends the reader is Loyd's acquired capacity to think the unthinkable without having to justify his thoughts nor feeling morally accountable to anything and anyone:

"The oppressive stagnation of peacetime, growing older, of domestic tragedy and trivial routine. Could I accept what to me seemed the drudgery of everyday existence, the life we endure without so much as a glimpse of an angel's wing. Fuck that. Sometimes I pray for another war just to save me."

I reluctantly suggest this book to all those who think they can love the writing despite hating the writer.
That's what I did.

[Clif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author Anthony Loyd took some courses in journalism in London, found a person to teach him Serbo-Croat and went off to chronicle the war in Bosnia from start to finish with a side trip to witness the first Russian attack on Grozny, Chechnya. His relentless pursuit of combat is broken with occasional breaks back in his native London.

Why would someone voluntarily place himself in a situation that is known to put life and sanity at great risk? As Loyd relates,

I wanted to throw myself into a war, hoping for either a metamorphosis or an exit. I wanted to reach a human extreme in order to cleanse myself of my sense of fear, and saw war as the ultimate frontier of human experience.

It turns out that Loyd has demons of his own to deal with that have him regularly getting high on heroin. The result is a doubly riveting tale of the harm men do to each other and the harm one man does to himself. With Loyd's powerful prose, this work takes the reader as close to personal experience as is possible at one remove.

In war, one's survival intact comes down to the chances of a simple coincidence: will my flesh and a flying piece of metal be in the same place at the same time? That metal might be an individual bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Loyd puts it perfectly...

Shells? They can do things to the human body you never believed possible; turn it inside out like a steaming rose; bend it backwards and through itself; chop it up; shred it; pulp it; mutilations so base and vile they never stopped revolting me. And there is no real cover from shellfire. Shells can drop out of the sky to your feet, or smash their way through any piece of architecture to find you...a bullet may or may not have your number on it, but I am sure shells are merely engraved with 'to whom it may concern'.

There is no rest in this book; personal encounters, good, bad and often impossible to predict come on every page. Loyd's brief breaks in London are filled with anguish, drugs as the only relief.

Colorful characters abound as one would expect when life becomes tenuous. When death is everywhere, every person either finds it for himself or comes up with a method to deal with it as others fall. Some choose bravado, some choose lucky talismans, some indulge in cruelty, some turn to stone. When battle ceases drug use is common.

Loyd covers all the details of the countryside, the hamlets and the towns he visits with scenes of recent slaughter all around from a civil war that in one case has enemies commiserating in a short truce arranged to gather the dead. Muslims and Christians speaking the same language ask each other about the fate of fellow schoolmates they had shared classes with in years past, only to separate for renewed battle.

In the classic war movie, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, there is a scene in which all has been lost. A small group of soldiers lament in a devastated landscape, one crying out that he curses the gods for allowing such horror to occur. Another soldier says, "Do not blaspheme! The gods look down on us and weep for what we do to ourselves."

Anthony Loyd puts the reader into the killing fields like no other author I have read.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Usually I expect to be choked up while reading war memoirs. That didn't happen often with Anthony Loyd's My War Gone By, the most gruesome account I have ever read of warfare, despite my prejudice, shared with the author, for the Bosnian side of the conflicts between the former republics of Yugoslavia.

A large part of this book is about Loyd's experience as a young, novice photojournalist in Yugoslavia. A small part of it is about his experiences in Chechnya, a portion that could have been left out except that it fits in the chronology of his account of his life, an account which is punctuated with information about his family, their military background, his participation in the Gulf War and his heroin addiction. Very little of his account concerns geopolitics, the history of Yugoslavia, its breakup and the negotiations which ultimately ended the wars there. The story is personal, not political except insofar as the author comes to adopt a strong preference for the multi-ethnic forces defending Bosnia.

The tale is also told as an attempt to get at the psychopathology of war or, putting more as Loyd might, its attractiveness, both as a disposition and as an aquired taste. This he begins to do, and not cheaply. He had such a disposition. He further developed such tastes--along with apparently related tastes for alcohol, heroin and virtually anonymous sex...yet, he does not scrimp on the horror and the injustice of it all. Nor does he avoid the obvious implications of the extremely morbid fascination he, and others, develop for the chaos and destruction of warfare. The book is, in fact, substantially an exploration of this pathology, though no "cure" for that or for his other addictions is ever adduced.

One thing obviously lacking from My War Gone By are the author's photographs, the taking of some of which are explicitly mentioned and the representation of which would have been helpful. Hopefully this will be rectified in later editions. Fortunately, however, maps of Bosnia and Chechnya are provided.

[withdrawn]

No star rating

Anthony Loyd has written a book which is somewhat of a paradox for me. There are two stories running in parallel here, but they are inseparable. We are shown war with great detail and clarity in Bosnia and Chechnya. The descriptions are often horrific, probably as realistic as anything in print. From this point of view, writing is good.

Intertwined with war, there is an autobiography of Loyd. This too is often horrific as he portrays his life growing up and as a heroin addict. The problem is that the two stories portray the same man, addicted to heroin and addicted to war.

As much as I appreciated the writing about the wars, I could not get over my dislike of the man, the self-admitted 'war tourist'. He was not there to fight and, although he was at first a would-be photographer and then a reporter, he makes it clear that he was there to be in a war, not to inform about the war. His only motive is self gratification. Even when he tells of his adventure in helping to save the life of a young girl, he cannot redeem himself. His tone throughout the book is disingenuous. His attitude is one of superiority. Much of what he tells us is coldly cynical. These things are not as a result of the war. They are who he is. He befriends, benefits from and even protects men who are monsters and war criminals. He is not likeable nor admirable.

His addictions, to heroin and to human suffering, are explained by his lousy relationship with his father. The reader is, I suppose, expected to have some sympathy for Loyd. I do not. Finally, although the book has its merits, I find that Loyd gets in the way. He would have done better to join the Red Cross if he wanted to see the war and do some good.

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is hard to believe, but the Balkans were once home to one of the most advanced cultures in Europe, and had the Ottomans not invaded and conquered the area, the Renaissance might have started there a century earlier that it did in Italy. After the conquest the factions, divided by religion, tribe, and class, were held together by force majeure of whoever ruled the area, so that an uneasy peace was generally maintained. Under the dead hand of Communism, Yugoslavia papered over its divisions in the name of Homo sovieticus, the new “Soviet Man,” and by the time communism collapsed the people had been part of a unified culture for centuries, long enough that one might have expected them to be able to continue getting along together, but one would have been wrong.

What defined these two groups? Race? They were the same race. Culture? They were all Tito-era children. Religion? No man present had the first clue about the tenets of his own faith, be it Orthodox or Islam. They were southern Slav brothers, pitted in conflict by the rising phoenix of long-dead banners raised by men whose only wish was power, vlast, and in so doing had created a self-perpetuating cycle of fear and death that grew in Bosnia, feeding off its own evil like a malignant tumour.

Robert Kaplan’s 1993 book Balkan Ghosts is still used today by policymakers trying to navigate this troubled region, and he saw what was coming. “My visit to Yugoslavia was eerie precisely because everyone I spoke with—locals and foreign diplomats alike—was already resigned to big violence ahead. Yugoslavia did not deteriorate suddenly, but gradually and methodically, step by step, through the 1980s, becoming poorer and meaner and more hate-filled by the year.” He also wrote that “Macedonia was like the chaos at the beginning of time,” but the comment could have been applied to much of the Balkans. The war began when Croatia declared its independence from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, and when My War Gone By opens the fighting has already been going on for a year.

The author, Anthony Lloyd, is the great-grandson of Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton De Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, one of the most decorated British soldiers of World War One. He was personally brave beyond the point of recklessness, into foolhardiness and perhaps even madness. Wikipedia says of him “He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, ‘Frankly I had enjoyed the war.’” He sounds like the very archetype of a soldier, but this is the kind of leader who gets his troops killed in large numbers and usually for little gain.

Anthony Lloyd clearly felt he had big shoes to fill, and after service in the peacetime British army found himself drifting through life and increasingly addicted to drugs, so he went looking for a war of his own. He showed up in the Balkans as a freelance photographer with no plan, no contacts, and little money, and basically attached himself to whoever was heading to the front lines. He does not come across as a sympathetic character, and he was certainly no hero. A psychiatrist would have a field day with him, and there were times when I wondered if he even realized how much self-loathing was in his writing. For instance, “Why was I here? There had to be a reason. I was not a Bosnian stuck in Sarajevo, I was a foreigner who could leave. So why did I stay? Was I a sluttish dilettante day-tripping into someone else’s nightmare?” Personally, I’d say yes to the whole dilettante thing.

He meets people who are stuck in a nightmare from which there is no escape, and only a small chance of survival. For him, however, London was just a two hour plane ride away and he could return whenever he wanted a break or when his drug stash needed to be replenished. “War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out but it never happens. You think you have hit the bottom many times then always find something else to lose, till after a while what once seemed like the bottom is an altitude that you are trying to scrabble back to.”

He found the combat he had gone looking for, war in its true form, not the sanitized, glorified images presented in books and speeches. He found it in a place stripped of everything but the urge to survive, where honor, courage, and patriotism were reduced to their most basic forms: words old men use to get young men to die. “I did not learn to accept courage in a different form, I grew to see it as a meaningless term of glorification used by the ignorant to describe the actions of others whose real motivations are more often instinctive than altruistic. So began the long winter retreat of emotion.”

The dominant motif of this book is madness: the war was crazy, fomented and kept going by politicians to maintain their hold on power, so that both soldiers and civilians were encouraged to commit grotesque atrocities on neighbors who had lived side by side with them their whole life.

The next most important theme is cynicism. The only thing you could be sure of is that the “truth” whatever that meant, was not what you would hear from official sources. “All participants lie in war. It is natural. Some often, some all the time: UN spokesmen, Croats, Serbs, Muslims, the lot. Truth is a weapon more than a casualty. Used to persuade people of one thing or another, it becomes propaganda. The more authoritative a figure, the bigger the lies; the more credible his position, the better the lies.”

Lloyd met good people in the war, people trying to survive and get on with their lives, but many others had been so poisoned by the fighting and dying that they had lost all compunctions about killing, so long as they could drink themselves into oblivion afterwards.

I believe any man, given the right pressures, could kill an innocent in cold blood. In accepting the reality of war rather than the ideal, however, I believe there are categories of atrocity. If fighters lose their heads and murder civilians or prisoners they are certainly guilty. But if a state uses atrocity as a tactic to polarize the population, like Serbia and latterly Croatia did in Bosnia, then it is guilty of a greater crime. In my mind, cold-bloodedness and the culpability of the state are the keys to apportioning guilt. Yes, Muslim troops did kill civilians and prisoners on occasion, but their actions were dwarfed by the scale of the crimes of their opponents.

If Lloyd had been a damaged soul before going to the Balkans, he was a burned out husk by the time he left. “Everything I had seen and experienced confirmed my views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe.” Even the presence of UN “peacekeepers” was part of the farce, their leaders apparently chosen from the ranks of the least capable and least imaginative, “He was one of those officers who had risen to a position of authority without ever having the confidence to know when to abandon the book.”

To this day the region simmers with barely suppressed violence. Ethnic cleansing has led to large majorities in many areas, with the remaining minorities ever more fearful that it is only a matter of time before the pogroms begin again. The leaders on all sides have learned nothing, and continue to foment nationalism for narrow political gains, willing to risk another war so long as they can stay in power and continue their lucrative thievery and extortion rackets. Nor did the UN learn anything, taking away the wrong lesson, that wars can be stopped with airpower alone, and with minimal risk of politically unpopular casualties on the ground. In 1888 Bismark said, “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” He was right about the outbreak of World War One, and may be right about a future great conflict, where Russia comes to the aid of its Serbian Orthodox co-religionists, the Islamic states come together to support the Bosnian Muslims, and the Western Europeans decide to help the Christian factions.

[Robert Gustavo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the years, I've read a lot of books about the Bosnian genocide, presumably because there is something wrong with me -- something creepy and voyeuristic and utterly fascinated by how completely and utterly evil mankind can be. This is one of the Bosnian war porn books that is going to stick with me for a long, long time. It's relentlessly depressing, enraging and funny all at once.

You won't get a good sense of the politics that fueled the wars, hatreds and genocides from this book. It's the memoir of a journalist heroin junkie who spends a lot of time near the front lines. It's not a book I would recommend to anyone who doesn't already have a modest understanding of the fall of Yugoslavia.

The heroin addict bit doesn't really add to the story, but it probably couldn't have been cut out without affecting the truth of the rest of the work -- if this were fiction, it would definitely be a messy subplot that should be cut out just to streamline the book. Likewise, his relationship to his father is just kind of there, butting into the atrocities.

I've read enough of these books that they begin to blur together, but this joins Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass, and Endgame: The Betrayal And Fall Of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II by David Rohde, as one of the books that will stay with me and haunt me. The writing here is better than those, but the book itself is less focused.

Annoyingly, the Kindle version replaces every ć with a graphic that doesn't scale with the text, or match the font. A typographic atrocity to match anything the Serbs did.

Now I want to read something about fluffy bunnies.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, is one of the great titles I've come across (on the short list with Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). It is also one of the best and most gruesome travelogues I've read. Most people would classify it as war journalism, as the book covers the conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya during the 90s. But war books are full of reportage, and though they ask why, it is usually a practical why: why did this conflict begin, what happened, and what does it mean? Loyd's why is more existential. As in a travelogue, he considers the question Kerouac wrote in his journals before flinging himself on the journey that became On the Road: "The night before travel is like the night before death. Why must I always travel from here to there, as it mattered where one is?"

Indeed, many of Loyd's nights feel like the night before death, and the answer is complicated; his military heritage, his strained relationship with his father, and his addiction to heroin all play a part. In taking this more personal and existential tack, Loyd not only provides a compelling narrative about the horrors that unfolded in these wars, but examines why it is that people seek out darkness and brutality, and what can be learned from plumbing the depths.

[Fionnuala · Rating 5 out of 5]

EDIT (20/12/23): When I first wrote this review, I was still sorting out a lot of thoughts. I didn't want to commit them to words yet, because they were still so new to me. To put it simply, this book made me realise what I wanted to do. It made me realise that war journalism might just be what I was looking for.

For the last year and a half I have been working towards that goal. And I'm writing this update in a hotel room in Kraków, after three weeks in Ukraine. To say it was the best experience of my life would be a brutal understatement. To say that this book changed my life for the better in every way would, however, be completely accurate.



The above photo was taken by a colleague while we were working in east Ukraine. It has been just over eighteen months since I first read this book. I would definitely recommend, but watch out.

ORIGINAL REVIEW (MAY 2022):This is one of those books that I know I'm not going to be able to describe. Know that anything I say is selling it short -- this is a book you just have to read for yourself.

The stand-out thing about this book is that it is written unflinchingly, by somebody who is absolutely not ashamed to admit what he's about. I've noticed in other reviews that some people greatly dislike him for this, but aside from sticking rigidly to pre-conceived notions about what a good person is, I can't think why they take it so personally. There is nothing morally abhorrent about curiosity, even when that curiosity is towards dark subjects that most people would like to avoid. That's fine, if you want to avoid it yourself. But some people do not wish to avoid it, and that's fine too. I don't know why people get on their high horse about it. Something about exploiting suffering, I suppose -- in which case they didn't read the book very closely at all, but also fail to understand that witnessed or not, people are still suffering. Unwitnessed suffering, I think, is far worse than witnessed suffering, especially when it comes to war crimes. If you don't want to see it, if you feel it's not for you, if you want to look away, or if for some unknown reason you think you'll take moral damage from merely witnessing it, fine. But this doesn't give a person the right to judge another for looking where most people wouldn't dare.

It is impossible to talk about this book and this subject without acknowledging the fact that I grew up in conflict. While it wasn't on the same intensity as the wars depicted in this book, I grew up with considerations that most kids did not. Bombings and shootings were frequent, and bomb scares even more so. Riots, looting, arson attacks, and threatening mobs were part of growing up there. The conflict I grew up in was also sectarian in nature, and I know well how it feels to be in such an insane situation. Some scenes in this book resonated with me for this same reason -- the soldiers from opposite sides grieving together over those they knew in common is, in essence, no different to my friends and I, each from different sides of the conflict, grieving together over the murder of one of our group. There are certain things that never leave you, no matter how far removed the years have made you: if a car pulls up in a crowded area and the driver gets out and leaves it, I cannot stay near it. I fear it's a bomb. Sudden cracks and bangs make me instinctively duck or dart for cover. I struggle to relax sitting with my back to a window. This kind of war is the same everywhere, and it was never far from my mind reading it. This is why I have such strong opinions on the witnessing of it: not only was I myself fascinated by the situation I was in, and curious about the nature of the war that dominated three generations of people in my country, but also my main frustration about it is that outside of my country barely anybody acknowledges that it happened. This is why witnessing is so important. This is why people need to see, to write it down, to capture it on film. Such situations are not for anyone. People like Loyd do it because it is a necessary role and they have the means to fill it. If such horror has to be witnessed, better somebody who knows what he wants and gets it.

And for all of this moralising, there's nothing wrong with what he wrote. This book is poignant, it's devastating, it's raw, and it deserves to be read. There is a much, much wider picture here, and those who narrow it down to disliking the author because they feel uncomfortable with and unable to relate to his personal choices are seriously missing the point. It's easy to turn your back on the kinds of things that go on in the world, when you have a choice to pretend it isn't happening. But I can tell you that if it was your country, you'd probably want people like Loyd around. How quickly the world forgets otherwise.

[Patrick Belair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well I found this book on one of my thrift store hunts,Being that I've not read much about the war after Yugoslavia broke up I was interested.I don't think that I was prepared for the raw visual observations of the author,The brutality of the war all sides concerned was very honestly detailed.The human suffering cannot be imagined.The physical toll on the parties involved is beyond measure let alone the mental toll, even on the journalist's.
I believe that this region in the world is just another powder keg waiting to explode as so many others in our world today.If this conflict or piece of history is in your wheel house check it out,but be prepared for a truly honest and frank read.

[Amabilis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Knjiga dubokotraumatiziranog pojedinca iz Britanije koji zbog teškog obiteljskog nasljeđa (ratovi), odnos-neodnos s ocem, je posjetio Bosnu i Hercegovinu za vrijeme rata 90tih. Jer je njemu to trebalo.
Kako se kod njih kaže ova knjiga "not worth a penny".

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, it was one of the better written memoirs I've read in a long time, up there with "Sorrow of War" and dare I say it, "All quiet on the Western Front". It has been out of print I believe.
For the "gun and gear guys it is a let down, but for telling the effects of combat and man's inhumanity to man, it is startling.
To be fair to Anthony, the book is divided into sections; his troubled relationship to his parents: his addiction: set against the backdrop of a correspondent who is struggling with self-judgement at being a morbid voyeur.
He admits Chechnya blows the cover off anything else he had seen. "A glimpse into hell he calls it", and the subsequent chapter is a righteous description of a conflict that few were aware of.
It is one of the few books where I've underlined passages based on sheer eloquence in prose and context, yet found it most depressing; So what else could war be? A Great Read, but you'll need some Scotch when your finished.

[Adam Volk · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all time favorite books. On the one hand it's a masterpiece of war reporting as we follow Anthony Loyd (now, Sir Anthony Loyd) on his journey through the war torn Balkans during the bloody civil war of the 90s. On the other hand, it's an incredibly beautifully written story and Loyd's poetic narrative captures the tragedy and senseless of war unlike any other author I've ever read.... An absolute must read about one man's addiction to both heroine and war.

[Andrew Robins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't really get choked and emotional about books, but this one really choked me several times. Loyd is a heroin addict photographer who travels to the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and sees some hideous things, all of which he relates utterly fantastically. Truly super stuff.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 probably. I'm still mulling it over.

When starting this book, the big reminder to keep in mind is Loyd has an addictive personality. Raised in an affluent family, he had the means to take on whatever new addiction crossed his path. He discusses his drug addictions that started when he was in school and obsession with the military thanks in part to a family who boasted and romanticized a long history of war participation. Naturally, he joined the army and was in the Persian Gulf and Northern Ireland. However, it was not enough. He wanted to see war. Drugs and depression followed and when they lifted, the war in Bosnia was beginning.

With a desire to go to war, he meets a Bosnian immigrant to learn some language skills and acquires a press badge with the notion he can always leave whenever he wants. He moves around within the war, making observations of his surroundings, but at the same time never fully connecting. When he finally connects to a side, he comments on the disbelief of that side committing atrocities, coming across as war is simple instead of complex. And Bosnia was not the only war zone visited. At one point, he makes a side trip to Chechnya, and the back cover reveals he also ended up going to six other wars including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo.

Another thing that stood out to me was his attraction to the dead and he describes them. Of course, with an addictive personality, he is attracted to not just the dead. Every woman in this book was alluring, stunning, beautiful, etc.

I give a pass on the smoking and drinking, considering being in war zones there will be stress-relieving vices, but keep in mind this is personal narrative and not a book where you will learn of the politics or history of the war.

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this book up to learn more about the Bosnian / Serbian / Croatian conflicts of the early 1990s. There is a lot of detail here, but it's very much a ground view and doesn't go much into the overarching political concerns behind the war. Perhaps that's the point - the picture painted here is of pure chaos, with little rhyme or reason beyond the clashes of various local power groups.
This book is essentially a memoir, so what we get is the author's experience during the war years, which consists of staggering atrocities and brutality, mediations on fear and war, and the chronicle of a heroin addiction.
It's a riveting read, and although I didn't always like the author, I found myself trusting his words because of the fearless way in which he confronts his own shortcomings, not least of which is the guilty truth many of us suspect - being close to war can be glamorous, exciting, and fun. Of course the flip side is that you see, hear and do horrible things that scar you and stay with you forever.
I recommend it to anyone with a strong stomach and a fascination with war, but it might be best to read it alongside a more detached or academic study of the Bosnian war, as this book doesn't answer many of the large questions about how that awful event came to pass.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know what the politicians did during the war, read a history, like Yugoslavia:Death of a Nation. Books like that certainly have their importance. But war is always, in these modern times, a two way street: what the politicians are doing, and what the average people are doing. This memoir is about those normal people. Sure, Loyd encounters generals and thugs in power, but only those that actually carry arms, that are there in the thick of it. Not those hanging out in Belgrade or Zagred making decisions that they never have to witness. If you want to know what really happened in Bosnia - in all it's confusing glory - read this book.

I was not surprised by the enlightening, often disturbing detail. What I was surprised about was the fantastic writing. Loyd, before he went to Bosnia and Chechnya, was not a writer or a journalist; he took on graduate course in photo journalism, after he retired from the British military. But his writing stands out as that of a professional; even more than that, as someone who was deeply, genuinely moved by the experience, and has the talent to convey it. I was not only informed through him book, but also came to sincerely care about what happened. I appreciate the book tremendously for that.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

having just finished "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning", I felt compelled to re-read this book to see if it freaks me out as much as it did when I first read it - before I started traveling to war torn countries. I've now been to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Darfur, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Northern Uganda. Will it still upset me like it did? Or have I become cynical?

Update: Still shocking yet I understand it more. Thank God, heroin is not as easily available in my groups of friends as his. Instead I dove into the decidely middle class comforts of rich food and alcohol when I returned from war. I didn't see the human carnage that he descirbes but I listened to the stories of suffering over and over. In his writing, he never seems to interview people but rather to describe the scenes that he sees. It's an engrossing book and the title is still evocative. Will probably check out his other books now.

[Espen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthony Loyd goes to the war in the former Yugoslavia as an observer - well, let's be honest, a tourist - and then gradually succumbs to the fascination, tinged with shame, of observing something surreal, dangerous, and yet so central to Europe. The complex and cruel war in between Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Muslims and other overlapping and changing factions was a gruesome continuation of centuries of internecine fighting that was only temporarily halted by the Tito regime - close to a quarter million people dead, yet curiously disregarded by the European press.

Loyd gradually becomes a war correspondent, seemingly more for financial reasons - and to have a proper reason to be where he was - than because of an interest in career. He turns out to be good at it, yet maintains his distance, and his heroin addiction. In the end you are left with painfully memorable descriptions of individual and mass tragedies - and you still don't know much about the person doing the reporting.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing - nothing that I could write could do justice to what this book did to me when I read it.

Have you ever had a book hit you like a hammer blow to your head and your gut at the same time? That's what Loyd's writing did to me. Ricocheting between wartime and peace, jarring you out of your stupor with no preparation when he describes the horrors of war to begin a chapter, dragging you down with him as he sinks into his addiction to heroin - all this and more made for a haunting, unbelievable read.

There are few books that I have finished and immediately known I would have to reread one day, but this is definitely one of them. If you've ever been frightened of someone's descriptions because you recognized your own dark impulses staring back at you from the page you'll know what I mean.

[Joe · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a relatively interesting and disturbing account of one man's experience reporting on the Bosnian war. I'm sure there are much better and more comprehensive accounts of this war out there, so I wouldn't choose this one out of a lineup.
It was worth the read for the bits about the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, but I honestly didn't care about some Brit's personal psychological problems and heroine addiction.
The part about the author that I did find interesting (even though I don't remember exactly how he came to this) is that he misses being there in this war, even though it was difficult and depressing for him. It somehow made him feel alive and that he was taking part in something bigger than himself.

[Nicky B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was recommended to me by my friend David, he thinks it's a great perspective on the war in former Yugoslavia and a great read. At first the author Anthony Loyd irked me with his masculine style. It always annoys me when a book is dripping with predictable gender stereotypical perspectives - in this case, a gross glorification of war and the arguably innate attraction humans have for violence. At least that's what I first though. Reading further I realize that his voice damns that desire as it revels in it, which is interesting and often ignored inner-struggle. Anthony Loyd essentially becomes a 'war tourist' under the guise of journalist.

[Gavin P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grizzly images seared into brainspace... I hope they dissipate with time. His style leaves a lot to be desired and his thesis of conflict addiction is liturgically rehashed to a numbing point. Leave the memoir, take the jarring history of modern inhumanity left to its own brutal devices while the impotent observers shivered and the pundits traded barbs. The Balkans are endlessly interesting: read Ivo Andric's Bridge on the Rive Drina for an account of the Ottoman years and watch Emir Kusturica's films for a bit of whimsy amongst the ashes of burning buildings.

[Frank Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A raw, cold, anguished memoir of a war correspondent who covered the killing fields in Bosnia in the 1990's. At times what he saw and heard are almost unspeakable, evil and mindless. How the Croats, Bosnians Muslims, and Serbs became the rabid animals of hell that they did is beyond comprehension. A collective madness Loyd covers with anguish, interspersing his own personal struggles with heroin addiction when on leave in London. This is not reading for the faint of heart but it is a brilliant insight into how war is truly hell - especially that one.