My War Gone By, I Miss It So - Softcover

Loyd, Anthony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802122329 ISBN 13: 9780802122322

Publisher: Grove Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

My War Gone By, I Miss It So is a fiercely compelling and beautifully written personal account of the Bosnian war. The book alternates between Anthony Loyd's experiences in Bosnia and personal reflections of his time in the British army, his parents' divorce, his estrangement from his father, and his heroin addiction. Loyd describes the war at eye level: detailing the way bodies look after they've been shot or blown up, looking through the sights of a Muslim gun trained on a Serb soldier, traveling with a French mercenary, and fleeing from advancing Serbs during battle. The book is filled with firefights and mutilated corpses and is not for the squeamish. Bosnia was "a playground where the worst and most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted out." For Loyd, the high of battle substituted for the high of heroin and vice versa: "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 gunsmoke."

Loyd's big break as a war correspondent came when another British journalist was wounded. He had arrived in Bosnia a war junkie, just trying to figure out what was going on and sell a few pictures to newspapers on the side. "Journalism in itself had never really interested me, I saw it only as a passport to war." He did not cover the war like most other journalists--he went right into battles. Loyd dismisses what other journalists did in Bosnia: staying at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, driving out to the UN headquarters in an armored car, and then returning to the relative safety of their hotel "to file their heartfelt vitriol with scarcely a hair out of place." Loyd, who did everything but carry a gun against the Serbs, scoffs at the idea of journalistic objectivity. "What good did reporting ever do in Bosnia anyway?" he sneers. In fact, he seems almost embarrassed not to be fighting himself. "I felt I was a pornographer, a voyeur come to watch." Lucky for the rest of us he did go to Bosnia. --Linda Killian

From the Inside Flap:

QUOTES:

"A truly exceptional--account of his time in the Balkans and Chechnya--. I read [Loyd's] story of war and addiction (to conflict and to heroin) with a sense of gratitude for the honesty and courage on every page." --Independent

"I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival." --The Times

"Magnificent--a stench of blood, excrement, mortar-fire, slivovitz and human bestiality emanates from these pages." --Literary Review

From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0802122329
• ISBN 13: 9780802122322
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336