Product Description

Nothing can prepare you for Anthony Loyd's portrait of war. It is the story of the unspeakable terror and the visceral, ecstatic thrill of combat, and the lives and dreams laid to waste by the bloodiest conflict that Europe has witnessed since the Second World War.

Born into a distinguished military family, Loyd was raised on the stories of his ancestors' exploits and grew up fascinated with war. Unsatisfied by a brief career in the British Army, he set out for the killing fields in Bosnia. It was there-in the midst of the roar of battle and the life-and-death struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims-that he would discover humanity at its worst and best. Profoundly shocking, poetic, and ultimately redemptive, this is an uncompromising look at the brutality of war and its terrifyingly seductive power.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42770 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140298543
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly
"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." Writing with a combat veteran's dark knowledge and a seasoned war correspondent's edgy, hesitant desire to cling to some sort of confidence in humanity, Loyd delivers a searing firsthand account of the war in Bosnia that successfully blends autobiographical confession and war reportage. Loyd, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War (where he was a platoon commander), was deep into suicidal depression and heavy drinking when, at 26, he left London for war-torn Bosnia in 1993 (he got assignments for British newspapers and is now a Times of London correspondent). After returning to England in 1995 by way of Chechnya, he sank into heroin addiction before pulling himself together and returning to cover the Balkan carnage through 1996. He admits to a grim fascination with war as the ultimate frontier of human experience. Just when a reader begins to feel that Loyd is too cynical and detached, a scorchingly lyrical passage will illuminate the Balkan war in all its anarchic horror. While Loyd finds plenty of guilt all around, he is highly sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims, approves of NATO's bombing of the Serbs and chastises U.N. troops for standing idly by while thousands of Muslims were slaughtered in Srebrenica, a designated U.N. "safe area." On the autobiographical front, he attributes his immersion in war to his hostile relationship with his intimidating father, and to his family's complex web of national and ethnic origins (Austrian, English, Belgian, Egyptian, Jewish). Not like any other book on the Yugoslav war, his gripping, viscerally subjective chronicle puts a human face on the tragedy as it mourns the strangled soul of multiethnic Bosnia. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Loyd, a war correspondent for the Times of London and a former British army officer, recounts his experiences as an independent journalist in embattled Bosnia-Herzegovina. Reared on his family's tradition of military glory and impelled by drug dependence, he sought the "high" of battle in the only war available. The stark, often lyrical quality of his prose accentuates the surreal atmosphere of wartime in Bosnia, "a playground where the worst and most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted on." Loyd's account blends personal revelation with biting commentary on diplomacy and war. By turns horrifying, contemplative, and savagely funny, this memoir captures the peculiar ferocity of ethnic and religious civil strife. Particular targets of his scorn are the UN and European officials whose indecisiveness and moral relativism inhibited an effective response to the slaughter. This unforgettable work ranks with the great modern accounts of war and should be in every library.AJames Holmes, Fletcher Sch. of Law & Diplomacy, Medford, MA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Simply Amazing
This is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It reminds me of the Vietnam era classics "A Rumor of War" and "Dispatches." The vivid accounts of the Bosnian Wars shames me as it should any citizen of a NATO country. How such horrific acts were allowed to occur within a few minutes planes ride from the most powerful military alliance in history is totally unforgivable. I don't believe the US should be the world's policeman, and in truth at the time I opposed sending American troops to Bosnia. But after such a vivid account of the horror, betrayal, and sheer hopelessness of the lives of those in the former Yugoslavia during the early 90's shames me more than I can say. All this was allowed by western cowardice. It seems our experience in Vietnam has yet to claim it's last victims.

After being there, this book fills in the spaces ...
I was deployed to B-H for seven months and spent most of that time with the local Serb and Muslim people. I wish I had read this book prior to deploying. It filled in the emotional and nationalistic intensity that my intelligence officer was unable to convey. This book is fantastic - after reading it and being there, I feel I truly understand what happened. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the war, or about nationalism gone awry.

War Tourist
Upon first picking up Anthony Loyd's "My War Gone By" and seeing the blurbs on the jacket, I was impressed with the comparisons to Herr's "Dispatches." Upon reading the book though, it seems more similar to another book about the Vietnam war, Tim O'Brien's novel "Going After C," albeit in a nearly antithetical fashion. O'Brien writes about a fighter who walks, in a dream, from his meaningless jungle war to civilized Paris. Loyd writes about a dreamer who walks into a fight and from London into a war that ten years ago was a suprise to most of us. And Loyd writes about that war with direct, vibrant, unflinching prose, tying in his own descent into addiction as an allegory for the loss of such a beautiful landscape and people on the European continent into the darkness and insanity of a pointless war. Also, the feeling of a "war tourist," which Loyd refers to frequently are on point. In 1992, I stayed with a friend of Zagreb, Croatia, at a time when the "front" was about fifty kilometers from the capital city. Although I never actually went to the front, largely because my friend told me it was usually "boring," I always harbored the guilt that my visit was simpily an attempt to vicariously experience their war, as we drank in the cafes and partied in the clubs and homes of young Croatians, amoung those some who had simply walked away from the fighting. At that time, I heard many of the Croats complaining of atrocities by the Serbs similar to those Loyd describes committed against the Muslims. And they wanted to know why the UN and Americans (I seemed to be the only one around at that time) had not intervened. Perhaps, Loyd's book with its brutal honesty will be a wake-up call for real police action in the Balkans, as the real atrocities there are not being committed by any one ethnic group or side in this war, but by common criminals hiding beyond those ethnic banners, cousins to Loyd's warlord in camos, pink shirt and bedroom slippers.