My War Gone By, I Miss IT So - Softcover

Anthony Loyd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140298541 ISBN 13: 9780140298543

Publisher: Penguin, 2001

Synopsis

My War Gone by, I Miss it So The author recounts how, unsatisfied by his brief career in the British Army, he set out for the killing fields in Bosnia. There, in the midst of battle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslins, Loyd discovered humanity at its best and worst. A profoundly shocking, uncompromising look at the brutality of war and its seductive power. Full description

About this title

Product Description:

The former soldier who fled depression and drug addiction in England to cover Europe's bloodiest conflict since the Second World War recounts extraordinary stories of brutality and compassion he recorded while in both Bosnia and Chechnya. Reprint.

Review:

Anthony Loyd's first book is a vivid, haunting account of the war in Bosnia from 1993 until 1996, from where he reported for the Daily Telegraph and then the Times as a special correspondent. However, what separates it from standard reportage is the war Loyd was fighting on a personal front, which drove him to seek war as a "final absolution of self-responsibility". While snipers shot people indiscriminately Loyd, living on whisky-chased adrenaline, fought to understand the compulsion he felt to be there and struggled to shoot the pictures that were the pretext for his presence. It is this battle, set against the brutality that tore the Balkans to shreds, that gives the book its anguished focus and embattled majesty.

Loyd gradually reveals a fractured upbringing, which culminated in the death of the father from whom he had been torturously distant for many years. Five years in the army did little to relieve the embittered emotional hangover that had become his burden, and in indulging the impulse that propelled him to war he was following in the footsteps of generations of males in his family. In addition to the stimulation engendered he was also fighting a heroin dependency that reared up when the buzz of the danger passed.

The descriptions of mortar-damaged flesh in Bosnia do not depart easily from the consciousness of the reader, who is left shuddering at the damage they must have inflicted on the author. Loyd, though, free from the constraints of newspaper journalism, writes with an angrily articulate physicality that throbs with a challenging compassion one longs for him to apply to himself. He finally achieves a redemption of sorts, and in the process has written one of the most uncompromising and personally honest accounts of the ugliness of war that puts to shame complacent apathy. Brave, provocative, essential, but not for those who take cream in their coffee. --David Vincent

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0140298541
• ISBN 13: 9780140298543
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336