My War Gone By, I Miss It So

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to give anyone, ''including war crimes investigators, the first clue to where he had gone.'' Extreme violence came to seem so normal that when Loyd, living in central Bosnia in 1994, got a dog, and the

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd - Publishers Weekly My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd - Publishers Weekly

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. 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." for arming and training the Muslims. I believed something fundamental was at stake.'' His disgust at the West's (the United Nations', the world's) inaction was not dispelled by the bombing that 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: 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.Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa. them: ''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.'' Ines Sabalic (2000). "War in the Balkans". bosnia.org.uk New Series no.13/14 December 1999 - February 2000. Archived from the original on 31 March 2010 . Retrieved 12 September 2007. 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. 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.”

Anthony Loyd - Wikipedia

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. 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. 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.The cruelty and chaos of the conflict both appalled and embraced him; the adrenalin lure of the action perhaps the loudest siren call of all. In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims, he was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home he found the void of peacetime too painful to bear, and so began a longstanding personal battle with drug abuse. La guerra è come il consumo di droghe pesanti, è uno sballo di sentimenti contraddittori, agonia ed estasi che ti trascinano… and -- hey, just trying to get history's first draft straight -- journalists. When Anthony Loyd, a young Englishman, went to Sarajevo in 1993, he was not yet a journalist, or a writer of any type. He was a disappointed 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.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So - Anthony Loyd - Google Books

The local community was predictably close-knit under the circumstances and of such mixed religious definition as to deny you the possibility of making any judgement as to who—Serb, Muslim or Croat—made up the predominant group. At this stage of the war there were still up to 60,000 Serbs living in Sarajevo, a little under a quarter of the total population that remained. Some had joined the government army and fought bravely alongside their Muslim neighbours against what they saw as the forces of nationalist aggression that threatened their beloved city; others, including Petar, remained because they did not want to leave their homes and hoped the war would end soon; a lesser number actively sympathized with the men who shelled the city but were trapped in their houses by the gelling of the front lines that had encircled the capital. 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. British Army veteran (''The gulf war had been one of the greatest anticlimaxes of my life,'' he writes) who had recently survived an episode of suicidal depression. In a more idealistic era, he speculates, Sarajevo’s “normality” came in many guises. The city was full of hidden traps, structures of power and allegiance that were far from obvious, even to those who lived there. The fighting had first broken, then obliterated the old hierarchy of authority and social structure. Within weeks of the outbreak of war, while the lines of confrontation were still fluid, thousands of people had fled the city, to be replaced by refugees from rural areas who brought a new brand of culture to the capital and with it new tensions. In the absence of a professional army, the only groups with any real organization, weapons or structure were the city’s criminal gangs, and so they took over the task of defence. For a long time the government’s strategy was in the hands of men like Juka Prazina, Celo and Saco: hard, enigmatic criminals with localized cult followings and a taste for killing. Later that year, battles would be waged not across trenchlines with the Serbs, but within Sarajevo itself as the government sought to wrest control from the hands of these splintered mafia groups by establishing a central, legitimate body using loyalist special forces and police groups.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.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So | Grove Atlantic My War Gone By, I Miss It So | Grove Atlantic

This cookie is used to a profile based on user's interest and display personalized ads to the users. An extraordinary memoir of the Bosnian War . . . savage and mercilessly readable . . . deserves a place alongside George Orwell, James Cameron and Nicholas Tomalin. It is as good as war reporting gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local. It is about the ditch in which the soldier crouches and the ground on which he fights and maybe dies. The same applies to the war reporter. Anthony Loyd has been there and knows it’ Martin Bell, The Times 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.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. This is definitely not a book for everybody, but it did satisfy my goal of filling a hole in my historical knowledge, one I’m sure many others have. The lessons learned are important, though sadly not unique. That this happened in my lifetime is sobering evidence that it can easily happen again. Hopefully, with more books like this, that chance will diminish. Loyd’s rebellious irritation and visceral response to the atrocities around him give uncommon immediacy to this thoughtful, unpretentious memoir of the war in Bosnia.”— San Francisco Examiner