He had the vulnerable purity and courage that would ensure he was among the first to get whacked on the front. 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.

A compassionate, visceral record of conflict; a brutally honest account of war's exhilarations and more personal battlegrounds.

a raw, vivid and brutally honest account of his transition from thrill seeker to concerned reporter' Philip Jacobson, Daily Mail | 'Chilling . Anthony’s memoir was love at first page – a portrait of war like I’d never read before,” O’Connor says.

UN general, BBC correspondent, aid worker, mercenary: in the final analysis they all want the same thing, a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side. This harrowing account shows humanity at its worst and best, and is acknowledged as a classic of the genre. His candid struggles with drug addiction offer the perfect companion to Loyd’s struggle with his addiction to war. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is a story about Loyd’s struggle of emotional turmoil and his abuse of alcohol and heroin becoming the solution.by turns looking at the convexity of war in Bosnia and the concavity of the war going on inside the author, as he wrestles with questions as mundane as addiction and as exalted as theology. 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. I finished reading Anthony Loyd’s account of his time in the Balkans and Chechnya only a few days ago and am still feeling the after-effects . Anthony Loyd's first book is a vivid, haunting account of the war in Bosnia from 1993 to 1996, from where he reported for the Daily Telegraph and then the Times as a special correspondent. Loyd's strongest writing is in his descriptions of carnage--of the sound and smell of shellfire; of the sexual release of blasting away with an automatic machine gun .

Freshly arrived in Sarajevo, he was almost immediately introduced to the irrationality of the situation. These were confused moments, though once in place it took the fighters only seconds to understand the full horror unfolding before their eyes. 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. 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.

The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. For those who have experienced war first hand, it is an intimate and personal endeavor often difficult to explain to their loved ones. He wrestles with the emotions of viewing as an outsider and being a participant in a world that very few of us will understand. 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. The allure of combat and war as the medium to find oneself and something missing in life has existed since the dawn of humanity.