This is a relatively interesting and disturbing account of one man's experience reporting on the Bosnian war. I'm sure there are much better and more comprehensive accounts of this war out there, so I wouldn't choose this one out of a lineup. 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 goes to the war in the former Yugoslavia as an observer - well, let's be honest, a tourist - and then gradually succumbs to the fascination, tinged with shame, of observing something surreal, dangerous, and yet so central to Europe. The complex and cruel war in between Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Muslims and other overlapping and changing factions was a gruesome continuation of centuries of internecine fighting that was only temporarily halted by the Tito regime - close to a quarter million people dead, yet curiously disregarded by the European press.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So — Anthony Loyd — September My War Gone By, I Miss It So — Anthony Loyd — September

It is hard to believe, but the Balkans were once home to one of the most advanced cultures in Europe, and had the Ottomans not invaded and conquered the area, the Renaissance might have started there a century earlier that it did in Italy. After the conquest the factions, divided by religion, tribe, and class, were held together by force majeure of whoever ruled the area, so that an uneasy peace was generally maintained. Under the dead hand of Communism, Yugoslavia papered over its divisions in the name of Homo sovieticus, the new “Soviet Man,” and by the time communism collapsed the people had been part of a unified culture for centuries, long enough that one might have expected them to be able to continue getting along together, but one would have been wrong.

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."

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

Loyd] has given us a dazzling, hallucinogenic, harrowing and utterly riveting book. . . . Loyd manages to get on the inside and look out, and so provides a perspective on hatred, cruelty and human depravity that is sobering and terrifying. . . . My War Gone By, I Miss It So is strong stuff and certainly not for everyone. But there are touches of brilliance here, and readers who do stomach their way through it—and once started it is almost impossible not to—will be touched and, yes, even enriched for the experience.”—Lawrence Goldstone, The Hartford Courant Knjiga dubokotraumatiziranog pojedinca iz Britanije koji zbog teškog obiteljskog nasljeđa (ratovi), odnos-neodnos s ocem, je posjetio Bosnu i Hercegovinu za vrijeme rata 90tih. Jer je njemu to trebalo. Annoyingly, the Kindle version replaces every ć with a graphic that doesn't scale with the text, or match the font. A typographic atrocity to match anything the Serbs did. I reluctantly suggest this book to all those who think they can love the writing despite hating the writer. Loyd gradually acquired a political view of the war: Serbian nationalists were the main aggressors, Muslims the main victims. ''Gone was my wandering impartiality,'' he writes. ''I was for air strikes, for NATO intervention,his druggy crowd of friends in West London might have volunteered to go fight fascism in Spain. Loyd, unencumbered by political convictions, went to Bosnia to save himself from himself. Also, to get the full draft of war Ma trovo che la vera pornografia sia tradurre il titolo originale ‘My War Gone, I Miss It So’ in Apocalisse criminale. If Lloyd had been a damaged soul before going to the Balkans, he was a burned out husk by the time he left. “Everything I had seen and experienced confirmed my views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe.” Even the presence of UN “peacekeepers” was part of the farce, their leaders apparently chosen from the ranks of the least capable and least imaginative, “He was one of those officers who had risen to a position of authority without ever having the confidence to know when to abandon the book.” Our discussions around the stove were a forum for arguments from every strand of the spectrum and frequently became hot-tempered affairs of raised voices and wild gesticulations. At this time I had no real foundation for an opinion of my own concerning the war. Of course it was obvious that the city was suffering, and that terrible deeds were being committed elsewhere in Bosnia. Yet my impressions of the conflict prior to my arrival had been moulded by Mima’s tutoring and in general she blamed all sides equally. So in debates I acted as a kind of muted umpire. Angrier exchanges were often halted as if to protect my sensibilities, bestowing me somehow with a passifying role. I listened with interest to what I heard.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads

You won't get a good sense of the politics that fueled the wars, hatreds and genocides from this book. It's the memoir of a journalist heroin junkie who spends a lot of time near the front lines. It's not a book I would recommend to anyone who doesn't already have a modest understanding of the fall of Yugoslavia.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.

Bloodshed - The New York Times Web Archive Hooked on Bloodshed - The New York Times Web Archive

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 My War Gone By is not your father’s front-line reporting. This may just be flat-on-your-belly grittiest coverage to come out of those tormented killing zones thus far.”—John Gamino, The Dallas Morning News Following the resounding success of my Locus Quest, I faced a dilemma: which reading list to follow it up with? Variety is the spice of life, so I’ve decided to diversify and pursue six different lists simultaneously. This book falls into my GIFTS AND GUILTY list. An English journalist and war correspondent's account of the Bosnian War, and alternates between his 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 falters, however, when he tries to account, in general terms, for the barbarity he documents. His reflections on the human capacity for evil, on the mind-set of Bosnian villagers, on the different degrees of culpability for atrocities in war, are 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. It was worth the read for the bits about the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, but I honestly didn't care about some Brit's personal psychological problems and heroine addiction.