My War Gone By, I Miss IT So

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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." -- Hartford Courant He got it. Battlefield reporting does not get more up close, gruesome or personal than the front-line accounts he eventually produced. At first the bloodshed unnerved him: a girl on his street in Sarajevo is killed by a mortar and, despite the expectations

Loyd has used a zoom lens to put his readers nose to nose with the surreal and horrifying brutalities [in Bosnia] . . . this book is so powerful that, at times, you will have to put it down. But not for long." -- Denver PostYou could have a good time in Stara Bila that summer, providing you had not been born in the place. Congregated there were every type and nationality of journalist, photographer, cameraman (...). The fighting spilled further into the hills around us; they glowed with burning villages at night, and echoed with firefights by day. We sometimes watched it over barbecues. At dusk, we would choose our company, load up on whatever was going, and party to excess. We would fade out what the war meant to us and turn up the volume on the generator-run sound system." Guerra e roba. Spero sempre che l’una o l’altra mi mostrino la strada, ma non si verifica mai. Pensi di aver toccato il fondo molte volte e invece scopri sempre qualcos’altro da perdere. E dopo un po’ ti accorgi che quello che un tempo ti sembrava il fondo è ora un’altitudine verso la quale stai arrancando.

In war, one's survival intact comes down to the chances of a simple coincidence: will my flesh and a flying piece of metal be in the same place at the same time? That metal might be an individual bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Loyd puts it perfectly... He became so fond of one murderous Croatian militia leader that in a story he filed about the killer's flight from the region, he now confides, he changed the man's destination from Australia to Brazil, not wantingAnother thing that stood out to me was his attraction to the dead and he describes them. Of course, with an addictive personality, he is attracted to not just the dead. Every woman in this book was alluring, stunning, beautiful, etc. 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. While reporting in Northern Syria (2014), he was shot twice in the leg by Syrian rebels to stop him running away. [9] Family [ edit ]

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. The next most important theme is cynicism. The only thing you could be sure of is that the “truth” whatever that meant, was not what you would hear from official sources. “All participants lie in war. It is natural. Some often, some all the time: UN spokesmen, Croats, Serbs, Muslims, the lot. Truth is a weapon more than a casualty. Used to persuade people of one thing or another, it becomes propaganda. The more authoritative a figure, the bigger the lies; the more credible his position, the better the lies.” A testament to his honor and courage. And while it would be impossible for one man to tell the whole story, his book shines with small truths and larger, philosophical ones about life and war." -- New York PostInes 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. This is merely one example of the horrific cruelty and irrational hatreds created by the conflict between a desire to have an ethnically pure nationalistic country and those who desired a secular multi-ethnic society. Of course, nothing can be that simple, and one wonders if the thugs hadn’t taken control. Horrors abound as humans are turned into weapons. Loyd witnessed one particularly wanton and cruel act as groups of Serbian soldiers bound the arms of some Croatian prisoners and then taped Claymore mines to their bodies connected by wires to their own lines. They forced the prisoners to walk toward the enemy lines, assuming the prisoners would not be fired upon. The inevitable end left only minor pieces scattered around and parts of legs. Per anni in Bosnia, ‘dentro’ l’assedio di Sarajevo, in tante campagne militari, parteggiando apertamente per i musulmani. A raw and ragged book for a war that officially announced to the world that what's old is new in conflict: war fought between neighbors divided by religion or ethnicity, and fought hand to hand. . . . And his writing from the middle of the action is visceral, rife with urges that chaos and anonymity spur. . . . This may be the book these wars needed--an angry, confused howl against the obliteration of all we consider humane. Loyd has taken a step toward resuscitating the somnolent language of conflict-at-a-distance, bringing a war often seen through a haze of euphemism into sharp and jarring focus. This great horror in a century of horrors finally has its jeremiad." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

The prospect of peace eventually becomes, to Loyd's mind, ''hideous.'' His self-loathing entwines with his growing contempt for peaceful, prosperous places, and he scorns ''the complacency of Western societies.'' Lloyd] has written an account of its horrors that will wipe out any thoughts you might have had that we have reached the limit of the worst human nature has to offer. The monstrosities he describes are beyond belief. But the book is also compelling for what it tells us about fear." -- National Geographic Adventure Magazine Anthony Loyd (11 February 2005). "I'm more scared of going out with these guys than fighting insurgents". The Times. London . Retrieved 12 September 2007. 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.As such, Loyd’s book is a compelling contribution to the growing body of war correspondents’ memoirs, a distinguished genre of twentieth century literature. That distracted century offered writers ample opportunity to practice this branch of letters. In war after war reporters were confronted with the results of official and individual belligerence. World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—all these conflicts, and others besides, bred their own distinctive literatures. Now, with Loyd, it is the time of the dirty little wars of the 1990’s. He gets himself a bare-bones qualification in photojournalism, a smattering of Serbian from a restaurant-owner’s daughter, throws some bags in the boot of a mate’s car, and heads off to the new war in Bosnia. He has no affiliation with a news agency, little money and some sketchy press papers – little justification and no safety net, but he goes – because he has to.