At the time of Endre’s words I had been in the city only a short while and still knew almost nothing of war though the subsequent days queued packed in line to throw their rocks into the still pool of my naivety. There was a Bosnian government army sniper positioned in one of the top floors of the burned-out tower block overlooking the Serbs in Grbavica. Isidora’s father, Petar, was a Serb from Montenegro who had lived in Sarajevo for twenty-eight years.

My War Gone by, I Miss it So by Anthony Loyd | Waterstones

He was one of Bosnia’s natural survivors and quickly became my “droog,” comrade, my guide and mentor.

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. Loyd gradually acquired a political view of the war: Serbian nationalists were the main aggressors, Muslims the main victims.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd | Goodreads

We roared off at speed and in silence, the city rushing past me on either side of the straight road in a dirty grey blur. As long as you stayed clear of topics such as religion, war or politics, hospitality was seldom a problem in the Balkans.There were times when our feelings changed, as if synchronized by a hidden clock, and the noise of the fighting outside reached into us. Author Anthony Loyd took some courses in journalism in London, found a person to teach him Serbo-Croat and went off to chronicle the war in Bosnia from start to finish with a side trip to witness the first Russian attack on Grozny, Chechnya. Shocking and violent, yet lyrical and ultimately redemptive, this book is a breathtaking feat of reportage and an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war.

Anthony Loyd - Wikipedia

Occasionally a government sniper would use the top floor or roof as a position, provoking more `educating fire’ in response, but by and large it was untouched after its initial baptism. The way I read it was simple: Ant felt great conflict inside, and sought an environment that would reflect that externally, as an attempt to understand it. I showed them my passport and a Bosnian accreditation card I had picked up but this did little to satisfy them.He had escaped to Sarajevo, seeing it as a bastion of multi-ethnicity that no war could ever reach, a misjudgement he still laughed over when I first met him. Then it would come: the double concussion-sound kerrump of shellfire and the air-cutting crack of bullets. The book is largely autobiographical and recounts Loyd’s experiences covering the war as a British ex-soldier-turned-photojournalist. The three of us belted across the road, for a second jamming together in the doorway in a tangle of thrashing limbs. Loyd waxes eloquent on the backblast of his war time, a heroin addiction that begins before his arrival and becomes the only way he can survive his breaks from the fighting.