My War Gone By, I Miss It So

by Anthony Loyd

Overview

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.

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. Shocking, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802122322
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/22/2014
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	381,965
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Anthony Loyd is a British foreign correspondent who has reported from numerous conflict zones including the Balkans, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Chechnya. A former infantry officer, he left the British army after the First Gulf War and went to live in Bosnia. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is his memoir of that conflict.

Read an Excerpt

Central Bosnia, Winter 1993

"Don't shoot, don't shoot," the three soldiers cried out to their comrades as they staggered up the rain-sodden slope towards the Muslim lines at the end of the Novi Travnik. The BiH troops scrambled out of their bunkers among the trees, stumbling down the narrow trenches to take up their positions on the knoll of ground overlooking the Croat-held houses little more than a hundred yards below them. These were confused moments, though once in place it took the fighters only seconds to understand the full horror unfolding before their eyes.

The men approaching them were their own, captured days earlier during a dawn infiltration of the Muslim lines by the HVO. Now, forced back across no man's land, the prisoners lurched unnaturally up the hillside. Their hands were strapped to their waists. Improvised claymore mines were attached to their chests, linked to the Croat houses by coils of wire that unraveled slowly with each stop of their robotic progress. The human bombs were returning home.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"A fascinating look at war from a front-row seat." —Denver Rocky Mountain News

"Loyd's fragmentary reports morph into first-rate war correspondence from Bosnia that places him into the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr." —Boston Globe

"An extraordinary evocation of the war in Bosnia, that is also a painful personal story . . . idiosyncratic, unsparingly graphic, refreshingly critical, and beautifully written." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"What a writer, what a vision. It's hard to read and not be impressed." —San Diego Union Tribune

"Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome and personal." —The New York Times

Editorial Reviews

"Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and personal. . . . The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page." —New York Times

"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 . . . This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering. And 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." —Salon

"Both beautiful and disturbing." —Wall Street Journal

"First-rate war correspondence . . . [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr." —Boston Globe

"My War Gone By, I Miss It So moves at the pace of a thriller. Why bother reading war fiction when you can read such intense reporting?" —LA Weekly

"[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

"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 Post

"Brave and admirable . . . with vivid descriptions of shelling, human suffering, and new depths of fear." —Christian Science Monitor

"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 Post

"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

"Loyd has a matter-of-fact writing style that augments rather than softens the carnage he describes. At the same time he can go ballistic on certain subjects: the incompetent impotence of the U.N., for example, or the apathy of the Western public. . . . He describes both wars from a ground-level view, making them more understandable while maintaining their chaotic feel: a difficult, yet appreciated balancing act. He humanizes how inhuman war can be. . . . Loyd has gone to hell and back and is telling us what he's seen in sometimes beautiful, always pungent prose." —Seattle Times

"Writing with a combat veteran's dark knowledge and a seasoned war correspondent's edgy, hesitant desire to cling to some sort of confidence in humanity, Loyd delivers a searing firsthand account of the war in Bosnia that successfully blends autobiographical confession and war reportage. . . . Not like any other book on the Yugoslav war, his gripping, viscerally subjective chronicle puts a human face on the tragedy as it mourns the strangled soul of multiethnic Bosnia." —Publishers Weekly

"An extraordinary evocation of the war in Bosnia, that is also a painful personal story. . . . He sketches an almost unbearable picture of the carnage . . . [no other book] takes the reader deeper into the domestic heart of the conflict as this idiosyncratic, unsparingly graphic, refreshingly self-critical, and beautifully written memoir." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"The stark, often lyrical quality of his prose accentuates the surreal atmosphere of wartime . . . Loyd’s account blends personal revelation with biting commentary on diplomacy and war. By turns horrifying, contemplative, and savagely funny, this memoir captures the peculiar ferocity ethnic and religious civil strife. . . . This unforgettable work ranks with the great modern accounts of war and should be in every library." —Library Journal

"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 Chronicle

"A strangely confessional chronicle of a man who looks into devastated regions and sees the rubble of himself. It is a simultaneously cold and impassioned chronicle of a love affair with war, a disturbing and sometimes embarrassing mix of self-loathing and self-justification written with acrid candor . . . he invokes the ritual poetry of violence: the stunning transformation of live flesh into mist and offal, the voraciousness of fear, the classic juxtaposition of innocence and gore." —Newsday

"Loyd steadfastly writes from [an] unromantic point of view, refusing to give lip service to the vacuous, sound-bite moralisms and historical nuggets he sees most journalists resorting to in Bosnia . . . he tells the unvarnished truth, no mean feat in such a diabolically convoluted and tragic conflict." —Chicago Tribune

"Riveting, first-hand, intensely personal accounts of horror . . . 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." —San Jose Mercury News

"A masterpiece of gore by a war correspondent whose words are worth a thousand pictures . . . [Loyd is] a writer of astonishing talent, with a sense of humor as dark as the inside of a Kalashnikov’s barrel." —San Diego Union Tribune

"Not your father’s front-line reporting. This may just be the flat-on-your-belly grittiest coverage to come out of those tormented killing zones thus far." —Dallas Morning News

"Lose yourself in Loyd’s surreal world . . . then return to your own reality. What a trip. What a wild, wrenching ride you will give yourself. . . . The fear he feels you feel. The bloodied bodies he sees you see. The courage he musters to save the life of a child you cheer. . . . My War Gone By, I Miss It So will long be considered a gem of wartime journalism." —Albuquerque Journal

"Exceptionally well written and a devastating reminder that there are still places where the particular hell of war is the everyday norm." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Surreal and chilling . . . a fascinating look at war from a front-row seat . . . he succeeds in his most impossible of missions: to explain the inexplicable." —Denver Rocky Mountain News

"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

"Gruesome, gritty . . . a compelling book, engaging and stylistically both elegant and accessible . . . the descriptive detail is stunningly realized, and the anecdotes are often shrewd and revealing . . . his keen susceptibility to risk, pain and fear." —Tucson Weekly

"A truly exceptional book, one of those rare moments in journalistic writing when you can sit back and realize that you are in the presence of somebody willing to take the supreme risk for a writer, of extending their inner self. . . . I read his story of war and addiction (to conflict and to heroin) with a sense of gratitude for the honesty and courage on every page. . . . Until I read Antony Loyd's book I had never quite understood the pull or power of that Balkan experience." —The Independent (UK)

"There are those who seek out the world’s hotspots and combat zones, to experience and to report where the rest of us mere mortals would fear to tread. Photographer Anthony Lloyd captures this perplexing obsession in the brilliant My War Gone By, I Miss It So." —Irish Times

From the Publisher

In My War Gone By, I Miss It So, when Mr. Loyds gets down to the task of war reporting, the results are phenomenal.
— Wall Street Journal

Kimberley A. Strassel

My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Anthony Loyd's provocatively titled memoir of the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, challenges many of the conventions of the genre. Loyd admits right off that he isn't interested in journalism -- that for him it's just a passport to war. So he doesn't "cover" these wars so much as he reports about himself playing tourist on the scene. He isn't sympathetic to any particular side or cause, and he isn't outraged by the carnage or moved to what he calls "sluttish displays of empathy." He doesn't see anything of value in being a witness. "What good did reporting do in Bosnia?" he asks with considerable justice.

Loyd says soldiering is in his blood. The military men he's descended from fought in the Boer War and in World War II, and he was a soldier himself with the British in Northern Ireland (where he apparently didn't witness a single shot fired in anger). He tells us he "wanted to know what it was like to shoot people. I felt it was the key to understanding so much more." But as a journalist/photographer (he's never clear about what, if anything, he's doing work-wise), when he gets his chance to actually kill a Serb, he doesn't. And elsewhere he forgets to take photos altogether, making him an all-around fuck-up as a "shooter."

Since he's not interested in "the story," you won't learn much here about these wars that you haven't already read in the newspapers. Perhaps because he's not tied to the daily story the other journalists and photographers are covering, though, he does make use of the time he spends cruising around on the fringes of the fighting, discovering how tribal the Bosnian war is and how provisional the ethnic loyalties and the alliances between Muslims, Croats and Serbs are.

But he isn't much of a storyteller. There are a few revealing anecdotes: How an American peacekeeper was so spooked by a Bosnian killing field war-crimes investigators were exploring that he wouldn't patrol it at night. How some Swedish peacekeepers backed off from the courageous move to free a score of Muslim prisoners from their Croatian captors after a visiting BBC team decided the scene was too dangerous to film. But nothing here compares to the stories Tobias Wolff tells in his Vietnam memoir, In Pharaoh's Army, which distill the whole war into a few pages.

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; of the stroke victim's daughter who is raped while her father lies paralyzed and unable to help; of the Croats who wire up Muslim POWs with claymore mines and make them walk back to their own lines, forcing their buddies to shoot them to save everyone else. This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering. And 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.

Smack and war go together like a horse and carriage. That nihilistic cocktail can seem truer than the hysterical humanism of TV war reporting. But druggy ruminations are notoriously shallow, and an "existence is meaninglessness" POV makes for dreary reading. The hype machine has compared My War Gone By to Michael Herr's masterpiece, Dispatches, but Loyd's book is devoid of Herr's vivid prose, his wacko humor and his wild, deep love for the American grunts he hung with in Vietnam. There are no people we come to know and understand in Loyd's book except for a Sarajevo family he looks up when he arrives in the war zone, and he really doesn't even bring them to life. Although he does once brave enemy lines to save some wounded children (and even saves a cow in the process), he's ultimately just a tourist.

For Loyd, war turns out, like smack, to lose its transcendent power after a while and decline into an addiction. As for his hope that war would be "the key to understanding so much more," maybe before he set off he should have listened to Frank Zappa's warning: "Understanding is the booby prize of life."
— Salon

Judith Coburn

"It was not necessarily that I had 'found myself' during the war, but the conflict had certainly put a kind of buffer zone between the fault lines in my head." Writing with a combat veteran's dark knowledge and a seasoned war correspondent's edgy, hesitant desire to cling to some sort of confidence in humanity, Loyd delivers a searing firsthand account of the war in Bosnia that successfully blends autobiographical confession and war reportage. Loyd, a veteran of the Persian Gulf War (where he was a platoon commander), was deep into suicidal depression and heavy drinking when, at 26, he left London for war-torn Bosnia in 1993 (he got assignments for British newspapers and is now a Times of London correspondent). After returning to England in 1995 by way of Chechnya, he sank into heroin addiction before pulling himself together and returning to cover the Balkan carnage through 1996. He admits to a grim fascination with war as the ultimate frontier of human experience. Just when a reader begins to feel that Loyd is too cynical and detached, a scorchingly lyrical passage will illuminate the Balkan war in all its anarchic horror. While Loyd finds plenty of guilt all around, he is highly sympathetic to the Bosnian Muslims, approves of NATO's bombing of the Serbs and chastises U.N. troops for standing idly by while thousands of Muslims were slaughtered in Srebrenica, a designated U.N. "safe area." On the autobiographical front, he attributes his immersion in war to his hostile relationship with his intimidating father, and to his family's complex web of national and ethnic origins (Austrian, English, Belgian, Egyptian, Jewish). Not like any other book on the Yugoslav war, his gripping, viscerally subjective chronicle puts a human face on the tragedy as it mourns the strangled soul of multiethnic Bosnia. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Loyd labors long, and generally successfully, to convey the experience of a war correspondent living at or near the front. Readers are submerged in a grim cycle of boredom, discomfort, chaos, terror and grief -- a cycle that in his version becomes so all-consuming that the peacetime world recedes, seeming to disappear over the psychological horizon.
—The New York Times Book Review

William Finnegan