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.
For the "gun and gear guys it is a let down, but for telling the effects of combat and man's inhumanity to man, it is startling.
To be fair to Anthony, the book is divided into sections; his troubled relationship to his parents: his addiction: set against the backdrop of a correspondent who is struggling with self-judgement at being a morbid voyeur.
He admits Chechnya blows the cover off anything else he had seen. "A glimpse into hell he calls it", and the subsequent chapter is a righteous description of a conflict that few were aware of.
It is one of the few books where I've underlined passages based on sheer eloquence in prose and context, yet found it most depressing; So what else could war be? A Great Read, but you'll need some Scotch when your finished.

One of my all time favorite books. On the one hand it's a masterpiece of war reporting as we follow Anthony Loyd (now, Sir Anthony Loyd) on his journey through the war torn Balkans during the bloody civil war of the 90s. On the other hand, it's an incredibly beautifully written story and Loyd's poetic narrative captures the tragedy and senseless of war unlike any other author I've ever read.... An absolute must read about one man's addiction to both heroine and war.

"There are no innocent bystanders... what are they doing there in the first place?"
(W. Burroughs, 'Exterminator!')

It would be hard to deny that Anthony Loyd is possibly the most despicable writer one could ever come across: a former arny officer who, for reasons we can't even start to fathom, leaves London with a rucksack and a postgraduate course in photojournalism, headed to besieged Sarajevo with no professional assignment whatsoever to witness a war he knows nothing about. What he's actually looking for is the thrill only a war could give him, the intensity he would never experience in normal circumstances. Or so he thinks.
Such an aim, fuelled by a family tradition of war mavericks, is at the very least ambiguous, devoid as it is of any real motive. Even greed would be somehow acceptable, compared to the psychological void of a 27 year-old guy who deliberately plunges into the horror, hunting it down in the Bosnian killing fields and shelled towns to fill the gap in his soul. A gap that - as the title suggests - is bound to reopen as soon as the maelstrom subsides, just like a junky's withdrawal:

"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. Without it, or any narcotic relief, they ground away with renewed vigour."

In fact a more pedestrian skag addiction is awaiting him at home.

After having sufficiently slandered the man (a well-known war correspondent for 'The Times', with missions in Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq under his belt) there are two things I'd like to point out about the writing, which are basically the reasons why I rated this book so high despite the ferocious antipathy I feel toward the author.
First of all, this book is hugely informative. It sheds light on a historical and human tragedy whose details are still largely unknown, no matter how massive the media coverage was at the time; and it does so from a perspective I can't quite define, between smugly egotistic and rationally detached. In short, a unique voice in the chorus of talk-show mourners and fundraising hyenas we're so familiar with nowadays.
The Balkan wars have always seemed too perversely complicated for me to fully grasp what actually happened between 1991 and 1995 - what with the ever-shifting alliances between the armies, factions, gangs, ethnic groups and mercenary troops involved in the conflict: Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs. I can safely say I didn't know anything about those events, apart from a handful of randomly picked-up notions. Far from having a thorough knowledge of what lead to four years of massacres, I was content with the basic information I'd been provided in school and never felt the need to further expand it.
It wasn't until I discovered this war memoir that I found out how little I knew of that period, how much I needed to learn about it and how erroneous my convictions were as to who was who, who did what and why Bosnia turned into the worst inferno Europe had witnessed since WW2.
Althoug being a first-person report rather than an exhaustive overview of political and military facts, Loyd's book is a very good introduction to the subject, due to his being so self-centred no ideological bias seeps through the text. The author constantly reminds the reader of his lack of idealistic motives: there's simply no room for sentimentality or moralism. He describes what he saw and heard and did over there, and that's all as far as he's concerned. No conclusion can be drawn. On the contrary, Loyd doesn't try to hide how apparently inappropriate his emotional responses were:

"The dynamic of my life in Bosnia (...): to reach the edge of the abyss in which people were getting killed, stay teetering there for as long as possible without dying, leave, then do it all again as quickly as possible. It was a solitary state whatever the company, and there were darker things than lead that could whack into you out of that void."

Secondly, the writing in and of itself is amazingly good. Not only does it portray the horror through images of murder and devastation; it also describes the insanity of daily life behind the frontlines: an army jeep with a skull stuck to the bonnet, psychotic fighters wearing ladies' hats and black sombreros, a female journalist thriving on mayhem and abjection, foreign correspondents partying while the mortars bring death all around them:

"You 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."

If you can stomach this sort of thing, then you'll be rewarded with some truly beautiful pages, especially when Loyd manages to convey the atmosphere of 1993 central Bosnia:

"There was something more than what you saw, smelled and felt inside. The atmosphere. It chainsawed through your senses and squirmed glass over your body; shut your eyes and you could still hear the screaming. For whatever had been sucked out of that place, something else had been pumped in. An open scar in the ether; pleading chokes scabbing the edges. Some empty black infinity inside that spat and laughed. Ever had a bad hallucination? You've seen nothing. Nothing."

Moreover, his war memories are interspersed with recollections of private moments such as his frantic junk-scoring in London and catastrophic family background, which perfectly fit into the overall sense of doom. One chapter is also dedicated to his experience in Chechnya, to where he flew during a truce - before the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement put an end to the Balkan bloodbath.

For all these reasons, this is not your average war memorial. It's a much more disturbing experience, one that stirs up quite a few perplexities as to the role played by war correspondents, cameramen, photojournalists, and all sorts of willing witnesses to mankind's tragedies:

"Love hate, war peace, life death, crime and justice: to say my mind was stretched by trying to figure it all out would be an understatement. I tried to cling on to the values I learned in peacetime (...) but behind it all I and others shared the turmoil of an inverted morality. War: don't believe the hype: it could be heaven as well as hell. Some people snatched themselves back from its mental tumult, got on with their lives and kept their perspective. If you want to call people heroes then these are your candidates. Others died: they are your victims. Too many like me, threw themselves into the waves and never looked back until the undertow kicked in."

One can't help but despise such an attitude. What truly offends the reader is Loyd's acquired capacity to think the unthinkable without having to justify his thoughts nor feeling morally accountable to anything and anyone:

"The oppressive stagnation of peacetime, growing older, of domestic tragedy and trivial routine. Could I accept what to me seemed the drudgery of everyday existence, the life we endure without so much as a glimpse of an angel's wing. Fuck that. Sometimes I pray for another war just to save me."

I reluctantly suggest this book to all those who think they can love the writing despite hating the writer.
That's what I did.

This book struck me in several ways. First, the author's view of the conflict in Bosnia completely reinforced my observations and opinions of the war in general and each of the warring sides and their respective roles/blame. The parts of the book written about his time in Bosnia were incredibly well written. That being said, I could have done without the parts of the book that dealt with his heroin addiction and how it came about. If his time in Bosnia had led to his addiction, inclusion in the book would have made more sense. Instead, those sections merely took away from an otherwise very good memoir on the Bosnian conflict.

Quite an incredible journey of self-reflection, self loathing and perhaps some kind of finding peace amongst it? A very honest look at one man’s war, more with himself than the ones he witnessed. Absolutely beautiful and haunting writing, some of the best I’ve ever read. Wildly descriptive, terrifying, and hard to put down. Chapeau.

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.

What defined these two groups? Race? They were the same race. Culture? They were all Tito-era children. Religion? No man present had the first clue about the tenets of his own faith, be it Orthodox or Islam. They were southern Slav brothers, pitted in conflict by the rising phoenix of long-dead banners raised by men whose only wish was power, vlast, and in so doing had created a self-perpetuating cycle of fear and death that grew in Bosnia, feeding off its own evil like a malignant tumour.

Robert Kaplan’s 1993 book Balkan Ghosts is still used today by policymakers trying to navigate this troubled region, and he saw what was coming. “My visit to Yugoslavia was eerie precisely because everyone I spoke with—locals and foreign diplomats alike—was already resigned to big violence ahead. Yugoslavia did not deteriorate suddenly, but gradually and methodically, step by step, through the 1980s, becoming poorer and meaner and more hate-filled by the year.” He also wrote that “Macedonia was like the chaos at the beginning of time,” but the comment could have been applied to much of the Balkans. The war began when Croatia declared its independence from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, and when My War Gone By opens the fighting has already been going on for a year.

The author, Anthony Lloyd, is the great-grandson of Lieutenant General Sir Adrian Carton De Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, one of the most decorated British soldiers of World War One. He was personally brave beyond the point of recklessness, into foolhardiness and perhaps even madness. Wikipedia says of him “He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crashes; tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp; and tore off his own fingers when a doctor declined to amputate them. Describing his experiences in the First World War, he wrote, ‘Frankly I had enjoyed the war.’” He sounds like the very archetype of a soldier, but this is the kind of leader who gets his troops killed in large numbers and usually for little gain.

Anthony Lloyd clearly felt he had big shoes to fill, and after service in the peacetime British army found himself drifting through life and increasingly addicted to drugs, so he went looking for a war of his own. He showed up in the Balkans as a freelance photographer with no plan, no contacts, and little money, and basically attached himself to whoever was heading to the front lines. He does not come across as a sympathetic character, and he was certainly no hero. A psychiatrist would have a field day with him, and there were times when I wondered if he even realized how much self-loathing was in his writing. For instance, “Why was I here? There had to be a reason. I was not a Bosnian stuck in Sarajevo, I was a foreigner who could leave. So why did I stay? Was I a sluttish dilettante day-tripping into someone else’s nightmare?” Personally, I’d say yes to the whole dilettante thing.

He meets people who are stuck in a nightmare from which there is no escape, and only a small chance of survival. For him, however, London was just a two hour plane ride away and he could return whenever he wanted a break or when his drug stash needed to be replenished. “War and smack: I always hope for some kind of epiphany in each to lead me out but it never happens. You think you have hit the bottom many times then always find something else to lose, till after a while what once seemed like the bottom is an altitude that you are trying to scrabble back to.”

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.”

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.

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.”

Lloyd met good people in the war, people trying to survive and get on with their lives, but many others had been so poisoned by the fighting and dying that they had lost all compunctions about killing, so long as they could drink themselves into oblivion afterwards.

I believe any man, given the right pressures, could kill an innocent in cold blood. In accepting the reality of war rather than the ideal, however, I believe there are categories of atrocity. If fighters lose their heads and murder civilians or prisoners they are certainly guilty. But if a state uses atrocity as a tactic to polarize the population, like Serbia and latterly Croatia did in Bosnia, then it is guilty of a greater crime. In my mind, cold-bloodedness and the culpability of the state are the keys to apportioning guilt. Yes, Muslim troops did kill civilians and prisoners on occasion, but their actions were dwarfed by the scale of the crimes of their opponents.

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.”

To this day the region simmers with barely suppressed violence. Ethnic cleansing has led to large majorities in many areas, with the remaining minorities ever more fearful that it is only a matter of time before the pogroms begin again. The leaders on all sides have learned nothing, and continue to foment nationalism for narrow political gains, willing to risk another war so long as they can stay in power and continue their lucrative thievery and extortion rackets. Nor did the UN learn anything, taking away the wrong lesson, that wars can be stopped with airpower alone, and with minimal risk of politically unpopular casualties on the ground. In 1888 Bismark said, “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” He was right about the outbreak of World War One, and may be right about a future great conflict, where Russia comes to the aid of its Serbian Orthodox co-religionists, the Islamic states come together to support the Bosnian Muslims, and the Western Europeans decide to help the Christian factions.

Brutal details of a photographer's experience of the war in the Balkans in the '90s.

From Eton to Sandhurst to... Sarajevo? In a stunning act of masculine pride, an ex-army officer, unsatisfied by tours of duty in Northern Ireland and the first Gulf War, leaves the British military, picks up a camera, and rocks up to the Bosnian War. He spends a lot of time smoking cigarettes and drinking with the locals, occasionally taking photos and sending stories back to London.

"I was delighted with most of what the war had offered me: chicks, kicks, cash and chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real and wreathed in gunsmoke. It was an environment to which I had adapted better than most, and I could really get off on it. I could leer and posture as much as anyone else, roll my shoulders and swagger through stories of megadeath, murder and mayhem; and I could get angry about the poignant tragedy of it all. But what did it amount to? 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.”

I found his writing to be pretty gruesome at times, but it is the reality of war. Heavy stuff.

7/11/22 -- Finished reading this for the second time. It is always good to find that a book that you love is just as good the second time around - better, in this case, for reading it slowly and with more care. Anthony Loyd writes with an energy that I've never seen anywhere else, which is just a privilege to read about, especially as it's all directed to describing something as vast as war.

*

Everything that I've heard or read about war has always given me the impression that it exists separate from "the real world," metaphorically speaking -- of course it is real, but what happens in war is totally irreconcilable with the rest of the world. This book isn't interested in providing an exact history, not the political implications nor the broader picture; rather, this book sets out to cross the divide between the world as it is ordinarily, and the liminal, unreal world that Loyd found himself in when he set out to experience war -- a world which, despite its brutality, he loved.

Nothing here is romanticised; the brutality is graphic, it is horrible. There is nothing good about the violence, the genocide, the crimes against humanity, even as he describes it all in loving detail. While this book doesn't cover everything, the impact of what is given is intense, shying away from nothing. I read a lot about different attrocities; while I do not read without emotion, my interest in such things is always foremost because the topic interests me and I want to know the detail. I must emphasise this, because there were several moments in this book where what was written became real to me in a way that nothing else has, and I truly appreciated the magnitude of the situation.

More than just being "about war," this book is also about Loyd's relationship with it. Throughout the book there is enough context to understand why it is that Loyd feels as he does, while still never intruding on what he has to say. I can easily see why it is that people may be disgusted by Loyd. He is a war tourist, someone who has no personal reason to be involved in the conflict but chose to go to Bosnia simply for the experience; he makes no secret of the fact, and remains aware of the distance between his situation and the situation of the people that he met there. He admits to his own voyeurism openly, and makes no apology for the fact that he wanted to be there and loved it. Naturally, I can't fault him for that -- I read this book wanting to see the details, which were provided in abundance, and also because I wanted to know more about the kind of person who puts themselves in such horrible situations because it is where he belongs.

There is so much that I could say about this book. The way that he talks about his addiction is interesting, as relevant to the rest of the story as anything else; many of the people that he meets are very interesting, and it is easy to see why certain people and incidents left the impression that they did. I love his acknowledgement and treatment of superstition and belief, without ever sounding trite. The writing itself is worth commenting on alone, because it is beautiful and would almost be poetic if it did not feel so grounded.

On the whole, I've taken a lot away from reading this.

Interesting portrait of the author’s time covering the war in the Balkans. It does not provide a history of the war but more of the everyday horrors combatants and civilians endured during the time. From his writing I pictured the battlefront, and wondered if I could have done what he did.

That was vivid.

Usually, going into nonfiction, I expect the descriptions and recollections to feel embellished or supplemented for the story and very analytical or cold in nature. Not in this case.

Loyd writes with prose that borders on free form poetry, evoking emotions and feelings with both descriptions and metaphors. Even when simply telling the reader what happened without dressing, Loyd is able to convey at once how he felt at the time and how he feels recounting some of the most horrific events that could happen to a person.

This is an incredibly intimate book. Everything is so graphic. I felt at times like I wasn't supposed to be reading this, like I was too close to Loyd for an American who wasn't even born before the war ended. I know it's impossible to experience war without going to war, but this book is as close as I think anyone can get.

The raw emotion combined with suprisingly nuanced fact telling put this up as one of, if not my favorite piece of nonfiction writing.

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.
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.
The part about the author that I did find interesting (even though I don't remember exactly how he came to this) is that he misses being there in this war, even though it was difficult and depressing for him. It somehow made him feel alive and that he was taking part in something bigger than himself.