Certo dia, Anthony Loyd decidiu que queria ser fotojornalista. Sem experiência, sem emprego, apenas com uma câmara, partiu para o conflito na Bósnia e ficou "viciado" em guerra. Homem de excessos, encontrou o conforto possível nas drogas e o no álcool, viu de perto o inferno, testemunhou crimes de guerra, na Bósnia e mais tarde no Kosovo. Uma narrativa "crua" que demonstra o lado mais selvagem do homem, na década de 90 d0 século passado.

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.
Kako se kod njih kaže ova knjiga "not worth a penny".

Over the years, I've read a lot of books about the Bosnian genocide, presumably because there is something wrong with me -- something creepy and voyeuristic and utterly fascinated by how completely and utterly evil mankind can be. This is one of the Bosnian war porn books that is going to stick with me for a long, long time. It's relentlessly depressing, enraging and funny all at once.

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 heroin addict bit doesn't really add to the story, but it probably couldn't have been cut out without affecting the truth of the rest of the work -- if this were fiction, it would definitely be a messy subplot that should be cut out just to streamline the book. Likewise, his relationship to his father is just kind of there, butting into the atrocities.

I've read enough of these books that they begin to blur together, but this joins Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass, and Endgame: The Betrayal And Fall Of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II by David Rohde, as one of the books that will stay with me and haunt me. The writing here is better than those, but the book itself is less focused.

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.

Now I want to read something about fluffy bunnies.

My War Gone By tells the story of Anthony Loyd, who bluffs his way into an ill-defined or non-existent role as a war correspondent in Bosnia (with a side visit to Chechnya that doesn't quite fit, for me).

He's singularly unprepared for any of it. He has a history in England's army and ancestors in the military but no training in journalism. And, he seems surprised that no media outlet wants anything to do with him: "I still waited hopefully for an employer to end the drumroll of my preparations. The thought of going off to a war without the cloak of a professional guise was a little unnerving. Without a contract there would be no aim to fulfill other than my own, and that was fairly vague: ... to go to war using, if possible, journalism as an open-ended ticket to remain in Bosnia. ... None came. I was left having to face the full responsibility of my own actions."

In the early pages of the book he comes across as the worst sort of wannabe voyeur: "Was I a sluttish dilettante day-tripping into someone else's nightmare? Maybe. ... If I could not use my cameras, then I should not be there. I could not stay ... and feed off the misery of people who had become my friends just to 'see a war.' "

"Men and women who venture to someone else's war through choice ... all want the same thing, a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side."

Loyd's walk includes drug addiction, depression and a fractured family. But he discovers the limits of moral relativity as he seeks to understand the alphabet soup of competing factions and the roles of nationalism, territoriality and religion in sustaining the violence. As he sees war up close, he's seized by terror. And, he figures out his role.

"Dread was never in my script. ... The dynamic of my life in Bosnia ... was entirely different [than his military service]: unarmed, 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."

He's still not a journalist when he finds a niche: "I neither knew if I could write, nor what was expected of me. ... In the absence of knowledge I resolved to carry on like a photographer, only writing about what I saw." And he finds his calling. "I had found the war to be as unjust as it was brutal. There was no equal guilt. There was right and wrong." Loyd naively believes his words will change hearts and minds (even policy) back in the UK. "Is not 'doing something' the whole point? It was no contest of course. We lost. They won. The hollow men usually do."

That epiphany comes two hundred pages from the end. There's much savagery left, interspersed with memories from Loyd's life away from war. The former might be too much for sensitive readers. It can become indistinguishable, as all parties to fighting in Bosnia and in Chechnya choose atrocities and war crimes over the "decorum" of the wars fought by Loyd's menfolk.

Loyd's book begins with war crimes investigators in Srebrenica in 1996. His take on the violence that occurred from 1992 until 1995 is that its root was power mongers who "created a self-perpetuating cycle of fear and death that grew in Bosnia, feeding off its own evil like a malignant tumors. ... the war was about polarity and separation."

Those dynamics continue and spread, which gives this memoir a continuing relevance.

I'd have liked to see some thoughts from Loyd on the damage (physical, but especially mental/emotional) done to journalists who witness the carnage and experience the terrors of war. As a career journalist, I know of instances where men and an occasional woman continue to suffer long after the assignments end. Loyd could bring some balance to the media's tendency to glorify war AND those who document it. His testimony about his experiences isn't enough.

I'm torn about a rating here. Three and a half or four stars. It's both overlong and self-indulgent. But it contains important truths.

“We want to know what killing is like.’ The words hang in my mind. If you are a young man of combat age frustrated by the tedium and meaninglessness of life in twentieth-century Europe, you may understand them. If not, you will probably think they come from a psychopath.”

“However tuned in my friends, we were all consumerist children of the Sixties with an appetite for quick kicks without complications. They wanted to feed their senses – as I would have done in their position – by hearing of the blood and violence without the complexity of it all. Sixty years earlier perhaps they all would have volunteered for an International Brigade and gone over to fight in Spain. That they did not now was the result of being a product of a different age, a different society. We did not have the sense of idealism, awareness and conviction of our forefathers. It was not our fault, but it was, I guess, ultimately to our detriment.”

This isn't the story of the war in Bosnia, it's the story of a particular man suffering from a very typical sort of 21st century malaise, a feeling which is highlighted by the excursions into his drug addiction and family issues. War for him is about purity, and beyond the idealism, cause, and favored side that he over time develops on the Bosnian lines (and carries directly with him into Russia), that's ultimately what the book is about:

"It suggested that the power of man can withstand the might of the machine, and it threatened the complacency of Western societies whose children, like me, are corrupted by meaningless choice, material wealth and spiritual emptiness."

“We had shared something together in Sarajevo so intimate and incommunicable, a humility and compassion among individuals unconnected by blood tie, which I have never found elsewhere. Some would call it the human spirit. Whatever it was, to discuss those times in London seemed an unbearable prospect: the needless wounding of a walk back into loss that I just could not face. I hope that they understand.”

That said, it's also a very interesting walk through a microcosm of the war in Bosnia from a low to the ground and openly selfish perspective that therefore feels much more honest than many higher level or other personalized low level accounts.

Of course, the Serbs (and later for a single chapter the Russians) are the "they" of the story – a shadowly inhumane enemy you will never see in a way that deeply offends my personal sensibilities, but the Croat and Bosnian perspectives are interestingly explored, and hoo boy did this guy get around.

Overall, more of an aesthetic experience than war reporting, but I quite liked it. Definitely won't read it again out of offended chauvinistic feelings, though.

I think this is a development of the "photo essay in words" that Loyd attempted to create as a (dilettante photo journalist become) reporter –– "a video essay in words."

Excellent prose, but more than that, he has articulated feelings I have had as an aid worker of living in a war zone..and the disjuncture it creates with those who haven't.

A fascinating first-hand account of the Bosnian War. If you're looking for truly grim war stories scattered with highly resilient individuals trying to survive, I recommend it. It's also a great way to learn recent and important history; it documents the brutal Bosnian War in the 90's very well, something that I learned absolutely nothing about as a millennial American.

The last two chapters, a revelation. Only by reading these last 40 pages I discovered the true meaning of this book, the 'why' of the whole story and its purpose for being told. It was a marvellous feeling, a cathartic disclosure where all the past seems to be able to decode the present and any recurring future.
It was hard to find a link, a head or a tail in this book, a beginning and a direction, an aim for this narrative. There were all very interesting, captivating stories, proof of something...I did not know what.
Although extremely descriptive and real, I had the sense there is a lot missing in this book, too much left to be dug even deeper if the author ever had the intention to.
I would have.

As a vet who served in the Balkins, this book has been on my to read list for years. After watching Alex Garlands Civil War, I thought this would be just the fix I was looking for and was so right. Loyds' deeply personal journey through Yugoslavia's disintegration reveals how easy society can collapse.

4.5 I waited to review this one. It stuck with me even after I finished another book so thought it deserved a review. Some of the war imagery was brutal, depressing, and very hard to read, but it put a human face on the conflict in the Balkans that was missing from a lot of the new coverage from that time. Also while some thought the author was callous or arrogant and criticized him for bringing up his addiction issues I found he worked them in pretty seamlessly to the overall structure of the book and that he seemed relatively humble in the face of the mass atrocity he witnessed.

This book was both difficult and resonating for me. Loyd captures so well the brutality of war and the insanity of which humanity is so capable when locked into some twisted form of bloodlust. I have seen and experienced both. His account of the short term blessings and the long term curse of addiction as a way to cope with the overwhelm of combat and the banality of peace is also very familiar to me. This book was dragged from the tortured soul only those who have been through the cauldron can know. It is so well written and articulate, I have never seen it all better told. I feel a great affinity with this man, and though I am grateful to have his account, more because it is a confirmation of my own responses than anything else, I am also intensely aware of the futility of trying to communicate these things to someone who has never been there. I share his rage at the apathy of our own society, the cynicism of politicians of every ilk and the total ineffectuality of the United Nations. The seducer of false promise! The old soldier's adage applies, "you're born; you eat shit and then you die!"

This book was recommended to me by one of my former students. I have read a few war memoirs before, but this is one of the most graphic and horrifying accounts I have ever come across. I never understood the war in Bosnia; now I know why. There so many factions: it was like trying to comprehend gang wars in L.A. but even more heartless and gruesome. Someone once said that you can't explain war to someone who has never been in one, and you don't need to explain war to someone who has.