Prep school boy decides to go to war as a tourist. Surprise, discovers war is bad. This is a nice biography of a masculine boy with daddy issues raised by feminine women. It is probably even a good self-help psychological study of the writer. It is not a history book nor even a philosophical study of war. As always, the poor fight wars and the rich write about it.

Born of a prestigious English military family, Loyd was enamored of war until he enlisted in the Bosnia conflict. Fresh with a degree in photojournalism and no prospect of a job, Loyd decided to go to Bosnia, where the war had been going on for about a year in 1993. Freshly arrived in Sarajevo, he was almost immediately introduced to the irrationality of the situation. Looking for a guide to help him find the house a contact in London had provided, he soon found one who was more than happy to help, insisting that no remuneration was necessary — indeed, Loyd discovered that despite outside world assumptions of universal hatred, his experience was that as long as religion, politics, and war were not mentioned, the residents would s soon adopt any stranger as almost a member of the family.

From the hotel, they needed to cross “sniper’s alley,” a dangerous section of street open to constant sniping. Loyd’s guide made it clear that he would not run in front of “those people.” Loyd could see that any rational person would want to break the four-minute mile getting across and hated the thought of dying on his first day because of a need for politesse. They settled on a crab-like compromise. Soon after arriving, he discarded his flak jacket not just because it was heavy, but because it placed a barrier between him and the residents who had to survive the horrors on a daily basis. He could get on a plane at any time and return to London in just two hours.. There were numerous groups of men surrounded by cadres of armed bodyguards who created their own little fiefdoms, and allegiances shifted more frequently than a river’s bottom.

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.

Mercenaries flocked to Bosnia from everywhere seeking action and excitement. One he met was a French Foreign Legion deserter (killed not a few weeks later). Loyd was shot at within days of his arrival. He met a beautiful young woman in a bar, a Croatian who, it turned out, was a sniper. Loyd asked her if she knew any Serbs or had any Serbian friends. She said the only ones she hoped to see again were those she would kill.

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.

The body of one who had weighed some 200 lbs. before he was captured weighed only thirty lbs. when buried, and that included the weight of the coffin. In another example of life’s randomness, the only prisoner to survive was one who had been beaten so badly that he could not walk. Loyd wonders what to say to the parents of these mere children, barely 21 years old. Ordinary items became instruments of death. The U.N. insisted that all Coke cans be squashed because both sides would use them to create grenades. Television sets were gutted and filled with explosives.

Loyd is both repelled and fascinated by what he sees firsthand. He admires the marksmanship of a Serb who climbed to the top of a tower and, using a .50 caliber rifle, shot an international aid worker. The bullet traveled through the back of the Range Rover, through the seat, through the man’s flak jacket, and then out the front of the vehicle. An awesome weapon. Bosnia was "a playground where the worst and most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted out."

Loyd despised the regular media correspondents who would wander periodically via armored personnel carrier into U.N. headquarters for a few sound bites and then return to the safety of a Holiday Inn, “to file their heartfelt vitriol with scarcely a hair out of place.” His big break came when he was asked to substitute for a wounded British writer and then he began to sell his stories as well as photographs.

The horror of this beautifully written book (hard to describe such a book thusly given the content) is that Loyd found the war somehow appealing, a high close to that of his former heroin addiction. "I had come to Bosnia partially as an adventure. But after a while I got into the infinite death trip. I was not unhappy. Quite the opposite. 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 gun smoke." All social constraints are abandoned in war. Scoffing at the idea of objectivity, he lobbied against the Serbs and was embarrassed not to be shooting at them himself. "I felt I was a pornographer, a voyeur come to watch."

Whether 9/11 and its aftermath will generate future war addicts remains to be seen.

Brutal, Fascinating, Educational, Personal, Honest all of those apply to this book. The author takes you on a journey during the Bosnian war with no hold barred. He also takes you on a personal journey of his addiction and personal relationships. It is also a pretty deep dive in the causes and political reasons for a very complex geo-political event. While his feelings are definitely pro Bosnian and anti Serb he shows all sides of the conflict. An excellent readand beautifully written.

I don't really get choked and emotional about books, but this one really choked me several times. Loyd is a heroin addict photographer who travels to the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and sees some hideous things, all of which he relates utterly fantastically. Truly super stuff.

3.5 / 5

Hard one to rate. On the one hand, a truly unique and bizarre story of what it's like to experience a war from the perspective of someone who is sort of just going for the rush and the experience. On the other hand, lots to criticize. I suppose, however, I commend his honesty in talking about his intentions and his experiences. Good read.

Usually I expect to be choked up while reading war memoirs. That didn't happen often with Anthony Loyd's My War Gone By, the most gruesome account I have ever read of warfare, despite my prejudice, shared with the author, for the Bosnian side of the conflicts between the former republics of Yugoslavia.

A large part of this book is about Loyd's experience as a young, novice photojournalist in Yugoslavia. A small part of it is about his experiences in Chechnya, a portion that could have been left out except that it fits in the chronology of his account of his life, an account which is punctuated with information about his family, their military background, his participation in the Gulf War and his heroin addiction. Very little of his account concerns geopolitics, the history of Yugoslavia, its breakup and the negotiations which ultimately ended the wars there. The story is personal, not political except insofar as the author comes to adopt a strong preference for the multi-ethnic forces defending Bosnia.

The tale is also told as an attempt to get at the psychopathology of war or, putting more as Loyd might, its attractiveness, both as a disposition and as an aquired taste. This he begins to do, and not cheaply. He had such a disposition. He further developed such tastes--along with apparently related tastes for alcohol, heroin and virtually anonymous sex...yet, he does not scrimp on the horror and the injustice of it all. Nor does he avoid the obvious implications of the extremely morbid fascination he, and others, develop for the chaos and destruction of warfare. The book is, in fact, substantially an exploration of this pathology, though no "cure" for that or for his other addictions is ever adduced.

One thing obviously lacking from My War Gone By are the author's photographs, the taking of some of which are explicitly mentioned and the representation of which would have been helpful. Hopefully this will be rectified in later editions. Fortunately, however, maps of Bosnia and Chechnya are provided.

Well I found this book on one of my thrift store hunts,Being that I've not read much about the war after Yugoslavia broke up I was interested.I don't think that I was prepared for the raw visual observations of the author,The brutality of the war all sides concerned was very honestly detailed.The human suffering cannot be imagined.The physical toll on the parties involved is beyond measure let alone the mental toll, even on the journalist's.
I believe that this region in the world is just another powder keg waiting to explode as so many others in our world today.If this conflict or piece of history is in your wheel house check it out,but be prepared for a truly honest and frank read.

I've read several books lately on the Bosnian War; this is more of the same...evil at work, and the world letting it happen. I pick up today's newspaper and read about the Syrian Civil War; change the place names and it's the same thing. The events in Bosnia are heartbreaking. Will there soon be books about Syria that are equally heartbreaking?
The author is a drug addict. The italicized chapters detail his family problems and his drug usage. I felt like he was whining and that made the book less appealing. Without those chapters, I would have given the book a higher rating.

This book was recommended to me by a friend. And what a good recommendation it was. A fascinating account of the authors experience as a war journalist, mostly in Bosnia. As with most books about war, it tries to communicate the horrible brutality of it all. But the key to this book is the author trying to figure himself out. Trying to figure out why he is drawn to war and conflict. It also helps that he is a very very good writer.
There are passages in this that will stay with me forever. Probably the most poignant one is at a meeting between soldiers on either side during a temporary ceasefire to allow the dead soldiers on either side to be recovered. The conversation at first is all business; about missing comrades. Then they start to drink together, and you realise that they know one another quite well, and in some cases were friends before the conflict erupted, and pitted them against one another.
A few hours later, they were shooting at each other again.
How bizarre.
Highly recommended.

A voyeuristic trek through famed war voyeur Anthony Lloyd’s stints on the front lines as a journalist. Trauma porn is the main appeal here, but still pretty informative and thoughtful.
Found the drug addled italicized segments a bit disjointed.. the relationship between Lloyd’s addiction to opioids and the adrenaline of the battlefield is important here, but the intermittent spurts of anachronous benders smushed between sequential episodes of wartime hijinks felt off to me.
Really good though!

[1999] Notes to self…One photojournalist’s account of the Bosnian war. Intersperses his experiences with heroin addiction and draws parallels between that addiction and his addiction to war, as he struggles to articulate, to the reader and to himself, why he is in Bosnia - voluntarily. Account limited to his own personal experiences, as opposed to a historical accounting of events in general. I’ve been interested in this war since we visited Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro a few years a go. Bosnians fighting Serbs fighting Muslims fighting Bosnians fighting...hard to keep track of but no fault of the book’s, it was just a very complex situation. Heartbreaking to think about the recent history of all the lovely people that we met while we were there.

This is hands down my favorite book. Lloyd beautifully illustrates a horrifying conflict, and forces the reader to process the true insanity of the Bosnian War. As a reader, it makes you feel truly hopeless, which is exactly what understanding the Bosnian War should cause. Some dislike the segments describing Lloyd’s life and heroin abuse, but I would argue that they are necessary to help the reader understand Lloyd, his motivations, and his perspective.