No star rating

Anthony Loyd has written a book which is somewhat of a paradox for me. There are two stories running in parallel here, but they are inseparable. We are shown war with great detail and clarity in Bosnia and Chechnya. The descriptions are often horrific, probably as realistic as anything in print. From this point of view, writing is good.

Intertwined with war, there is an autobiography of Loyd. This too is often horrific as he portrays his life growing up and as a heroin addict. The problem is that the two stories portray the same man, addicted to heroin and addicted to war.

As much as I appreciated the writing about the wars, I could not get over my dislike of the man, the self-admitted 'war tourist'. He was not there to fight and, although he was at first a would-be photographer and then a reporter, he makes it clear that he was there to be in a war, not to inform about the war. His only motive is self gratification. Even when he tells of his adventure in helping to save the life of a young girl, he cannot redeem himself. His tone throughout the book is disingenuous. His attitude is one of superiority. Much of what he tells us is coldly cynical. These things are not as a result of the war. They are who he is. He befriends, benefits from and even protects men who are monsters and war criminals. He is not likeable nor admirable.

His addictions, to heroin and to human suffering, are explained by his lousy relationship with his father. The reader is, I suppose, expected to have some sympathy for Loyd. I do not. Finally, although the book has its merits, I find that Loyd gets in the way. He would have done better to join the Red Cross if he wanted to see the war and do some good.

Anthony Lloyd's first book is a blend of personal memoir and war reportage. Lloyd is an interesting character, one who challenges a lot of the reader's conventional attitudes about war reportage. Although he went to Bosnia as essentially a self-professed war junkie in desperate search of the fix he claims he was denied during his service in the Army, he writes with a great deal of empathy about the chaotic civil war. Lloyd isn't a totally likable figure, but he's a compelling reporter. His descriptions of war are captivating and well-written; they serve the reader's voyeurism while also constantly challenging that very impulse. This is a bloody, gory, book but it doesn't feel intentionally edge-pushing.

Unfortunately, as other readers have noted, the book loses a little bit of focus during the personal memoir sections about his heroin addiction (which feels somewhat cliched but then maybe that's the point) and his struggles with his dysfunctional family. While he excels at describing war, he is less adept at laying out his inner demons. Overall, however, this is a great work of war reportage and probably a modern nonfiction classic.

For some reason it took me a long time to get into the book properly. The fault was mine, not the author's. I have been reading so many deep, thoughtful books that I resisted taking it fully on board. But it is a well written, horrifying account of a terrible war.

This work of nonfiction far exceeded my expectations. Brutally honest, Anthony’s tale is about his relationship with the war. As someone who has lived through the described events, I can submit that this is a remarkably sobering perspective from an observer right in the thick of it. Reads like a fiction, though very much a true story.

Are you supposed to like this book? It was grim and the pervasive mood was that of rain, gloom, and the misery of an unfulfilled life.

Interesting assignment would be to read this with Jarhead and to compare and contrast the author's experiences and what they thought/think of war and battle.

2.5 probably. I'm still mulling it over.

When starting this book, the big reminder to keep in mind is Loyd has an addictive personality. Raised in an affluent family, he had the means to take on whatever new addiction crossed his path. He discusses his drug addictions that started when he was in school and obsession with the military thanks in part to a family who boasted and romanticized a long history of war participation. Naturally, he joined the army and was in the Persian Gulf and Northern Ireland. However, it was not enough. He wanted to see war. Drugs and depression followed and when they lifted, the war in Bosnia was beginning.

With a desire to go to war, he meets a Bosnian immigrant to learn some language skills and acquires a press badge with the notion he can always leave whenever he wants. He moves around within the war, making observations of his surroundings, but at the same time never fully connecting. When he finally connects to a side, he comments on the disbelief of that side committing atrocities, coming across as war is simple instead of complex. And Bosnia was not the only war zone visited. At one point, he makes a side trip to Chechnya, and the back cover reveals he also ended up going to six other wars including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo.

Another thing that stood out to me was his attraction to the dead and he describes them. Of course, with an addictive personality, he is attracted to not just the dead. Every woman in this book was alluring, stunning, beautiful, etc.

I give a pass on the smoking and drinking, considering being in war zones there will be stress-relieving vices, but keep in mind this is personal narrative and not a book where you will learn of the politics or history of the war.

ERA LA MIA GUERRA, E MI MANCA DA MORIRE



Esistono tanti libri sulla guerra, su tante guerre.
Tanti su quella in Bosnia, un po’ meno, ma sempre numerosi, su quelle in Cecenia.
Tuttavia, questo libro di Anthony Loyd è diverso dagli altri, esce in qualche modo dal coro: è diverso perché è particolare il suo punto di vista e approccio, da ex soldato diventato giornalista, così ‘dentro’ da essere parte di quello che testimonia e racconta.


Una donna all’interno della Biblioteca Nazionale di Sarajevo dopo il bombardamento. 1992

Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa.
Appena possibile si arruola, partecipa alla Prima Guerra del Golfo:
In realtà, non pensavo che importasse granché per chi o per cosa combattere, purché si indossasse una divisa e ci si battesse con coraggio. Mi innamorai inevitabilmente dell’idea della guerra senza nemmeno sapere cosa fosse.
Poi, dopo qualche anno, lascia l’esercito.


È stato annunciato un film tratto da questo libro e Tom Hardy sarà Anthony Loyd.

A quel punto tenta l’avventura col fotogiornalismo, e all’inizio è piuttosto spaesato, ma possiede comunque un approccio alla guerra che è pressoché unico, un modo di sentirla viverla e parteciparla che lo fa presto emergere tra gli altri reporter:
Avevo appena letto ‘Dispacci, il libro di Michael Herr sul Vietnam, reclamizzato da John Le Carré come il miglior libro sull’uomo e la guerra nel nostro tempo. Quel testo ebbe profonde ripercussioni su di me, e mi mostrò l’esistenza di una tribù per la quale disciplina e autorità erano concetti astratti: i corrispondenti di guerra.


Soldati russi in Cecenia, dicembre 1994.

Alcol e droghe, erba ed eroina, mai polvere in vena però.
La guerra è un’altra droga, anzi è il modo per restare lontano dalle droghe pesanti:
La guerra è come il consumo di droghe pesanti, è uno sballo di sentimenti contraddittori, agonia ed estasi che ti trascinano…
Durante le battaglie e il lavoro da giornalista fotografo ‘solo’ tanto alcol e tanto fumo.

Per anni in Bosnia, ‘dentro’ l’assedio di Sarajevo, in tante campagne militari, parteggiando apertamente per i musulmani.
Parlando la lingua, iniziata a studiare prima di lasciare Londra, vivendo il più possibile con e in mezzo ai locali, invece di rinchiudersi nelle enclave giornalistiche.


Sarajevo, inverno 1992-1993: il giornalista olandese Robert Dulmers presso la tomba di Hakija Turajlić nella moschea Ali Pasha.


Poi in Cecenia, anche a Grozny, dove i cadaveri abbandonati diventano punti di riferimento stradale:
svolta a sinistra dopo il tizio morto con la borsa della spesa gialla e la moglie, poi a destra per Minutka…

Loyd vive e descrive al limite del voyeurismo, rasentando la pornografia:
Da viva la ragazza era sorprendentemente carina. Morta, era così bella da indurti ad assoldare un esercito e saccheggiare Troia per averla.

Ma trovo che la vera pornografia sia tradurre il titolo originale ‘My War Gone, I Miss It So’ in Apocalisse criminale.


Esumazioni a Srebrenica nel 1996.

Anthony Loyd sa, invece, restare lucido anche nel delirio, sa trasmettere umanità anche descrivendo l’assurdità e la brutalità selvaggia della guerra, di queste due guerre in particolare, più brutali e violente di altre, sa confezionare un reportage e memoir che mi resterà dentro.

Guerra e roba. Spero sempre che l’una o l’altra mi mostrino la strada, ma non si verifica mai. Pensi di aver toccato il fondo molte volte e invece scopri sempre qualcos’altro da perdere. E dopo un po’ ti accorgi che quello che un tempo ti sembrava il fondo è ora un’altitudine verso la quale stai arrancando.

PS
'Dispacci" di Michael Herr rimane comunque il più bel libro sulla guerra che io abbia mai letto.

Anthony Loyd's writing is elegant from the get-go.

"If a chart could be made of ways to die then Srebrenica's dead had ticked off most of the options. Some had gone by their own hand in panicking despair; others in confused gunbattles with their own troops or those of the enemy; many more had surrendered, taking a last long walk in the summer sun to stand in rows with their comrades, the languid working of machine-gun bolts behind them the final sound they heard, except perhaps for a few last whispered words of love or contrition."

I had to look up some definitions here and there and parse an occasional sentence because of the differences in old-country and new-country English. One example: "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 pond of my naivety." On the third reading, I edited out "packed," which seems redundant, to understand.

This review first featured on A Passion to Understand

During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, most press correspondents huddled in the safety of the distinctive yellow Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, sending out second-hand dispatches to news outlets back home. Anthony Loyd was never going to do that. In his memoir My War Gone By, I Miss It So Loyd travelled across Bosnia and Herzegovnia during the war of 1992-1995 and spent time in Grozny at the height of the First Chechen War. Now, to mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Agreement, a new edition of Loyd’s memoir has been released with an updated foreword.

The prologue of My War Gone By, I Miss It So begins at the end of the Bosnian war, in the hills near Srebrenica. Withdrawing from drugs and newly clean, Loyd stumbles through a landscape peppered with corpses, witness to the aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide. It is an interesting place to begin, at the very end of the war, but by the end of the memoir we will see that this was not the most disturbing thing that Loyd saw in his time there. Moreover, by the end of the war, we will see that Loyd has come full circle in his life.

Armed with just a camera and pen, Loyd travelled over to Bosnia during the war after a stint in the military. Landing first in Sarajevo, he befriended a local family and spent his days dodging sniper bullets and trying to overcome the relentless boredom of war. Eager to see the frontlines, Loyd later travelled to various towns and villages in central and northern Bosnia where he met up with other members of the press corps and began to eke out a living as a war correspondent.

Loyd’s writing is brutally honest and in many passages he describes scenes and photographs that many of us would look away from or avoid. That is not to say that I don’t want to know, I really do, but at times his descriptions were so intimate and graphic that I felt somehow wrong reading the passages, as if I had somehow violated someone’s privacy. Such is the power of Loyd’s writing.

At many times in the memoir, Loyd mentions his eagerness to support the Bosniak cause on a moral level, to view them as the underdogs, but even this explicit bias is tested from time to time by the atrocities he sees. The saying goes that all is fair in love and war but that is utter rubbish, and what Loyd witnesses proves that all is twisted and futile in war instead.

It was the scenes in Grozny that were perhaps the most shocking. I’ve read a fair amount about the wars in the former Yugoslavia and felt somehow familiar with the subject matter when Loyd described his time in Bosnia and Herzegovnia. The chapter on the conflict on the ground in Grozny was disturbing to say the least. Loyd travels to the Chechen capital days before the fall of Grozny in February 1995 and what he witnesses is the utter meaningless and futility of war. It is especially moving in light of the way that history ultimately played out for the Chechens.

Again, my view of events in Bosnia might be influenced by all that I have read about the war and history of the region in the past but the only aspect of Loyd’s memoir that concerned me was his tendency to takes sides in the conflict. It is true that history and the subsequent trials have pretty much confirmed what he wrote almost 20 years ago but throughout the memoir I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would have been preferable if he had maintained a slightly more objective position.

In the foreword to the new edition, Loyd remarks how young and angry he was at the time of writing. It is interesting because while I might fault his objectivity, I never would have faulted his perspective which was infinitely more nuanced than anything I would have written back in the mid-90s when I was roughly the same age as him.

Nevertheless, I was riveted by the book from cover to cover and would highly recommend it to those interested in accounts of war or in the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina in particular. Like the timeless photographs to which Loyd refers in his memoir, his book provides a unique glimpse into one of the most disturbing conflicts of the 20th century.

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. His relentless pursuit of combat is broken with occasional breaks back in his native London.

Why would someone voluntarily place himself in a situation that is known to put life and sanity at great risk? As Loyd relates,

I wanted to throw myself into a war, hoping for either a metamorphosis or an exit. I wanted to reach a human extreme in order to cleanse myself of my sense of fear, and saw war as the ultimate frontier of human experience.

It turns out that Loyd has demons of his own to deal with that have him regularly getting high on heroin. The result is a doubly riveting tale of the harm men do to each other and the harm one man does to himself. With Loyd's powerful prose, this work takes the reader as close to personal experience as is possible at one remove.

In war, one's survival intact comes down to the chances of a simple coincidence: will my flesh and a flying piece of metal be in the same place at the same time? That metal might be an individual bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Loyd puts it perfectly...

Shells? They can do things to the human body you never believed possible; turn it inside out like a steaming rose; bend it backwards and through itself; chop it up; shred it; pulp it; mutilations so base and vile they never stopped revolting me. And there is no real cover from shellfire. Shells can drop out of the sky to your feet, or smash their way through any piece of architecture to find you...a bullet may or may not have your number on it, but I am sure shells are merely engraved with 'to whom it may concern'.

There is no rest in this book; personal encounters, good, bad and often impossible to predict come on every page. Loyd's brief breaks in London are filled with anguish, drugs as the only relief.

Colorful characters abound as one would expect when life becomes tenuous. When death is everywhere, every person either finds it for himself or comes up with a method to deal with it as others fall. Some choose bravado, some choose lucky talismans, some indulge in cruelty, some turn to stone. When battle ceases drug use is common.

Loyd covers all the details of the countryside, the hamlets and the towns he visits with scenes of recent slaughter all around from a civil war that in one case has enemies commiserating in a short truce arranged to gather the dead. Muslims and Christians speaking the same language ask each other about the fate of fellow schoolmates they had shared classes with in years past, only to separate for renewed battle.

In the classic war movie, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, there is a scene in which all has been lost. A small group of soldiers lament in a devastated landscape, one crying out that he curses the gods for allowing such horror to occur. Another soldier says, "Do not blaspheme! The gods look down on us and weep for what we do to ourselves."

Anthony Loyd puts the reader into the killing fields like no other author I have read.

Very good book on war journalism and addiction. I was totally confused about who was who throughout the book but I guess that's just Yugoslavia for you.
Very eye opening and written in a good way. I also liked all of the personal additions about his family and addiction.

"You have to relinquish a lot until the reckoning comes, you snap off a twig in time, examine it and realize it's just the relationship between yourself, killers and victims that counts. Look some more and you see there is not much gulf at all between the three. Close your eyes, open your fingers and discover you are a hybrid. Open your eyes again, look in a mirror and someone else looks back: someone older and degraded. People call it wisdom but it is just a substitute for hope."
"Anyone who stayed in Bosnia during the war had their face change on a level beyond he purely physical... It would be so trite, so inappropriate to say that the eyes lost something as they witnessed the whole madness of it all, to talk of empty stares and children with hollow gazes. But it was not what people lost in Bosnia that you noticed in their eyes, it was what some of them gained. Whether it is your own or someone else's, the taste of evil leaves an indelible mark on the iris. You can see it flickering in moments of introspection as the muscles relax."

Loved to hear his thoughts as an outsider, especially as he becomes more involved.