Uncompromising and brutal, yet very sincere. Loyd is a man whose addiction to war was at times alien to me, but the way he writes about the conflicts he observed is nontheless masterful and gripping.
The flashback parts and his dealing with heroin on the other hand always get me out of the book. I get that it was important to his story as this is as much autobiography of a period of life than writing about war, but it felt all over the place sometimes.

During my "dark night of the soul" this book made me feel alive. Absolute clarity and awareness recorded in the most horrific of human experiences. I absolutely loved this book. It made me cry and gag with revolt but I couldn't turn away. That's what life is like though if your eyes are fully open. There is beauty too but the dark side here is so present and intense it awoke me from the stupor of an ordinary life. I highly recommend this book.

This book was recommended to me by my friend David, he thinks it's a great perspective on the war in former Yugoslavia and a great read. At first the author Anthony Loyd irked me with his masculine style. It always annoys me when a book is dripping with predictable gender stereotypical perspectives - in this case, a gross glorification of war and the arguably innate attraction humans have for violence. At least that's what I first though. Reading further I realize that his voice damns that desire as it revels in it, which is interesting and often ignored inner-struggle. Anthony Loyd essentially becomes a 'war tourist' under the guise of journalist.

“I just wanted to go to any war as soon as possible… once I was in the regiment I found that my real feelings were shared by most of the other young Light Division officers. Some were even more vitriolic than me, and came right out with it: “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.”

The tale of ennui leading a male into violent worlds is a well-troden path in literature, perhaps for good reasons. Lloyd treads that path here, although in a more reflective way than say Fight Club. And, of course, this is no fiction.

This war correspondence (or is it a travelogue?) details Anthony Lloyd’s experience in the Bosnian and Chechnyan wars of the 90s. Lloyd was an eyewitness to many of the key events and his descriptions of the violence & destruction are quite visceral. While Lloyd interacts with the fighters, the actual disputes are backgrounded (or just poorly/absurdly explained by combatants) making the conflicts seem particularly ridiculous & obscure ethic fights. In between the violence, Lloyd elaborates on his struggles with heroin and his terrible relationship with his dying father (the elder Lloyd was a real jerk according to Anthony’s telling). While a compelling narrative of his experiences, this is really a story of Lloyd’s existential angst and how it is mirrored by the combatants. The reasons they are engaged in this ridiculous violence perhaps are driven by the same dark impulses that led Lloyd to want to witness it.

Grizzly images seared into brainspace... I hope they dissipate with time. His style leaves a lot to be desired and his thesis of conflict addiction is liturgically rehashed to a numbing point. Leave the memoir, take the jarring history of modern inhumanity left to its own brutal devices while the impotent observers shivered and the pundits traded barbs. The Balkans are endlessly interesting: read Ivo Andric's Bridge on the Rive Drina for an account of the Ottoman years and watch Emir Kusturica's films for a bit of whimsy amongst the ashes of burning buildings.

A gritty, visceral, and unapologetically honest first hand account of an amateur journalist witnessing the turmoil of the Balkans during the 1990s Bosnian War, interspersed with bits of his past, his life in England, and his heroin addiction.

Anthony Loyd's book is the kind that has an impact, whether you think he's an asshole seeking out war violence for nothing more than voyeuristic entertainment values or not. It's well written and brutal, delving into the many atrocities he heard about and witnessed, while remaining relatively unattached throughout. It isn't an overly emotional book, not likely to drive any one to heartfelt tears, but there are many passages that produce a quiet sense of horror at the depths of depravity that humans can, and do, sink to, and the actions that they can take while still somehow trying to justify what they've done.

”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 scramble back to. Even in my deepest moments of fear, retreating or withdrawing it’s all the same, when I see those flashes of hope and swear never again, promise I’ll keep away the front or stay clean tonight, I know they are just illusions, flotsam in the river I pull myself up onto just so I can catch enough breath to last me for the next dive down.”

Anthony Loyd’s family idolized their war heroes. He grew up hearing about their exploits in particular one great grandfather who was a hero of several wars. A man that basically signed up for any war he could and whichever side took him first was the one he fought for. He was bemedalled and bejewelled with war wounds and veneration. We love our war heroes even if there is this underlying hum of death and destruction resonating in some of their souls. Ultimately...they aren’t supposed to like it. Anthony or Ant as he is called by his friends is estranged from his father. His sister is anorexic. He is beginning a long, loving relationship with drug use. He decides his life is going nowhere so in the tradition of his ancestors he goes and finds a war.

He finds two in fact.

He goes to Chechnya.

He goes to Bosnia.

n  n

He doesn’t have a job. He doesn’t have a real reason for being there. ”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 could understand going to war because you believe in the cause of one side or the other. I still think it is nuts, but at least I can wrap my head around it. To go and just hang out, experience a war like a cinematic experience...well... that is verging on immoral. He has this vague idea that he may get a job as a journalist or a photographer while over there, but the goal is to experience war.

n  n

The Bosnian War was over the breakup of Yugoslavia and lasted from 1992-1995. Three armies were formed along ethnic/religious grounds: the Army of Republika Srpska(VRS) or Serbs/Protestants on the one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) which was largely composed of Bosniaks/Muslims, and the Croat/Catholic forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side. Loyd came there thinking he had the most sympathy for the Muslim side, but as he finds in war when one side commits an atrocity and then the other side responds with something equally horrendous it is hard to know which side is more morally right. ”You could take sides in Bosnia easily enough if you wished, but it never allowed you complete peace of mind.”

In the short span of this war which I’m sure felt very long to the residents over 100,000 people (some reports as high as 250,000) are killed, 20,000 to 50,000 women are raped, and 2.2 million people are displaced. Villages were torn apart, no one was allowed to be neutral. Sometime your name determined the army you would be forced to fight for. ”Many people found themselves carrying a gun whether they liked it or not. If you were of combat age, meaning only that you possessed the strength to fight, kill and possibly survive, then you were conscripted into whichever army represented your denomination, Muslim, Serb or Croat.”

Loyd witnessed a moment when a weeping Croat brought his Muslim neighbors to the Swiss UN troops for safety. People who have lived together in harmony for generations suddenly found themselves on opposite sides of conflict they could barely understand. When someone died there was grieving on both sides of the battle line. Everyone is trapped, but not Anthony Loyd. He knows whenever the war gets “too heavy” or he needs a break he just hops a plane back to London.

n  n

”Marko was doing his best to kill somebody for my benefit. Twenty-four years old, trilingual, well educated, he was a sniper for the HOS, the extremist Croat militia which was still managing to maintain a loose affiliation with the government army in Sarajevo. We had met in the city’s one remaining nightclub, the BB, a sweltering basement venue that afforded an outlet for easy pick-ups among Sarajevo’s youth as the war stoked desire with one hand while unbuttoning restraint with the other. “

Anybody else feel a little queasy, like watching two teenagers playing video games only we are talking about human life. I had a hard time liking Loyd. It was too much like the war was there for his entertainment and early on I wondered if I was going to be able to finish this book.

”If you stuck around long enough, the dead and wounded piled up so quickly they squeezed one another off the narrow platforms of your memory.”

Drugs are cheap and readily available in a war zone. Anthony soon develops a heroin addiction. In fact he writes rather lovingly about it.

n  n

”I sucked in the smoke greedily, and the cold wash of anaesthesia hit me. It swept over me, a wave that started at the tip of my nose, rushing across my face to encircle my head, running down my neck through my chest, crashing into a warm golden explosion in my stomach, my groin, a blissed sensation beyond the peak of orgasm and relief of nausea, as every muscle in my body relaxed and my head lolled gently on to my shoulder, every sense unwinding, unburdened of the crushing weight of pain I never even knew I had: the rush, the wave, death, heaven, completion. For hours and hours.
The hit. Sensual ultimatum. You can argue over every other aspect of heroin, but you can never dispute the hit. Get it right and you may never look back. Except in regret. As I write now, just thinking about it makes my skin crawl, and the saliva pumps into my mouth like one of Pavlov’s Dogs.”

Reading about him running around desperately looking for his next war rush; his next heroin high; his next Red Cross Nurse orgasm I realized that there is addiction and then there is Anthony Loyd addiction. With this realization I started to understand the book and more importantly to understand the writer. I don’t agree with his methods nor do I like him very much, but in the end I can’t condemn him. He didn't pull any punches. He looked at his image in the mirror and told us what he sees.

I really enjoyed this read. A pacy, rollicking pulse through the life of a photojournalist addicted to heroin and war. Both seemingly, and somewhat unsatisfactorily, scratching the itches caused by childhood/early adulthood trauma and loss. Loyd heads to Bosnia in search of the grisly reality of war. He seeks out the front, wants to be where the action is, wants to experience war in its grimness. I think this might put some people off. Loyd seems like a “disaster tourist”, trying to get the next hit of violence and death, but always with the easy exit option out of the country, unlike the vast majority of those he interacts with. He does acknowledge this in a few places in the book, but there is an undercurrent of smugness/narcissism. We do see that there is a very strong humanist undercurrent, along with a vulnerability that Loyd lets out. His battles with addiction, his heroic actions saving the lives of two children, etc. But it’s chaotic and a bit all over the place, just like the war in Bosnia. Three groups fighting each other, aligning with each other, going against these alliances, etc (Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs). I didn’t realise Croatians played such a big role in the battles and the brutality.

But in sum, a very readable, informative and interesting take of life in a war zone (both in Bosnia and in his personal life in London). Brilliant intertwining of war, suffering and addiction.

A few quotes from the text:

P. 6 “There is no God behind me, and I have strong doubts concerning the existence of a soul these days, but when I look at a corpse it always seems as if there is more than simply life missing”

P. 115 “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”

P. 207 “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”

"Was I a sluttish dilettante day-tripping into someone else’s nightmare? I can answer "yes.""

The publisher's blurb on this book makes it sound like it's about the war in Bosnia - that is only partly true. It is also about the author's struggle with heroin addiction, his attraction to war, and his difficult relationship with his father. If you start reading this hoping to be enlightened about the history of the war between Bosnians, Croatians, and Serbians, or what happened in Chechnya, you will be sorely disappointed. Having gone into this book with little knowledge of the relevant history, I finished it still completely in the dark about exactly what happened and why.

What this book does instead is to give you a series of portraits of what it was like to actually be there - both for the author (a freelance reporter) and for the people who lived and fought in these places. It does not pull any punches in describing in detail some of the horrors that the author witnessed. Perspectives are given on the experiences of people on the front lines, people overrun by the enemy, and people trapped unable to escape oncoming disaster. Amidst all the killing, people try to live their lives, for example dancing at clubs amidst gun fire. Scenes from the war are interspersed with scenes related to the author's heroin use and his relationship with his father. The narrative jumps back and forth between these different aspects in a way that is not entirely chronological, and that I found difficult to follow at times.

In reading the book, I ping-ponged between thinking I would rate it either two stars, or five. On the negative side, it felt like large swaths of the book were spent in stylish sounding, semi-poetic musings about the effects of war on the psyche, the nature of addiction etc. I kept wishing the author would just tell me more about what actually happened, so that I could form my own opinion, instead of listening to his bloviating. On the other hand, there are several moments of excellent and evocative writing.

Though far from perfect, this is a very memorable book and has changed my image of warfare.

having just finished "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning", I felt compelled to re-read this book to see if it freaks me out as much as it did when I first read it - before I started traveling to war torn countries. I've now been to Sierra Leone, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Darfur, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Northern Uganda. Will it still upset me like it did? Or have I become cynical?

Update: Still shocking yet I understand it more. Thank God, heroin is not as easily available in my groups of friends as his. Instead I dove into the decidely middle class comforts of rich food and alcohol when I returned from war. I didn't see the human carnage that he descirbes but I listened to the stories of suffering over and over. In his writing, he never seems to interview people but rather to describe the scenes that he sees. It's an engrossing book and the title is still evocative. Will probably check out his other books now.

A beautifully written, gruesomely honest account of the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s by a British journalist. A compelling and interesting read that was at times difficult to stomach. It chronicles not only his experience in Bosnia, but also the heroine addiction he develops on his brief trips back to London as well as a side-trip to the even more brutal war in Chechnya.
Overall, a valuable read but not for the faint of heart.

This was an amazing piece of war journalism. Unflinchingly cynical, disturbing, yet so gripping on an utterly human level.