My War Gone By, I Miss It So

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Our discussions around the stove were a forum for arguments from every strand of the spectrum and frequently became hot-tempered affairs of raised voices and wild gesticulations. At this time I had no real foundation for an opinion of my own concerning the war. Of course it was obvious that the city was suffering, and that terrible deeds were being committed elsewhere in Bosnia. Yet my impressions of the conflict prior to my arrival had been moulded by Mima’s tutoring and in general she blamed all sides equally. So in debates I acted as a kind of muted umpire. Angrier exchanges were often halted as if to protect my sensibilities, bestowing me somehow with a passifying role. I listened with interest to what I heard.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So - Anthony Loyd - Google Books

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll learn a lot about the Bosnian war by reading this book, but it won’t be an analysis of political forces and tactical manoeuvres – this is a story of individuals, moments, sights, sounds and feelings. This is a very personal story of war. The cruelty and chaos of the conflict both appalled and embraced him; the adrenalin lure of the action perhaps the loudest siren call of all. In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims, he was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home he found the void of peacetime too painful to bear, and so began a longstanding personal battle with drug abuse. 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. 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. Sarajevo, inverno 1992-1993: il giornalista olandese Robert Dulmers presso la tomba di Hakija Turajlić nella moschea Ali Pasha.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. Loyd falters, however, when he tries to account, in general terms, for the barbarity he documents. His reflections on the human capacity for evil, on the mind-set of Bosnian villagers, on the different degrees of culpability for atrocities in war, are He went to school for journalism and then went to Bosnia with a vague plan to cover the ongoing war. He started taking pictures but almost by accident an American reporter offered to buy some that he saw. So Loyd became a war photographer supporting himself by selling photos for 50 Deutsche Marks per photograph. [1] Much later Loyd was traveling taking photos with British forces around Travnik, central Bosnia and Herzegovina about 90km west of Sarajevo. While covering a fire fight a French correspondent who was writing for The Daily Telegraph was wounded by a claymore mine set off by the Croat HVO forces. The wounded correspondent asked Loyd to fill in until the paper could send a replacement, Loyd agreed and so started his first job as a journalist. [1] Afterwards he was put on retainer by The Times of London and regularly sent to war zones around the world. 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.

Anthony Loyd - Wikipedia

Loyd’s memoir is exceptionally well written and a devastating reminder that there are still places where the particular hell of war is the everyday norm.”—Ernst-Ulrich Franzen, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Williams, Martin (14 May 2014). "Times journalists escape after kidnapping in northern Syria". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 19 November 2019.

While reporting in Northern Syria (2014), he was shot twice in the leg by Syrian rebels to stop him running away. [9] Great-grandfather [ edit ] a b c Anthony Loyd (1 February 2001). My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Penguin (Non-Classics). ISBN 0-14-029854-1. 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. 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: Anthony Loyd (11 February 2005). "I'm more scared of going out with these guys than fighting insurgents". The Times. London . Retrieved 12 September 2007.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So | Grove Atlantic My War Gone By, I Miss It So | Grove Atlantic

Loyd does his war close-up: bloody, muddy, and terrifying. He writes from the trenches and the mass graves; from the sniper’s nest and the carnage of the first-aid station. His writing is in the finest of traditions, of Martha Gellhorn’s The View from the Ground, and not since Michael Herr wrote Dispatches on his experience of the Vietnam War has any journalist ever written so persuasively about violence and its seductions, of all of war’s minutiae of awful detail.”— The Observer (London) 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.

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. Loyd also weaves in anecdotes from his personal life, mostly having to do with his struggle with heroin, which becomes his coping mechanism after witnessing some truly disturbing stuff. I don’t mind these sections, since they offer not only a change of pace from the war (albeit only a slightly less depressing one—I don’t recommend reading this book before bed), but also a glimpse into the mind of a person that would voluntarily put their body and mind in harm’s way.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads

As with heroin, Loyd becomes addicted to war; the rush of combat, the thrill of cheating death, the clear-headed conviction of doing something that matters. In some ways it’s relatable and inspiring. In others, it’s insane, selfish, and exploitative. The hypocrisy of his actions is not lost on Loyd, and reading him grapple with it is illuminating, especially as it pertains to the modern media. 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. 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." Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL7352732M Openlibrary_editionand -- hey, just trying to get history's first draft straight -- journalists. When Anthony Loyd, a young Englishman, went to Sarajevo in 1993, he was not yet a journalist, or a writer of any type. He was a disappointed 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. Why would someone voluntarily place himself in a situation that is known to put life and sanity at great risk? As Loyd relates, Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa. 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: