My War Gone By, I Miss It So

Rating:
Summary: Snapshots of Hell...
Review: This is a hard book to discuss critically. Many people will dismiss the author & his viewpoints due to his admitted heroin addiction. Many others (such as myself) will have a hard time with his love of war & combat. However, laying personal reactions aside, in literary terms, "My War Gone By, I Miss It So" has some important things to say but an irritating way of saying them.

Anthony Loyd's descriptions of the chaos of Yugoslavia's break-up are vivid. He makes as much sense out of the varying foes as is possible in a conflict that labels people by religious/ethnic labels (Muslim, Croat, Serb) who have never previously had any religious or nationalistic leanings.

Vignettes thruout the book illustrate how the rhetoric of a few hard-line racists can turn life long neighbors & friends into sworn enemies. Various battles Loyd witnessed amply demonstrate the madness of the conflicts in this part of the world, as splinter groups fragment & fight each other, then realign with former foes into new battlefield alliances. Especially good is Loyd's indictment of the UN's ridiculous "peacekeepers" watching rape & brutal genocide helplessly. The author also shows how the Western media is as culpable as any demogogue in allowing the madness to escalate to a whirlwind that engulfed entire regions while infecting formally peaceful areas.

Where "My War...." falls on it's face is the structure of the book. Rather than a linear narrative that would help the reader to more clearly see cause & effect in the Balkans, his scattershot writing zings between Sarajevo, London, Split, Chechnya (? ) & reminisces of his tortured relationship with his father. I never could figure out what the chapter in Chechnya had to do with anything (it's smack dab in the middle of the book) & although the family narrative may have served to give motivation to the author's demons, it often distracted from the thrust of the book.

I guarantee you will have difficulty reading "My War Gone By, I Miss It So" in large chunks. The images evoked of "ethnic cleansing" & attendant horrors are lucid enough to have given me nightmares (little wonder Loyd has become a heroin addict since his initial sojourn). There are many valuable parts to this book; it is unfortunate the overall structure weakens it's power.

Rating:
Summary: After being there, this book fills in the spaces ...
Review: I was deployed to B-H for seven months and spent most of that time with the local Serb and Muslim people. I wish I had read this book prior to deploying. It filled in the emotional and nationalistic intensity that my intelligence officer was unable to convey. This book is fantastic - after reading it and being there, I feel I truly understand what happened. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the war, or about nationalism gone awry.

Rating:
Summary: Fact is stranger than fiction
Review: This account of the conflict in Eastern Europe is proof that fact can be more awful and hard hitting than fiction. The fact that the author when witnessing some of the most bloodthirsty battles of our times is always a hop, skip and a jump away from a clean hotel room in a peaceful country makes it even more poignant. This book is a must read for anybody interested in European history and the fact that conflicts with origins hundreds of years old are still being fought today.

Rating:
Summary: A Twentieth Century Heart of Darkness
Review: This book brings the distant and antiseptic war in the Balkans home with an emotional impact that I will not forget. The horrible events portrayed by Lloyd occured for me when I was still in High School reading an occasional newspaper article on them and was still able to keep the conflict abstract. For those who wish to come a step closer to understanding what is often nothing more than a sound bite on the evening news, this book is of crucial importance. Lloyd manages to capture the heart of darkness as it manifested itself in the twentieth century- and unfortunately will most likely continue to do so in the twentyfirst. At times the map included is not sufficient to follow Lloyd as he traverses Bosnia and Croatia, however, this is a minor inconvenience that does not detract from the greater message. As mentioned before, the lack of his photography is puzzeling.

This book should be required reading in all modern European history courses.

On a note that has extra significance to the immediate present, considering the recently renewed assault on the Chechnyans by the Russian Military, Lloyd's chapter on Grozny is particularly interesting. It is hard to imagine the city being destroyed a second time after reading this account of the first devastating war in the mid-1990's; however, the carnage and death that have occured are happening again in Chechnya right now. These wars are not abstractions and Lloyd's book is an excellent device to remove any illusions of distance that the morning paper or evening news may have created.

Rating:
Summary: Apocalypse Again
Review: In telling you that I finished this book in four hours at 3 a.m., should indicate how enthralled I was by the author's (and our) roller-coaster decent into a Bosnian hell. The hook, what makes this book so good, is that his writing took us along for this terrorfying ride. My only caveat is that a photojournalist's memoir should have pictures and lots of them. What was the publisher thinking?

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read For Junkies, War and Otherwise
Review: Few books I have read in life have captured and sustained my attention as much as this book. Perhaps it was because of the author's uncanny ability to plumb and describe so graphically the depths of human cruelty and suffering in the Bosnian and Chechnyan wars. It's sometimes easy to forget how sick the human race can be, especially when our hatred of others is motivated by the age old forces of religion, nationalism or greed. Fortunately, Loyd laces his first-hand account of the killings, woundings, rapes and an tortures which characterized so much of these conflicts with unexpected humor and an unusual grace. In addition, he seems to be as balanced and fair as any journalist with a conscience or sense of decency can be in reporting on the relative moral blameworthiness of the various warring parties, the comments below of the apparent apologist for the Bosnian Croats notwithstanding. Finally, I must confess that Loyd's parallel story of his discovery and use of heroin gave this reader at least a unique insight into the equally dangerous attraction heroin seems to have for certain people. On the other hand, it also seemed odd, if not a tad unbelievable, that Loyd, who so often flirted with death in Bosnia and Chechnya, apparently never injected heroin, but was merely a "dragon chaser." I suppose it would have been a little too unbecoming for a correspondent for the London Times to admit to geezing smack. Anyway, if you are a war junkie or just a plain old dope junkie, this is definitely a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Bite Off Less Next Time
Review: In the grand tradition of wandering correspondents who consumecopious amounts of drugs and alchohol, Anthony Loyd gives us agripping play by play of his times in the Balkans--with a side trip toChechnya and its horrors thown in for good measure--recounting harrowing tales of horrors most of us are too wise or scared to seek out. Unfortunately, the pace and immediacy of his story suffer from too many personal asides and side trips to his family past and drug addiction.

Although he tells it like it is, his occassional editorializing gets in the way of the story as he nudges us to remind us of how awful war is. I longed for him to quiet down a bit and just let the stark facts alone speak for themselves, and there are stark facts aplenty. While his struggle with his other addiction, heroin, (war being his first mistress) is conjured up to lend narrative structure to his tale and authority to his persona as a writer, that experience, along with his ramblings about his unhappy family past and pained paternal relationship interrupted the text's flow and seem out of place next to the monumental horrors of war he experiences back in Bosnia and Chenchnya.

I hope he does this sort of book again but next time avoids the temptation to create a grand narrative that tries to fuse his personal life and field experiences together. He should find no shortage of new material as I belive there are still armed conflicts and genocide ocurring around the world at this very moment.

Rating:
Summary: War Tourist
Review: Upon first picking up Anthony Loyd's "My War Gone By" and seeing the blurbs on the jacket, I was impressed with the comparisons to Herr's "Dispatches." Upon reading the book though, it seems more similar to another book about the Vietnam war, Tim O'Brien's novel "Going After C," albeit in a nearly antithetical fashion. O'Brien writes about a fighter who walks, in a dream, from his meaningless jungle war to civilized Paris. Loyd writes about a dreamer who walks into a fight and from London into a war that ten years ago was a suprise to most of us. And Loyd writes about that war with direct, vibrant, unflinching prose, tying in his own descent into addiction as an allegory for the loss of such a beautiful landscape and people on the European continent into the darkness and insanity of a pointless war. Also, the feeling of a "war tourist," which Loyd refers to frequently are on point. In 1992, I stayed with a friend of Zagreb, Croatia, at a time when the "front" was about fifty kilometers from the capital city. Although I never actually went to the front, largely because my friend told me it was usually "boring," I always harbored the guilt that my visit was simpily an attempt to vicariously experience their war, as we drank in the cafes and partied in the clubs and homes of young Croatians, amoung those some who had simply walked away from the fighting. At that time, I heard many of the Croats complaining of atrocities by the Serbs similar to those Loyd describes committed against the Muslims. And they wanted to know why the UN and Americans (I seemed to be the only one around at that time) had not intervened. Perhaps, Loyd's book with its brutal honesty will be a wake-up call for real police action in the Balkans, as the real atrocities there are not being committed by any one ethnic group or side in this war, but by common criminals hiding beyond those ethnic banners, cousins to Loyd's warlord in camos, pink shirt and bedroom slippers.

Rating:
Summary: Morality gone by . . . haunting and honest
Review: Author Anthony Loyd witnesses our worst evil, yet seems to struggle with moral truths. He's drawn to the darkness of war to expell personal demons. Irony, anyone? The memoir is part catharthis and holds a redemptive punch to expose how ignorance fueled another shameful chapter in history. Whatever deficiencies in the book (very few), the author makes up for in honesty. Loyd's reflections on his family, father, the monkey on his back, etc., comprise his best writing.

Rating:
Summary: War and War Alone
Review: The darkness surrounding Anthony Loyd so overwhelmed me I could feel and smell his War. From The Red Badge to Dispatches, this is the best report I have ever read.

The digressions with his father at first altered the tempo. As the addiction and the pain intertwined, I almost turned ahead to view his next aside.

I have often worried about "missing" a war. Now, I don't have to worry. Anthony Loyd did it for me. The confusion and uncertainty make this an unforgettable book. The betrayals and absence of triumph are rending. I am sorry he had to go through this; not as sorry as I am for those innocents still in Hell.