My War Gone By, I Miss It So

Rating:
Summary: Brought back the nightmares
Review: I'll get right to the point. I served in Croatia during the same time period of the first half of the book (1993). I watched whole villages be ethnically cleansed while being prevented from entering the area by the perpertrators tanks. I stared down the barrels of automatic weapons while trying to establish a buffer zone between the beligerents. I walked through areas where the only thing alive was myself and the other guys in my section. I slept 10 feet from the 3 day old corpse of an old woman. I came home to a country where the majority of the people I encountered didn't know, didn't care, and didn't want to believe me. I still have nightmares, and this book has brought them back with a vengence. This book is real.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: Anthony Lloyd does an exceptional job putting into words the events he witnessed during the war in Bosnia and the events of his life.

This is somewhat of a diamond in the rough book. It surprised me with its poetic memoir qualities as well as succeeding in painting a picture of the realities of the war.

Lloyd shows that he cannot only take pictures but he can also create pictures with his words. He was at the center of much of action in this war and created relationships with people and leaders on all sides. His story offers many insights about the details of this war, including the tragedies.

It is also a personal tale of his life, his struggles with addiction and struggles in his family and with friends.

This book really does not fit into a particular category except the 5 star category.

Rating:
Summary: Multicultural Madness
Review: This is tale of war on the ground, as seen by those intimately involved in it. Not for Loyd the usual reportage from a remote news conference given by the "good guys" whose interest is primarily to promote the proper spin to events, fooling the world into believing in the goodness of his side. He goes in harms way, crossing the borders between the good/bad guys and the other good/bad guys, revealing in all its detail the horrors of war. It is a personal adventure, told from a first person point of view, and it is an eloquent, moving piece of journalism at its best. One is reminded of another hero of the profession, Robert Fisk, who tells a similar tale of the war in Lebanon in "Pity the Nation."

Both of these books are about what happens when a multicultural nation falls apart into its ethnic pieces, which get unscrambled in a horrific multisided civil war. They show how ordinary people of different ethnicities and religions can live peacefully side by side for many years, with all the predictable compromises and legalities, intermarriages and friendships, then turn in a matter of months into communities at war, destroying everything that had been built up over the preceding decades. Everything inevitably follows a repeating process that is very poorly understood from an objective or scientific point of view.

Explanations of the phenomenon abound, usually centered around a bankrupt and distorted variation of good guys vs. bad guys, which unfortunately goes nowhere in arriving at a true understanding of the phenomenon. These explanations and rationalizations are actually a part of the phenomenon, and can hardly be accepted in any meaningful way.

What is needed is an underlying theory which can be used in a scientific way to form hypotheses and models, studied by statistical methods, and enable useful predictions and perhaps even preventative measures to be taken. Is it possible to predict the "tipping point" where the transition to communal war occurs? Is it possible to intervene in ways that don't make the problem worse? These questions can only be asked in a meaningful way when men such as Loyd and Fisk have provided the crucial data and observations that others can utilize for a scientific approach to succeed.

In the meantime, these tragedies will continue to occur, the political charlatans will continue their spinning, historians will follow the leaders, and the outsiders point their fingers in the trials of the defeated. The real message, though, for Americans and Europeans alike, intent on promoting multicultural dreams through unconstrained immigration of other ethnicities, is to examine the possible outcomes, one of which is a nightmare.

Rating:
Summary: A Fresh Look
Review: It was a breath of fresh air to read a piece of literature on the Bosnian conflict from such a personal standpoint. While Loyd, as a outsider to the war, writes effectively of the tumult of myriad forces and fronts within Bosnia, he also brings to light a fascinating dynamic of conflict and terror as a drug to the soul of modern, lost Man. Although I would have liked to read more of his musings on this, I am impressed nonetheless by it's presence. The ineffable horror witnessed by Loyd coupled with his conscious opposition towards journalistic convention deem My War Gone By, I Miss It So well worthy of a read.
Of course, there are certain aspects of the story which could be expanded upon as well as cut out. But overall, especially having spent some time in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia right after the war, I find it a laudable effort.