My War Gone By, I Miss It So Free

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Born to a distinguished family steeped in military tradition, raised on stories of wartime and ancestral heroes, Anthony Loyd longed to experience war from the front lines. He left England at the age of twenty-six to document the conflict in Bosnia, and for the following years he witnessed the killings of one of the most callous and chaotic clashes on European soil. Addicted to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to wage a longstanding personal battle against substance abuse. Shocking and violent, yet lyrical and ultimately redemptive, this book is a breathtaking feat of reportage and an uncompromising look at the terrifyingly seductive power of war. The fear and confusion of battle are I Miss It So vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page. Some of the finest writing to come out of the Bosnian conflict. His prose can be both beautiful and disturbing. Strassel, The Wall Street Journal. This may just be flat-on-your-belly grittiest coverage to come out of those tormented killing zones thus far. This is pure war reporting. Loyd waxes eloquent on the backblast of his war time, a heroin addiction that begins before his arrival and becomes the only way he can survive his breaks from the fighting. Or it takes someone like Anthony Loyd. The book helps round out the literature that has looked back on the war in Bosnia. Better than most, it helps explain a war that seemed so at odds with the promise of the post-Cold War world. Some things need to be shown. Bringing a war often seen through a haze of euphemism into sharp and jarring focus. This great horror in a century of horrors finally has it jeremiad. Coffin, The Philadelphia Inquirer. In the end, readers well understand the toll war has taken on the lives of its players—whether witting or unwitting. Reading My War Gone By is like diving into parts of your psyche you might not want to confront. Our empathy with Loyd and his crazed doings poses a troubling, if well-wornquestion between each of his harrowing lines: Mad? He seems to say. Loyd manages to get on the inside and look out, and so provides a perspective on hatred, cruelty and human depravity that is sobering and terrifying. But there are touches of brilliance here, and readers who do stomach their way through it—and once started it is almost impossible not to—will My War Gone By touched and, yes, even enriched for the experience. By turns horrifying, contemplative, and savagely funny, this memoir captures the peculiar ferocity of ethnic and religious civil strife. This unforgettable work ranks with the great modern accounts of war. Idiosyncratic, unsparingly graphic, refreshingly self-critical, and beautifully written. Just when a reader My War Gone By to feel that Loyd is too cynical and My War Gone By, a scorchingly lyrical passage will illuminate the Balkan war in all its anarchic horror. Not like My War Gone By other book on the Yugoslav war, his gripping, viscerally subjective chronicle puts a human face on the tragedy as it mourns the strangled My War Gone By of multiethnic Bosnia. Elegantly My War Gone By. Loyd is painstakingly honest about the sheer excitement of war, and breaks the often unspoken taboo of war correspondents—that battle can be a better high than sex or drugs, the whip- crack of bullets and the whistle of shell-fire the deadliest siren I Miss It So of all. There was a Bosnian government army sniper positioned in one of the top floors of the burned-out tower block overlooking the Serbs in Grbavica. He was audio landmark to our days. Our proximity to the Serbs meant that they were seldom able to bring down heavy artillery fire upon us for I Miss It So of dropping short and hitting their own troops on the other side of the small river. The tight clustering of buildings afforded protection from automatic fire, provided you knew which alleys to run across and were not unlucky with a I Miss It So round. It was only if you chose to leave the claustrophobic confines of this narrow template in search of food or as a release from the stifling boredom that your troubles really began. There was no way around it, if you wanted to go anywhere else in the capital you had to deal with Vojvode Putnika. Empty your mind, fill your lungs and kick out for the centre knowing that if it happened then you would not hear it, merely get smashed forward onto your face by a mighty punch. Some people never bothered to leave the area. They waited for others to bring them food, growing paler and madder with frustration by the day. Others never bothered running. They My War Gone By that they were fatalists but I think they were just tired of living, exhausted by the mental effort of dealing with the random nature of the violence. Even so, however fast you beat the ground you knew that it would never be faster than a speeding bullet. But most of us kept making the effort anyway, hoping it would cut us a bit of leeway with the reactions of the men on the hills above us. I was sitting with Endre with my back to the wall of our house. It was late morning and the March sun I Miss It So high and moving slowly south- west, leaving us in the wedged shadow of the building. The war had been going on for nearly a year and had no end in sight. Our conversation followed the usual pattern: I asked lots of questions to try to get my head around the situation while Endre, a Hungarian Yugoslav, listened attentively and then began his answer. He did it the same way each time. The government sniper was obviously back up there, though we could not see him, and had taken a pop at something he had seen across the river. The two sides of the tower visible from our position almost never changed their appearance: the front was a wide expanse of black and twisted window frames, the southern side a concrete Emmental of shellholes from tanks. There was only one time I can remember it ever looking different. Some Muslim My War Gone By had crawled up to the top at night and unfurled a long banner down the side of the building that directly faced the Serbs. The Serbs shot it to ribbons the next morning. I could never work out if this meant that they had got the joke or not. Then another shot rang out. Endre paused again, this time raising an index finger in expectation of something. Across the river a machine-gun fired a burst back towards the tower, its dull popping sound following only after the whacking of the bullets chipped off bits of concrete in harmless- looking grey puffs above us. Still Endre held up his finger, waiting for something else. Again the sniper fired, only this time there was a scant second between the crack of his shot and great explosive smashings and sparks as an anti-aircraft gun riddled the top storeys of the tower in a nerve-jangling roll of sound. Silence followed the last detonation. The sniper would not fire again that day. Endre lowered his finger and turned to me smiling. Sarajevo was a schooling such as I have never had. Aside from the deeper reasons behind my being there, my path to the Bosnian capital was marked in equal parts by coincidence and intent, milestones which stretched from a prophetic warning on the day Tito died over a decade before to a stoned conversation with a Serb deserter in Marrakech in the late spring of By the summer of I had finished a post-graduate course in photojournalism. My CV, updated with the new qualification, swarmed through London mailboxes. I wasted four months before giving up on a response. There was no specific moment when I suddenly resolved to go to Bosnia alone, though I do remember having felt an accelerating motivation earlier that year when transfixed by a photograph in a British, newspaper of a Serb fighter, cigarette in one hand, kicking a dead Muslim civilian in a town called Bijeljina. The photographer himself was to have a part in the final endgame of my My War Gone By experience, but that was far away then; part of a future I could not My War Gone By even guessed at. I knew if I went I would not have My War Gone By money with me, certainly not enough to hire an interpreter, so I rang up the Serb restaurant in Notting Hill and asked if there was anyone there who could teach me Serbo-Croatian. A surprised voice the other end of the line agreed to meet me at Notting Hill tube to discuss the prospect. She had long straight hair that fell halfway down her back, its blackness matched only by the dark of her eyes, and was smoking a cigarette, hauling deeply on it as if it was the last she had. Mima was from Novi My War Gone By. Her mother was Croatian, her father Serbian. She agreed to try to teach me the rudiments of her language. Very crazy. Most of the intellectuals have left. The scum have risen to the surface. You must be very, very careful. She asked me if I would marry her as the Home Office was giving her grief. In the New Year and with the end of winter in sight I felt ready for what lay ahead, my formless concept of war. She asked me if I would take a parcel of medicine and money together with some letters to them, and told me that if I wished to stay in their flat I would be a welcome guest. She drew me a little sketch map of the city, X marking their house. The X was a little close to the thick red line she had used to indicate the front line but it seemed rude to bring that up at the time. Sarajevo seemed an obvious place to begin my journey and I was glad to be given a contact there. However, I still waited hopefully for an employer to end the drumroll of my preparations. The thought of going off to a war without the cloak of a professional guise was a little unnerving. Without a contract there would be no aim to fulfill other than my own, and that was fairly vague: merely to go to war using, if possible, journalism as an open-ended ticket to remain in Bosnia for as long as I wished. I felt I needed at least some kind of contractual blessing to go, some practical and My War Gone By safety net to justify myself if it all went wrong. None came. I was left having to face the full responsibility of my own actions. Two friends from college were leaving London for Moldova in a battered Skoda, hardly the golden chariot of my dreams. They were driving via Budapest, which was not far from the Croatian border. My plan was not reasonable. So I thought fuck it and went anyway, throwing my bags into the Skoda one cold morning. It was I Miss It So a decision that had My War Gone By to do with courage, but more an absolution of self-responsibility, a releasing of myself into the hands of chance. The journey across Europe in the Skoda passed like a week-long Last Supper culminating in a seedy but otherwise empty bar in Budapest where my two friends and I got drunk together before going our separate ways. At some stage in the evening the juke-box had fired into life as if operated by an unseen hand and a young Hungarian girl walked in and up to our table. Anthony Loyd - Wikipedia

He originally intended to stay about six weeks, but as the war dragged on, he found himself mesmerized by the rush and immediacy of every moment. Running through alleyways ducking sniper fire, sharing a meal of boiled fat and slivovitz with a family as mortar shells rained down: instead of fleeing the terror, he stayed the duration of the war, becoming a correspondent for the British press. My War Gone By is his memoir of four years of war in Bosnia, and it is a damn near unforgettable book. Unforgettable in the kind of way that makes you embarrassed to be sitting in a room writing comfortably about it. For it is difficult to bang out a stylish synopsis of a book on Bosnia — or anything else My War Gone By after reading Loyd's brutal account of war and its horrors. His pen draws blood and ghosts from every other page. You are taken through the twisted mass death yard of Srebrenica, through a thousand echoing wails of young mothers cradling their mutilated children, through endless mountains of fresh intestines I Miss It So against grass and cement walls, through suffering and mortal fear of such intensity and on such a scale as to keep you awake and ashamed of what can only be called a thoughtless and unfeeling existence in the peaceful, affluent west. Many of us have one or two scary stories about close calls during some hard traveling. But Loyd encountered these daily, taking for granted that each movement, each checkpoint, each trip to the front brought the real possibility of I Miss It So. And quick death if he was lucky. Getting Kalishnikovs leveled at his face by Serb death My War Gone By was bread and butter, just something to be dealt with as coolly as possible. Surviving in Bosnia during the war required the perfect mix of being careful but not too careful, and tough as nails yet solidly deferential to soldiers who would just as soon blow your head off as light your cigarette. Loyd learned fast and performed flawlessly on a stage where one false move brings down the curtain. Following our narrator's cobalt minuet with violent death is, as they say, a page-turning experience. But the most staggering sections of the book, amazingly enough, take place not in Bosnia, but in Chechnyawhere Loyd went to cover the fall of Grozny. To call the descriptions found here "grizzly" is I Miss It So flaccid, and it is a remarkable literary achievement My War Gone By Loyd is able to communicate such unutterable experiences at all. The film footage censored by the BBC is found here, in word paintings and slow-motion imaging that deplete the mental capacity and accelerate the heart rate of the reader. A taste: Soon after our arrival My War Gone By the hospital] some villagers entered carrying two little girls along corridors My War Gone By with a muddle of used dressings, urine, and blood. The children were sisters. Marika was four years old. She was missing the lower part of her back and buttocks, but was still alive, just, and her pale, doll-like form lay motionless face-down on a table as a doctor removed large pieces of metal from her wounds, allowing each to drop on the table with a heavy clunk. Her sister Miralya was a year older. I do not know what it takes to make a tiny child weep tears of blood, massive blast concussions I guess, but as she shook I Miss It So noiseless terror it ran in thick lines from the corner of each eye, joining the scarlet streaks from a head wound to form a cobweb mask that covered her face. Loyd returned to London with scenes like this lodged in his mind and took to heroin to shake them. When the heroin took over, he went back to war to shake the drug. But after reading his book I am confident he has shaken neither and remains at turns haunted and numbed. His book, though, is a testament to something worthy of admiration, not in humanity, but in the author. His style is solid but journalistic bordering on conversational and probably doesn't warrant the comparisons to Orwell that have been made. But as Loyd says somewhere in the I Miss It So, there is not much room for grace and poise in these chemical times. And he knows better than us. Australians famously love their My War Gone By. I woke up this morning and something magic occurred. Life without art would be rather dreary indeed. Does Singapore have the intelligencia required to support a thriving I Miss It So house scene? Please publish modules in offcanvas position. Contact Advertising. View Comments. Liz Bennett Does Singapore have the intelligencia required to support a thriving coffee house scene? Most Popular. Orchard Towers Singapore Guide. Read more. Veronica Zemanova - Beauty and the East. Over the Counter Health Care in Prague. Expat Living. Quotes of the Day: Anthony Loyd | The Velvet Rocket

I do not want to die, but I am prepared to take a chance on it, and the odds are reassessed each morning when I wake. Death is a hooked shark I Miss It So be skillfully played. My own reckless appetite for the game is cantilevered by a sense of cumulative mortal fear born from every close call in every war zone I have ever attended. The product is far from My War Gone By, but results in a tension that helps keep me alive, to this day anyway. To drive down the empty road or not? At other times, I turned back, usually pursued by doubt and self-irritation, sensing I had baulked at the joust. Was death so unwelcome? In this regard, at I Miss It So, there is a cross-over between the one-time exemption offered by the escape of war, an attitude shared to some or other degree by drug addicts, smokers, mountaineers, test pilots, racing drivers, almost every war correspondent I have ever met, along with anyone else who gambled unnecessarily with their life. We do not choose death, but neither do we fully accept life. The space between is its own world and definition and I muster there with like-minded comrades under the banner of a mortal procrastination, abjuring verdict and choice. Death looks too final, life too painful for the requirement of either to be acceptable. What disturbs me most in war is neither the prospect of my own annihilation, nor the ease with which humans kill one another. Killing comes quickly enough and most My War Gone By can do it when certain influences are either removed or exerted. Instead, it is the sight of the bereaved which chills my core. Such cruel, gratuitous suffering seems much more of a mystery than death itself, far harder a sentence to bear than merely dying. There is no escape for any of us. Peace and age kill just as surely as war. But in war exists the fantasy of a surprise, sudden and instantly fatal bullet one day — nothing too protracted. The thought is a powerful tranquilizer, anesthetizing the reality of so many concerns, preserving my suspension in a place between worlds. No more goodbyes. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. My War Gone By are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Menu Skip to content. Home About. Share this: Email Print. Like this: Like Loading I have read both books. His writings on bosnia literally changed my life. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your I Miss It So here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Post to Cancel. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use. To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy.