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FREE MY WAR GONE BY, I MISS IT SO PDF Anthony Loyd | 320 pages | 22 Apr 2014 | Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press | 9780802122322 | English | New York, United States My War Gone by, I Miss it So by Anthony Loyd | Waterstones 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.

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