This book is essentially a memoir, so what we get is the author's experience during the war years, which consists of staggering atrocities and brutality, mediations on fear and war, and the chronicle of a heroin addiction.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So — Anthony Loyd — September My War Gone By, I Miss It So — Anthony Loyd — September

He gets himself a bare-bones qualification in photojournalism, a smattering of Serbian from a restaurant-owner’s daughter, throws some bags in the boot of a mate’s car, and heads off to the new war in Bosnia. He has no affiliation with a news agency, little money and some sketchy press papers – little justification and no safety net, but he goes – because he has to. Qamishli, northern Syria, Anthony Loyd (14 February 2019). "How I found Shamima Begum". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 4 March 2021. Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa.

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Loyd found ISIL bride Shamima Begum in the Al-Hawl camp in Northern Syria. After finding Begum, Loyd taped an interview with her where she stated she had no regrets about moving to ISIL-Controlled territory. [5] Author [ edit ] Loyd] never whitewashes the horror of war nor the way it favors bullies over humanitarians. . . . Like his dispatches, his book is a photo in disguise and has a photo’s immediacy of effect. Some things need to be shown.”—Dan Blue, San Francisco Chronicle Ines Sabalic (2000). "War in the Balkans". bosnia.org.uk New Series no.13/14 December 1999 - February 2000. Archived from the original on 31 March 2010 . Retrieved 12 September 2007. For me there was always a way out. I could go to the airport, flash that UN ID card and get on a plane to Split. I could be in London the same day if I timed it right, and that knowledge protected me from the despair that affected Sarajevo’s people. But it was not a move I wished or chose to take, and in the close proximity of that flat, sharing their life with them, I found myself susceptible at least to the moods and emotions of the people with whom I lived. After a time I discarded the bullet-proof vest I had bought in London. I had worn it because I was aware that it was easy to die in those streets—especially as a stranger new to the rules of the fighting—and realized that life was not something to be treated flippantly there. Yet I soon found it more of a barrier, in my own mind at least, between myself and those who befriended me than between my body and bullets. Its heavy weight ceased to be reassuring and instead brought only shame to me in the presence of people I knew, people who had no avenue of escape. I began to leave it in the room in which I slept, where it finally gathered dust.

My war gone by I miss it so : Loyd, Anthony : Free Download My war gone by I miss it so : Loyd, Anthony : Free Download

This is a book about dark motivations and self-destruction, and (considering the effects of the great cruelty that marked this conflict) what draws people to such hatred, either to watch or to take part. . . . My War Gone By is a raw and ragged book for a war that officially announced to the world that what’s old is new in conflict: war fought between neighbors divided by religion or ethnicity, and fought hand to hand. . . . 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.”—Justin D. Coffin, The Philadelphia Inquirer It was not necessarily that I had 'found' myself during the war, but the conflict had certainly put a kind of buffer zone between the fault lines in my head. Without it, or any narcotic relief, they ground away with renewed vigour."

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It turns out that Loyd has demons of his own to deal with that have him regularly getting high on heroin. The result is a doubly riveting tale of the harm men do to each other and the harm one man does to himself. With Loyd's powerful prose, this work takes the reader as close to personal experience as is possible at one remove. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the communist state of Yugoslavia fractured into separate entities including Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia itself has long been composed of a multiethnic population of Serbs (Orthodox Christian), Croats (Catholic), and Bosniaks (Muslim). After an attempt by the Serbian faction of Bosnia’s multiethnic parliament to remain a part of Serbia, the rest of the Bosnian government, with the blessing of the international community, declared independence. The Bosnian War was over the breakup of Yugoslavia and lasted from 1992-1995. Three armies were formed along ethnic/religious grounds: the Army of Republika Srpska(VRS) or Serbs/Protestants on the one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) which was largely composed of Bosniaks/Muslims, and the Croat/Catholic forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side. Loyd came there thinking he had the most sympathy for the Muslim side, but as he finds in war when one side commits an atrocity and then the other side responds with something equally horrendous it is hard to know which side is more morally right. ”You could take sides in Bosnia easily enough if you wished, but it never allowed you complete peace of mind.” 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

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

Momcilo was in favour of foreign intervention and massive air strikes upon the Serb forces around the city. He was convinced that this would bring the war to an early close, leaving some hope for a continued form of co-existence between the various religious denominations. He was supported in this opinion by Endre, a friend and neighbour whose knowledge of the English language helped me to grasp details in the debates that otherwise would have been lost on me. However, Endre was not in favour of lifting the arms embargo that hamstrung the Bosnian government’s ability to fight. He believed that the consequent withdrawal of UN troops would lead to an immediate Serb retaliation that would swiftly overrun Sarajevo’s fragile defence lines. Petar opposed both air strikes and the lifting of the arms embargo. He said either move would lengthen and intensify the war. Though he was no lover of the political or military strategy that emanated from Pale, the ski resort town east of Sarajevo that the Bosnian Serbs had styled their “capital,” in his heart he was a Yugoslav, and division of that creation was not something he saw as desirable. If pushed, his loyalties lay ultimately with the Serbs. Loyd covers all the details of the countryside, the hamlets and the towns he visits with scenes of recent slaughter all around from a civil war that in one case has enemies commiserating in a short truce arranged to gather the dead. Muslims and Christians speaking the same language ask each other about the fate of fellow schoolmates they had shared classes with in years past, only to separate for renewed battle.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. He’s a bright, articulate, passionate and at times darkly funny man. If this all sounds a bit grim and bleak – it is – but he writes with a rare and startling honestly which makes it eminently readable. As fubar as it seems, this is where Ant needs to be – this is the home he’s chosen and he’s in his element. 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: The heroin addict bit doesn't really add to the story, but it probably couldn't have been cut out without affecting the truth of the rest of the work -- if this were fiction, it would definitely be a messy subplot that should be cut out just to streamline the book. Likewise, his relationship to his father is just kind of there, butting into the atrocities.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd - Publishers Weekly My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd - Publishers Weekly

Poi in Cecenia, anche a Grozny, dove i cadaveri abbandonati diventano punti di riferimento stradale: 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) Anybody else feel a little queasy, like watching two teenagers playing video games only we are talking about human life. I had a hard time liking Loyd. It was too much like the war was there for his entertainment and early on I wondered if I was going to be able to finish this book. his druggy crowd of friends in West London might have volunteered to go fight fascism in Spain. Loyd, unencumbered by political convictions, went to Bosnia to save himself from himself. Also, to get the full draft of warBritish Army veteran (''The gulf war had been one of the greatest anticlimaxes of my life,'' he writes) who had recently survived an episode of suicidal depression. In a more idealistic era, he speculates, Anthony Loyd’s family idolized their war heroes. He grew up hearing about their exploits in particular one great grandfather who was a hero of several wars. A man that basically signed up for any war he could and whichever side took him first was the one he fought for. He was bemedalled and bejewelled with war wounds and veneration. We love our war heroes even if there is this underlying hum of death and destruction resonating in some of their souls. Ultimately...they aren’t supposed to like it. Anthony or Ant as he is called by his friends is estranged from his father. His sister is anorexic. He is beginning a long, loving relationship with drug use. He decides his life is going nowhere so in the tradition of his ancestors he goes and finds a war. Mass graves were all over, hidden in the forests, and relatives would search for bodies of missing kin. The bodies had been looted and ID cards were scattered all over; sometimes the faces were almost unrecognizable as war changed them. “It’s not what people lost; it’s what they gained.” Evil , Loyd notes, makes an indelible impression on the eyes. 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.