An extraordinary memoir of the Bosnian War . . . savage and mercilessly readable . . . deserves a place alongside George Orwell, James Cameron and Nicholas Tomalin. It is as good as war reporting gets. I have nowhere read a more vivid account of frontline fear and survival. Forget the strategic overview. All war is local. It is about the ditch in which the soldier crouches and the ground on which he fights and maybe dies. The same applies to the war reporter. Anthony Loyd has been there and knows it’ Martin Bell, The Times When starting this book, the big reminder to keep in mind is Loyd has an addictive personality. Raised in an affluent family, he had the means to take on whatever new addiction crossed his path. He discusses his drug addictions that started when he was in school and obsession with the military thanks in part to a family who boasted and romanticized a long history of war participation. Naturally, he joined the army and was in the Persian Gulf and Northern Ireland. However, it was not enough. He wanted to see war. Drugs and depression followed and when they lifted, the war in Bosnia was beginning. As such, Loyd’s book is a compelling contribution to the growing body of war correspondents’ memoirs, a distinguished genre of twentieth century literature. That distracted century offered writers ample opportunity to practice this branch of letters. In war after war reporters were confronted with the results of official and individual belligerence. World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam—all these conflicts, and others besides, bred their own distinctive literatures. Now, with Loyd, it is the time of the dirty little wars of the 1990’s.

Parlando la lingua, iniziata a studiare prima di lasciare Londra, vivendo il più possibile con e in mezzo ai locali, invece di rinchiudersi nelle enclave giornalistiche. You could have a good time in Stara Bila that summer, providing you had not been born in the place. Congregated there were every type and nationality of journalist, photographer, cameraman (...). The fighting spilled further into the hills around us; they glowed with burning villages at night, and echoed with firefights by day. We sometimes watched it over barbecues. At dusk, we would choose our company, load up on whatever was going, and party to excess. We would fade out what the war meant to us and turn up the volume on the generator-run sound system." Loyd steadfastly writes from [an] unromantic point of view, refusing to give lip service to the vacuous, sound-bite moralisms and historical nuggets he sees most journalists resorting to in Bosnia . . . he tells the unvarnished truth, no mean feat in such a diabolically convoluted and tragic conflict." -- Chicago Tribune

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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.

Tuttavia, questo libro di Anthony Loyd è diverso dagli altri, esce in qualche modo dal coro: è diverso perché è particolare il suo punto di vista e approccio, da ex soldato diventato giornalista, così ‘dentro’ da essere parte di quello che testimonia e racconta. 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. 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." Ant was a child from a broken home, who left the British military without seeing conflict. His London social circle was in a slow downward spiral of drugs and isolation. Ant decided to go find a war. Now, he does his best to rationalise this decision, delving into his formative years for memories of his venerated, mercenary-solider great-grandfather – but that whole line of reasoning never really flew for me – it felt too much like an attempt to squeeze emotional instinct into a nice, neat framework of cause and effect. The way I read it was simple: Ant felt great conflict inside, and sought an environment that would reflect that externally, as an attempt to understand it.Don’t get me wrong, you’ll learn a lot about the Bosnian war by reading this book, but it won’t be an analysis of political forces and tactical manoeuvres – this is a story of individuals, moments, sights, sounds and feelings. This is a very personal story of war. Lloyd] has written an account of its horrors that will wipe out any thoughts you might have had that we have reached the limit of the worst human nature has to offer. The monstrosities he describes are beyond belief. But the book is also compelling for what it tells us about fear." -- National Geographic Adventure Magazine 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. First of all, this book is hugely informative. It sheds light on a historical and human tragedy whose details are still largely unknown, no matter how massive the media coverage was at the time; and it does so from a perspective I can't quite define, between smugly egotistic and rationally detached. In short, a unique voice in the chorus of talk-show mourners and fundraising hyenas we're so familiar with nowadays.

Poi in Cecenia, anche a Grozny, dove i cadaveri abbandonati diventano punti di riferimento stradale: 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.Regardless of how many books are already queued patiently on my reading list, unexpected gifts and guilt-trips will always see unplanned additions muscling their way in at the front. What defined these two groups? Race? They were the same race. Culture? They were all Tito-era children. Religion? No man present had the first clue about the tenets of his own faith, be it Orthodox or Islam. They were southern Slav brothers, pitted in conflict by the rising phoenix of long-dead banners raised by men whose only wish was power, vlast, and in so doing had created a self-perpetuating cycle of fear and death that grew in Bosnia, feeding off its own evil like a malignant tumour. 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. for arming and training the Muslims. I believed something fundamental was at stake.'' His disgust at the West's (the United Nations', the world's) inaction was not dispelled by the bombing that

La guerra è come il consumo di droghe pesanti, è uno sballo di sentimenti contraddittori, agonia ed estasi che ti trascinano… I can easily understand some/many people not liking this book and not liking Anthony Loyd – but this is one of those books I’m always going to defend. I felt a connection with the words that made me want to simultaneously give the man a hug and find my own war. My War Gone By, I Miss It So is well worth a read. He became so fond of one murderous Croatian militia leader that in a story he filed about the killer's flight from the region, he now confides, he changed the man's destination from Australia to Brazil, not wanting at or near the front. Readers are submerged in a grim cycle of boredom, discomfort, chaos, terror and grief -- a cycle that in his version becomes so all-consuming that the peacetime world recedes, seeming to disappearA testament to his honor and courage. And while it would be impossible for one man to tell the whole story, his book shines with small truths and larger, philosophical ones about life and war." -- New York Post Loyd also weaves in anecdotes from his personal life, mostly having to do with his struggle with heroin, which becomes his coping mechanism after witnessing some truly disturbing stuff. I don’t mind these sections, since they offer not only a change of pace from the war (albeit only a slightly less depressing one—I don’t recommend reading this book before bed), but also a glimpse into the mind of a person that would voluntarily put their body and mind in harm’s way.