My War Gone By, I Miss It So

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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. 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.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd | Goodreads

The cruelty and chaos of the conflict both appalled and embraced him; the adrenalin lure of the action perhaps the loudest siren call of all. In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims, he was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home he found the void of peacetime too painful to bear, and so began a longstanding personal battle with drug abuse. 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 Robert Kaplan’s 1993 book Balkan Ghosts is still used today by policymakers trying to navigate this troubled region, and he saw what was coming. “My visit to Yugoslavia was eerie precisely because everyone I spoke with—locals and foreign diplomats alike—was already resigned to big violence ahead. Yugoslavia did not deteriorate suddenly, but gradually and methodically, step by step, through the 1980s, becoming poorer and meaner and more hate-filled by the year.” He also wrote that “Macedonia was like the chaos at the beginning of time,” but the comment could have been applied to much of the Balkans. The war began when Croatia declared its independence from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, and when My War Gone By opens the fighting has already been going on for a year. Qamishli, northern Syria, Anthony Loyd (14 February 2019). "How I found Shamima Begum". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 4 March 2021.Sarajevo’s “normality” came in many guises. The city was full of hidden traps, structures of power and allegiance that were far from obvious, even to those who lived there. The fighting had first broken, then obliterated the old hierarchy of authority and social structure. Within weeks of the outbreak of war, while the lines of confrontation were still fluid, thousands of people had fled the city, to be replaced by refugees from rural areas who brought a new brand of culture to the capital and with it new tensions. In the absence of a professional army, the only groups with any real organization, weapons or structure were the city’s criminal gangs, and so they took over the task of defence. For a long time the government’s strategy was in the hands of men like Juka Prazina, Celo and Saco: hard, enigmatic criminals with localized cult followings and a taste for killing. Later that year, battles would be waged not across trenchlines with the Serbs, but within Sarajevo itself as the government sought to wrest control from the hands of these splintered mafia groups by establishing a central, legitimate body using loyalist special forces and police groups. In war, one's survival intact comes down to the chances of a simple coincidence: will my flesh and a flying piece of metal be in the same place at the same time? That metal might be an individual bullet or a piece of shrapnel. Loyd puts it perfectly... He found the combat he had gone looking for, war in its true form, not the sanitized, glorified images presented in books and speeches. He found it in a place stripped of everything but the urge to survive, where honor, courage, and patriotism were reduced to their most basic forms: words old men use to get young men to die. “I did not learn to accept courage in a different form, I grew to see it as a meaningless term of glorification used by the ignorant to describe the actions of others whose real motivations are more often instinctive than altruistic. So began the long winter retreat of emotion.” You won't get a good sense of the politics that fueled the wars, hatreds and genocides from this book. It's the memoir of a journalist heroin junkie who spends a lot of time near the front lines. It's not a book I would recommend to anyone who doesn't already have a modest understanding of the fall of Yugoslavia. I reluctantly suggest this book to all those who think they can love the writing despite hating the writer.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd | Goodreads My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd | Goodreads

He got it. Battlefield reporting does not get more up close, gruesome or personal than the front-line accounts he eventually produced. At first the bloodshed unnerved him: a girl on his street in Sarajevo is killed by a mortar and, despite the expectations urn:lcp:mywargonebyimiss00anth:lcpdf:326190ce-ba6a-4a7b-8368-dcea6c39606b Extramarc Darthmouth College Library Foldoutcount 0 Identifier mywargonebyimiss00anth Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t50g7rj2w Invoice 1213 Isbn 0140298541 Loyd gradually acquired a political view of the war: Serbian nationalists were the main aggressors, Muslims the main victims. ''Gone was my wandering impartiality,'' he writes. ''I was for air strikes, for NATO intervention, 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 thatsvolta a sinistra dopo il tizio morto con la borsa della spesa gialla e la moglie, poi a destra per Minutka… Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa. There’s a brief detour into Chechnya – the Russian separatist state – during a winter long ceasefire in Bosnia. The war there is a nightmare. They’re shelling the city into oblivion but the rebels are performing miracles. He doesn’t stay long – this isn’t his war.

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

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." 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. Not since Michael Herr wrote Dispatches has any journalist written so persuasively about violence and its seductions in all of war’s minutiae of awful detail . . . an account that demystifies war and the war reporter and strips them bare before the reader’ Peter Beaumont, Observer I've read enough of these books that they begin to blur together, but this joins Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass, and Endgame: The Betrayal And Fall Of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II by David Rohde, as one of the books that will stay with me and haunt me. The writing here is better than those, but the book itself is less focused.a b c Anthony Loyd (1 February 2001). My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Penguin (Non-Classics). ISBN 0-14-029854-1. It is hard to believe, but the Balkans were once home to one of the most advanced cultures in Europe, and had the Ottomans not invaded and conquered the area, the Renaissance might have started there a century earlier that it did in Italy. After the conquest the factions, divided by religion, tribe, and class, were held together by force majeure of whoever ruled the area, so that an uneasy peace was generally maintained. Under the dead hand of Communism, Yugoslavia papered over its divisions in the name of Homo sovieticus, the new “Soviet Man,” and by the time communism collapsed the people had been part of a unified culture for centuries, long enough that one might have expected them to be able to continue getting along together, but one would have been wrong. 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)

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

The next most important theme is cynicism. The only thing you could be sure of is that the “truth” whatever that meant, was not what you would hear from official sources. “All participants lie in war. It is natural. Some often, some all the time: UN spokesmen, Croats, Serbs, Muslims, the lot. Truth is a weapon more than a casualty. Used to persuade people of one thing or another, it becomes propaganda. The more authoritative a figure, the bigger the lies; the more credible his position, the better the lies.”

This is merely one example of the horrific cruelty and irrational hatreds created by the conflict between a desire to have an ethnically pure nationalistic country and those who desired a secular multi-ethnic society. Of course, nothing can be that simple, and one wonders if the thugs hadn’t taken control. Horrors abound as humans are turned into weapons. Loyd witnessed one particularly wanton and cruel act as groups of Serbian soldiers bound the arms of some Croatian prisoners and then taped Claymore mines to their bodies connected by wires to their own lines. They forced the prisoners to walk toward the enemy lines, assuming the prisoners would not be fired upon. The inevitable end left only minor pieces scattered around and parts of legs.