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    My War Gone By, I Miss It So
    My War Gone By, I Miss It So
    My War Gone By, I Miss It So
    Audiobook11 hours

    My War Gone By, I Miss It So

    Written by Anthony Loyd

    Narrated by Steven Crossley

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    About this audiobook

    With elegance and unsparing honesty, special correspondent for The Times of London, Anthony Loyd records this harrowing account of modern war. My War Gone By, I Miss It So exposes the unspeakable terror, visceral thrill of combat, and countless lives laid waste in Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II. Unsatisfied by a brief stint in the British army and driven by the despair of drug dependence, the author was searching for excitement when he set out for Bosnia in 1993. Nothing prepared him for the brutal life-and-death struggle he discovers there among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims. As he writes of the shocking chaos, he finds a chilling purpose to his life as a journalist. Anthony Loyd has become an award-winning international reporter whose work is compared to the classics of war literature. With this powerful book, he takes an uncompromising look at the horrifying savagery and seductive power of war. British actor Steven Crossley masterfully conjures up the sights, smells, and sounds of a country being torn apart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateNov 25, 2011
    ISBN9781461811220

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    Reviews for My War Gone By, I Miss It So

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I tried very hard to like this book. I wanted to like it. But I have a rule. If I'm not enjoying a book by a hundred pages in, then I give up on it. That's what happened with Anthony Loyd's strange, disjointed memoir, MY WAR GONE BY, I MISS IT SO. And I actually gave it 150 pages, nearly half the book. Nope. Couldn't make myself like it. Loyd seemed to be equating the high of hard drugs with the high of war. Because he admits to being a druggie, and he admits to not being quite sure why he kept going back to the war in Bosnia. He'd already served five years with the British Army during the First Gulf War, so he didn't have to go to this war. But he felt he needed to. He had a bunch of ancestors who were soldiers, so I guess he felt he didn't want to miss 'his war.' He also failed to ever quite make clear who was fighting whom, or why, although he made pretty clear that the battle lines and reasons for most of the participants were never clearly defined. Lots of ethnic and religious hatred figured in. Here's a line that may explain how it was for him and his other journalist and photographer comrades -"We were indulging in Sarajevo's greatest wartime activity: smoking and hanging around hoping nothing would happen to us but something would happen somewhere, anywhere, to break the monotony and give us a sense of time progressing, of anything progressing."And there's a lot of this in here, or at least in the first half. Loyd does see some very gruesome stuff, maybe becomes sort of used to it. He does a lot of drinking and drugs whenever he can. I don't know what happened later in the book, and, finally, I just couldn't make myself care.Maybe someone will like this book. I didn't. I understand it may become a movie. I don't think I want to see the film either. The book was bad enough. Again, didn't finish it. Didn't want to. Not recommended. (two and a half stars)- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 4/5
      Like all stories about becoming a war correspondent, without the backup of any organization, this one has adventure details to spare. The writing is effective, but far from brilliant, and the stories go from the dealing with addiction back in London, uninteresting for war history buffs, to the gory details of war, which the author uses as starting points to reflect on war at various levels.The stories mostly take place in Bosnia, and a few in Chechnya. So One can use this book as a welcome relief from reading about Irak and Afghanistan.
    • 5/5
      I will say this about Anthony Loyd: he's read his Michael Herr.
    • 4/5
      Born of a prestigious English military family, Loyd was enamored of war until he enlisted in the Bosnia conflict. Fresh with a degree in photojournalism and no prospect of a job, Loyd decided to go to Bosnia, where the war had been going on for about a year in 1993. Freshly arrived in Sarajevo, he was almost immediately introduced to t he irrationality of the situation. Looking for a guide to help him find the house a contact in London had provided, he soon found one who was more than happy to help, insisting that no remuneration was necessary — indeed, Loyd discovered that despite outside world assumptions of universal hatred, his experience was that as long as religion, politics, and war were not mentioned, the residents would s soon adopt any stranger as almost a member of the family.

      From the hotel, they needed to cross “sniper’s alley,” a dangerous section of street open to constant sniping. Loyd’s guide made it clear
      that he would not run in front of “those people.” Loyd could see that any rational person would want to break the four-minute mile getting
      across and hated the thought of dying on his first day because of a need for politesse. They settled on a crab-like compromise. Soon after arriving, he discarded his flak jacket not just because it was heavy, but because it placed a barrier between him and the residents who had to survive the horrors on a daily basis. He could get on a plane at any time and return to London in just two hours.. There were numerous groups of men surrounded by cadres of armed bodyguards who created their own little fiefdoms, and allegiances shifted more frequently than a river’s bottom.

      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.

      Mercenaries flocked to Bosnia from everywhere seeking action and excitement. One he met was a French Foreign Legion deserter (killed not a few weeks later). Loyd was shot at within days of his arrival. He met a beautiful young woman in a bar, a Croatian who, it turned
      out, was a sniper. Loyd asked her if she knew any Serbs or had any Serbian friends. She said the only ones she hoped to see again were
      those she would kill.

      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.

      The body of one who had weighed some 200 lbs. before he was captured weighed only thirty lbs. when buried, and that included the weight of
      the coffin. In another example of life’s randomness, the only prisoner to survive was one who had been beaten so badly that he could not
      walk. Loyd wonders what to say to the parents of these mere children, barely 21 years old. Ordinary items became instruments of death. The
      U.N. insisted that all Coke cans be squashed because both sides would use them to create grenades. Television sets were gutted and filled
      with explosives.

      Loyd is both repelled and fascinated by what he sees firsthand. He admires the marksmanship of a Serb who climbed to the top of a tower
      and, using a .50 caliber rifle, shot an international aid worker. The bullet traveled through the back of the Range Rover, through the seat,
      through the man’s flak jacket, and then out the front of the vehicle. An awesome weapon. Bosnia was "a playground where the worst and most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted out."

      Loyd despised the regular media correspondents who would wander periodically via armored personnel carrier into U.N. headquarters for a few sound bites and then return to the safety of a Holiday Inn, “to file their heartfelt vitriol with scarcely a hair out of place.” His big break came when he was asked to substitute for a wounded British writer and then he began to sell his stories as well as photographs.

      The horror of this beautifully written book (hard to describe such a book thusly given the content) is that Loyd found the war somehow
      appealing, a high close to that of his former heroin addiction. "I had come to Bosnia partially as an adventure. But after a while I got into the infinite death trip. I was not unhappy. Quite the opposite. I was delighted with most of what the war had offered me: chicks, kicks, cash and chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real and wreathed
      in gun smoke." All social constraints are abandoned in war. Scoffing at the idea of objectivity, he lobbied against the Serbs and was embarrassed not to be shooting at them himself. "I felt I was a pornographer, a voyeur come to watch."

      Whether 9/11 and its aftermath will generate future war addicts remains to be seen.
    • 4/5
      Good book. I recently re-read it and I enjoyed it better the first time around. I recomend it if you are interested in the war in the Balkins. Loyd is a good writer and was a bit crazy/niave to venture into this region without an actual "assignment" (he is a freelancer). Worth a one-time read...
    • 5/5
      Probably the best and most honest account by a war correspondent in recent years. Loyd doesn't pull any punches yet is never judgemental of those around him in this very enlightening retelling of his experience in the Balkans wars of the '90s. His straight-from-the-heart illustration of his own addictions to both the war-front and heroin use deserve high praise. Antony Loyd is a writer of whom greater recognition is warranted.
    • 4/5
      A harrowing, shocking, poetic memoir of the Bosnian war by a fine, if slightly unhinged, writer. Lloyd, who grew up in a military family, also grew up fascinated, apparently, by war and by the time he sets out for the killing fields of Bosnia is beset by the demons of addiction and despair. The horrors and chaos of war become a sort of counter-point for his addictions and emotional problems. One feels he becomes as addicted to the adrenaline rush of war as to the drugs, booze and sex. I admit I found the work intensely moving, and deeply human, although I do wish he'd provided more clarity at the end. I would have given it five stars, but for the fact I was left unsure as to how much the experiences about which he wrote with so much insight had changed him, and whether, in the end, he was able to put down his soul-destroying addictions.I found this book an invaluable reference when I was writing THE RADIANT CITY, about a war correspondent who had suffered a breakdown in Rwanda.
    • 5/5
      The only book I have read more than twice. I don't know what that says about me, but this book shook me out of my comfortable little world views when I read it in highschool.
    • 2/5
      This book was recommended to me by my friend David, he thinks it's a great perspective on the war in former Yugoslavia and a great read. At first the author Anthony Loyd irked me with his masculine style. It always annoys me when a book is dripping with predictable gender stereotypical perspectives - in this case, a gross glorification of war and the arguably innate attraction humans have for violence. At least that's what I first though. Reading further I realize that his voice damns that desire as it revels in it, which is interesting and often ignored inner-struggle. Anthony Loyd essentially becomes a 'war tourist' under the guise of journalist. Don't many if not all of us indulge in this way in perhaps less open ways. While one could say it's a twisted and gruesome voyeurism I think we are all trying to understand our darkness better, personally and humanely.
    • 3/5
      I doubt I will ever really understand the obsession of war. Loyd presents an intriguing and very human view of the battles. I was not very familiar with the struggle in Bosnia, so this book opened that door for me. Although I didn't always agree with his viewpoints, Loyd's narrative made me concerned for him and his friends. Overall, a pretty good read-- but sometimes his writing is lacking.
    • 4/5
      This is tale of war on the ground, as seen by those intimately involved in it. Not for Loyd the usual reportage from a remote news conference given by the "good guys" whose interest is primarily to promote the proper spin to events, fooling the world into believing in the goodness of his side. He goes in harms way, crossing the borders between the good/bad guys and the other good/bad guys, revealing in all its detail the horrors of war. It is a personal adventure, told from a first person point of view, and it is an eloquent, moving piece of journalism at its best. One is reminded of another hero of the profession, Robert Fisk, who tells a similar tale of the war in Lebanon in "Pity the Nation."Both of these books are about what happens when a multicultural nation falls apart into its ethnic pieces, which get unscrambled in a horrific multisided civil war. They show how ordinary people of different ethnicities and religions can live peacefully side by side for many years, with all the predictable compromises and legalities, intermarriages and friendships, then turn in a matter of months into communities at war, destroying everything that had been built up over the preceding decades. Everything inevitably follows a repeating process that is very poorly understood from an objective or scientific point of view.Explanations of the phenomenon abound, usually centered around a bankrupt and distorted variation of good guys vs. bad guys, which unfortunately goes nowhere in arriving at a true understanding of the phenomenon. These explanations and rationalizations are actually a part of the phenomenon, and can hardly be accepted in any meaningful way.What is needed is an underlying theory which can be used in a scientific way to form hypotheses and models, studied by statistical methods, and enable useful predictions and perhaps even preventative measures to be taken. Is it possible to predict the "tipping point" where the transition to communal war occurs? Is it possible to intervene in ways that don't make the problem worse? These questions can only be asked in a meaningful way when men such as Loyd and Fisk have provided the crucial data and observations that others can utilize for a scientific approach to succeed.In the meantime, these tragedies will continue to occur, the political charlatans will continue their spinning, historians will follow the leaders, and the outsiders point their fingers in the trials of the defeated. The real message, though, for Americans and Europeans alike, intent on promoting multicultural dreams through unconstrained immigration of other ethnicities, is to examine the possible outcomes, one of which is a nightmare.
    • 5/5
      A highly disturbing account of one man's view of war and his coinciding drug addiction. The visuals reaped when reading this are horrific, yet it's like a train wreck at which you can't stop staring.