My War Gone By, I Miss It So [Paperback]

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—so he left England at the age of twenty-six to document the conflict in Bosnia. For the following three years he witnessed the killings of one of the most callous and chaotic clashes on European soil, in the midst of a lethal struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims. Addicted to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to wage a longstanding personal battle against substance abuse.

These harrowing accounts from the trenches show humanity at its worst and best, through daily tragedies in city streets and mountain villages during Yugoslavia’s brutal dissolution. Shocking, 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.

Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome, and personal. . . . The fear and confusion of battle are so vivid that in places, they rise like acrid smoke from the page. —New York Times

Loyd’s strongest writing is in his descriptions of carnage—of the sound and smell of shellfire; of the sexual release of blasting away with an automatic machine gun . . . This is pure war reporting, free from the usual journalistic constraints that often give a false significance to suffering. And 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. —Salon

Both beautiful and disturbing. —Wall Street Journal

First-rate war correspondence . . . [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr. —Boston Globe

My War Gone By, I Miss It Somoves at the pace of a thriller. Why bother readil#à