My War Gone By, I Miss It So
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Lloyd met good people in the war, people trying to survive and get on with their lives, but many others had been so poisoned by the fighting and dying that they had lost all compunctions about killing, so long as they could drink themselves into oblivion afterwards. Hindsight gives you a strange wisdom. In some ways we all get what we want. I have so few regrets, even now." Poi in Cecenia, anche a Grozny, dove i cadaveri abbandonati diventano punti di riferimento stradale:
My War Gone By, I Miss It So | Grove Atlantic My War Gone By, I Miss It So | Grove Atlantic
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,Well I found this book on one of my thrift store hunts,Being that I've not read much about the war after Yugoslavia broke up I was interested.I don't think that I was prepared for the raw visual observations of the author,The brutality of the war all sides concerned was very honestly detailed.The human suffering cannot be imagined.The physical toll on the parties involved is beyond measure let alone the mental toll, even on the journalist's. Why would someone voluntarily place himself in a situation that is known to put life and sanity at great risk? As Loyd relates,
Anthony Loyd - Wikipedia
Loyd] gets past the carnage and begins to answer the more fundamental question of just how the war in Bosnia came to be so bad. . . . Some of the finest writing to come out of the Bosnian conflict. His prose can be both beautiful and disturbing.”—Kimberley A. Strassel, The Wall Street JournalAnthony 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. Knjiga dubokotraumatiziranog pojedinca iz Britanije koji zbog teškog obiteljskog nasljeđa (ratovi), odnos-neodnos s ocem, je posjetio Bosnu i Hercegovinu za vrijeme rata 90tih. Jer je njemu to trebalo. them: ''Love hate, war peace, life death, crime and justice: to say my mind was stretched by trying to figure it all out would be an understatement.'' I believe any man, given the right pressures, could kill an innocent in cold blood. In accepting the reality of war rather than the ideal, however, I believe there are categories of atrocity. If fighters lose their heads and murder civilians or prisoners they are certainly guilty. But if a state uses atrocity as a tactic to polarize the population, like Serbia and latterly Croatia did in Bosnia, then it is guilty of a greater crime. In my mind, cold-bloodedness and the culpability of the state are the keys to apportioning guilt. Yes, Muslim troops did kill civilians and prisoners on occasion, but their actions were dwarfed by the scale of the crimes of their opponents. Anthony Loyd goes to the war in the former Yugoslavia as an observer - well, let's be honest, a tourist - and then gradually succumbs to the fascination, tinged with shame, of observing something surreal, dangerous, and yet so central to Europe. The complex and cruel war in between Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Muslims and other overlapping and changing factions was a gruesome continuation of centuries of internecine fighting that was only temporarily halted by the Tito regime - close to a quarter million people dead, yet curiously disregarded by the European press.
My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads
As much as I appreciated the writing about the wars, I could not get over my dislike of the man, the self-admitted 'war tourist'. He was not there to fight and, although he was at first a would-be photographer and then a reporter, he makes it clear that he was there to be in a war, not to inform about the war. His only motive is self gratification. Even when he tells of his adventure in helping to save the life of a young girl, he cannot redeem himself. His tone throughout the book is disingenuous. His attitude is one of superiority. Much of what he tells us is coldly cynical. These things are not as a result of the war. They are who he is. He befriends, benefits from and even protects men who are monsters and war criminals. He is not likeable nor admirable. 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 wantingThe prospect of peace eventually becomes, to Loyd's mind, ''hideous.'' His self-loathing entwines with his growing contempt for peaceful, prosperous places, and he scorns ''the complacency of Western societies.'' 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. Drugs are cheap and readily available in a war zone. Anthony soon develops a heroin addiction. In fact he writes rather lovingly about it. heroin addiction. This is where ''My War Gone By, I Miss It So'' gets into real trouble, floundering frequently into incoherence, into posturing both maudlin and macho, into dismal swamps of stoned mixed
ANTHONY LOYD is an award-winning foreign correspondent
If Lloyd had been a damaged soul before going to the Balkans, he was a burned out husk by the time he left. “Everything I had seen and experienced confirmed my views about the pointlessness of existence, the basic brutality of human life and the godlessness of the universe.” Even the presence of UN “peacekeepers” was part of the farce, their leaders apparently chosen from the ranks of the least capable and least imaginative, “He was one of those officers who had risen to a position of authority without ever having the confidence to know when to abandon the book.” 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.”
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He admits Chechnya blows the cover off anything else he had seen. "A glimpse into hell he calls it", and the subsequent chapter is a righteous description of a conflict that few were aware of. La guerra è come il consumo di droghe pesanti, è uno sballo di sentimenti contraddittori, agonia ed estasi che ti trascinano… 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.
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