My War Gone By, I Miss It So

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Williams, Martin (14 May 2014). "Times journalists escape after kidnapping in northern Syria". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 19 November 2019.

My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd | Goodreads 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. svolta a sinistra dopo il tizio morto con la borsa della spesa gialla e la moglie, poi a destra per Minutka… 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. 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...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."

My War Gone By, I Miss It So - IMDb My War Gone By, I Miss It So - IMDb

He gets himself a bare-bones qualification in photojournalism, a smattering of Serbian from a restaurant-owner’s daughter, throws some bags in the boot of a mate’s car, and heads off to the new war in Bosnia. He has no affiliation with a news agency, little money and some sketchy press papers – little justification and no safety net, but he goes – because he has to. Loyd falters, however, when he tries to account, in general terms, for the barbarity he documents. His reflections on the human capacity for evil, on the mind-set of Bosnian villagers, on the different degrees of culpability for atrocities in war, are

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Everywhere Anthony Loyd goes, he keeps his eyes open. He sees horrific things, but he also sees acts of kindness and strength. He remembers. He respects. He learns. These are the events which shaped the man who became a great journalist, The Times’ lead war reporter and winner of the Amnesty International Award. 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.”

My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads My War Gone By, I Miss It So Quotes - Goodreads

A quel punto tenta l’avventura col fotogiornalismo, e all’inizio è piuttosto spaesato, ma possiede comunque un approccio alla guerra che è pressoché unico, un modo di sentirla viverla e parteciparla che lo fa presto emergere tra gli altri reporter: British Army veteran (''The gulf war had been one of the greatest anticlimaxes of my life,'' he writes) who had recently survived an episode of suicidal depression. In a more idealistic era, he speculates, Anthony Loyd viene da famiglia militare, che ha mantenuto la tradizione per diverse generazioni, in varie parti d’Europa. 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, 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 expectationsQamishli, northern Syria, Anthony Loyd (14 February 2019). "How I found Shamima Begum". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 4 March 2021. 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.