Will I love My War Gone By, I Miss It So?

Anthony Lloyd has spent his time as a war correspondent in horrific war zones like Bosnia Herzegovina and Chechnya and seen some of the worst conditions that modern war and ethnic hatreds have to offer.

Rather than just reporting on the experience, he gives you a sense of what it feels like to be in those situations, and then he goes further. While it has become common to talk about adrenaline junkies, Lloyd ups the ante by describing the heroin addiction he reverts to whenever he returns to England between assignments, and the perspective this brings to the narrative takes… show more.

I read this book many years ago and it was a time when I dreamed of being a war correspondent. It made me realise that I wasn’t cut out for it. Loyd’s unflinching account of the Bosnian War in the 1990s was so vivid that it made me physically recoil. I’d have become traumatised if I had seen the things he saw. I admired his powers of description and raw honesty. He is also addicted to smack, which takes him to dark places.

The effects of war don’t only affect the soldiers on the battlefield. This memoir by British war correspondent Anthony Loyd, who covered the war in Bosnia and the conflict in Chechnya, and was himself a veteran of the Persian Gulf War, illuminates the mindset and the consequences felt by anyone involved or witness to acts of violence in war. By turns brutal and lyrical, it is not a narrative of distant analysis that one would expect from a journalist. Loyd states unequivocally that to be “neutral” no matter what actually undermines an honest accounting of conflict and the actors involved.… show more.