After serving in the British Army in the Gulf and Northern Ireland, Loyd mustered out, got a post-graduate degree in as a photojournalist, and headed for Bosnia. Though he spent several harrowing weeks in Chechnya in 1995, most of the book details his experiences covering the war (partly free lance, eventually on staff for British papers) in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1995, having lots of near misses with munitions and thugs, and witnessing unimaginable atrocities -- from a grieving widow waving a severed leg, and prisoners forced to walk back to their own lines with mines wired all over them, to a five-year-old girl weeping tears of blood ("massive blast concussion I guess"). The book also describes Loyd's periodic trips home to England where he had to deal with a rotten relationship with his father, and an on-again-off-again heroin addiction that filled the empty space left by glorious, terrible war. _My War Gone By, I Miss It So_ is an arrested portrait of war, the victims and killers it creates, and war junkies, written in fine and occasionally exquisite prose.
Click here to see the rest of this review...
The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus
