A “beautiful and disturbing” account of the Bosnian conflict by a war correspondent grappling with heroin addiction and a family legacy of military heroism (The Wall Street Journal).
In an earlier era, Anthony Loyd imagines, he would have fought fascism in Spain. Instead, the twenty-six-year-old scion of a distinguished military family left England in 1993 to experience the conflict in Bosnia as a reporter. While he found his time serving in the British army during the Gulf War disappointingly uneventful, Loyd would spend the next three years documenting one of the most callous and chaotic clashes ever fought on European soil.
Plunged into the midst of the struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims, Loyd saw humanity at its extremes, witnessing tragedy daily in city streets and mountain villages. Shocking and violent, yet lyrical and ultimately redemptive, Loyd’s memoir is an uncompromising feat of reportage, and one man’s on-the-ground look at Yugoslavia’s brutal dissolution. But Loyd’s personal war didn’t end after he emerged from the trenches. Addicted to the adrenaline of armed combat, he returned home to continue his own longstanding battle against drug addiction.
“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.” —The 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.” —Salon.com
“First-rate war correspondence . . . [in] the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr.” —The Boston Globe
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