Review: 'My War Gone By, I Miss It So'

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Review: 'My War Gone By, I Miss It So'
What Photographers Should Be Reading

By Jim McNay, Brooks Institute of Photography

"My War Gone By, I Miss It So," by Anthony Loyd, 1998, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 1999, 321 pages.

Thinking of going to a shooting conflict somewhere? Read this first. It will be sober preparation for the harsh reality of what is too often flippantly referred to as going after bang-bang.

There are no photographs with this book. It's just the best account of modern war around, told brilliantly by a photographer.

This non-fiction book about the recent war in the Balkans by British photographer Anthony Loyd has received significant commendation as an excellent account of this mysterious regional conflict.

The praise is well-deserved. This is an unromantic, hair-raising account of one photojournalist's experience in one of the nastiest, most brutal - and in the West, most ignored - wars in recent history.

If Donald McCullin's autobiography Unreasonable Behavior defines the conflicts of the 70s and 80s for photographers, Loyd has done that for the next generation.

Loyd took a mini-course in photojournalism in London where he learned about picture making and how to connect with editors. Then, with no assignment or promise of work, he went to Central Europe. Like so many beginning photographers before him, the point was to see what war was like. He found out and has told his story brilliantly in these pages.

Although Loyd's job was to photograph the scene his written account will put a knot in the stomach of readers - he's that good at reporting the harrowing nature of the war, the randomness of who lives and who dies in the war zone. In a land were Muslims, Serbs and Croats all live and hate each other and where battle lines, control of towns and villages and most important of all, short term alliances seem to change in a moment. Uncertainty about everything is the only certainty.

As well as Loyd writes he makes it clear there is no way to tell the real story of war on the printed page. We know former soldiers often do not talk about what they did and what they saw, even with other soldiers. It's not that they have nothing to report. Rather, any second hand account fails to fully communicate the experience.

Loyd admits this fault, while celebrating the possibilities of photography. "When a photograph does capture 'the moment' in war, whatever it is, it leaves all the other mediums of reportage so far behind as to make them almost irrelevant: a single punch to the consciousness that will not go away until you close your eyes or look at something else. Yet I was not a good photographer, and was too often frustrated by my inability to capture on film the essence of what I was witnessing."

Still he succeeds at putting the reader right in the thick of things, right up to the final, run-for-your-life-and-hope-you-don't-get-a- bullet-up-the-arse-though-that's-probably-how-this-is-going-to-end-though-wouldn't-that-be- unfair-yet-ironic-after-all-we've-lived-through-up-to-now dash across an open field (600 yards!) as troops bear down on Loyd and colleagues as they sprint breathlessly for a tree line.

Before this dash Loyd tells a heck of a tale.

At one point Loyd had to make a quick, seemingly life altering decision. "'Have you got Muslim friends?' The man pulled back the hammer of his pistol to emphasize the gravity of the question and leaned forward so close the brandy on his breath seemed to gum our faces together. There was total silence from the soldiers standing behind me in the darkness of the container room, not so much as a cough of shuffle. My interrogator's companion, a shaven-headed bison with a dagger on his hip, folded his arms waiting for the judgment my words would bring me.

"f-number, I thought, how do I answer that one? I had just admitted to having lived in Sarajevo for a while, so they were sure to interpret a negative reply as a lie. Yet in the wake of the crazed bigotry I had glimpsed in the previous twelve hours to say yes seemed an even worse prospect. It was like an evil game of bluff, and I was not sure what the stakes were. Was the man just playing with me or was I in as deep shit as I felt? There were a different set of rules here characterized by a rabid sentiment I had never seen before. The suspicion and hostility of these men were mediaeval, and their regard for human life at best minimal. Values like respect of foreigners were just so far out of the scheme of things as to be irrelevant."

One caveat: Some reviews have focused - perhaps a bit more than necessary - on those parts of the book that touch on Loyd's heavy drug abuse. While Loyd does get involved with serious illegal substances, only a small portion of the book is about that. However for Loyd, as with other battle zone veterans before him, something has to fill the void when he is away form the war zone. That might be liquor, sex or any number of hard living choices. In Loyd's case, the void was occasionally filled by heroin.

Apparently he could leave this behind when it was time to leave London and return the front. He seems to have avoided drugs in the battle zone. But drugs are a part of this story. Loyd knows he has a problem and is aware of the downside of his addiction.

After seeing much, Loyd made the decision to cover the fighting in Chechnya, as the Russian army went in to crush the revolt. What he'd seen up to that point was a picnic.

"You can grade conflict according to intensity if your desire: low, medium and high. Chechnya blew the bell off the end of the gauge, and revealed an extreme of war to me that I had no conception of. Afterwards my understanding of conflict was never quite the same again.

It was indeed a glimpse from the edge of hell."

Most of all Loyd came to respect the people he came to know. He recounts one scene. "A friend had told me that he had witnessed two Chechen brothers meeting in a hospital. Both were fighters. One had had his legs and an arm blown off by a shell a day earlier. He lay in a filthy, bloodstained bed swathed in bandages. Only his face emerged through the swaddle of cloth; scabbed, scarred and blackened by the blast. He was conscious but could not speak. His brother walked in. It was the first time he had seen his sibling since he had been maimed. There was no touching, no display of sadness.

The unwounded man took a chair and sat by his brother's bed for a while, talking to him softly. After a time he got up to leave. No sign of emotion had passed over his face at any stage. He said goodbye and just before he turned to leave there was movement from the bed.

"The wounded man lifted his remaining arm from the blankets and raised his thumb in defiance.

"Image the power of such men. Hail them, and fear them."

Before buying that plane ticket to the next conflict wherever it is, catch up with this story. It will help photographers know what to expect.

Related Links:

My War Gone By, I Miss It So

Jim McNay's member page