My War Gone by, I Miss it So

My War Gone By, I Miss It So is a fiercely compelling, beautifully written personal account of the Bosnian war. The book alternates between Anthony Loyd's experiences in Bosnia & personal reflections of his time in the British army, his parents' divorce, his estrangement from his father & his heroin addiction. He describes the war at eye level: detailing the way bodies look after they've been shot or blown up, looking thru the sights of a Muslim gun trained on a Serb soldier, traveling with a French mercenary & fleeing from advancing Serbs during battle. The book, filled with firefights & mutilated corpses, isn't for the squeamish. Bosnia was "a playground where the worst & most fantastic excesses of the human mind were acted out." For him, the high of battle substituted for the high of heroin & vice versa: "I had come to Bosnia partially as an adventure. But after a while I got into the infinite death trip. I was not unhappy. Quite the opposite. I was delighted with most of what the war had offered me: chicks, kicks, cash & chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real & wreathed in gunsmoke."