My War Gone By. By Anthony Loyd. Doubleday. 321pp. £16.99 in UK
War is the most addictive drug of all. It concentrates life and intensifies emotions with the power of an atom-crusher in Los Alamos. Nothing in ordinary existence compares with being under intense and murderous fire and surviving uninjured. Afterwards, feeling one's unshattered limbs and unpunctured lungs, one exults in one's immortality; but more dazzling still is the hormone-surge, intoxicating beyond the imagination of those who have never experienced action. Not to have been under serious gunfire is to know so little about oneself, and to ask the question: how brave am I?
That question propels so many war correspondents in their endocrinal quest for endless war. I have met them in many places. Belfast was always too tame for them, its conflicts too contained, private and unpredictable, but Lebanon and Bosnia were crack cocaine for their habit, snorted in a rush of flame at Mostar or mainlined in some foxhole in the Shouf. They were invariably childishly cocky people, dressed in pseudomilitary gear, without love in their lives, without true homes, their conversations laden with affected militarisms, their souls corroded by what their eyes had seen. Anthony Loyd seems set to join their number, in thrall to the monkey on his back, loathing himself as addicts do, aware of and detesting his addiction, yet joylessly, joyously revelling in it.
In the way of such addicts, from de Quincy to Burroughs, he has written a very good book - a fine and honest and emotionally searing account of his time in Bosnia and its devastating effects on his mental health. This book's virtues are more than personal. Those who sanctimoniously have preached that NATO should have obeyed the dithering authority of the UN during the Kosovo War would do well to read this. Anthony Loyd's fulminations, eloquently incoherent with rage and grief, remind us that UN forces had to work under ludicrous and unenforceable mandates devised by the third-rate fools who had jobs in the UN civil service largely because of its nationality-quota system. NATO was hobbled by the UN as the twin fascist regimes of Croatia (now, mind you, an ally of the US) and Serbia tore into Bosnia in an unspeakable frenzy of murder, rape and sadism.
How one reacts to murder is what divides the addict from the non-addict, much as a whiskey hangover will separate the true alcoholic from those who drink for pleasure. My own limited exposures to violent death are now not merely fairly constant companions who day or night give me the odd familiar nudge - hello there, remember me? - but also serve as deep and persuasive arguments about how very unsuited to war I actually am. Most of us are, of course: addicts know this better than anyone - which does not stop them returning to the sound of the guns, as junkies turn from detox and rehab to that reassuring constant which defines them - the need for a fix.
All outsiders in war zones, says Anthony Loyd, want the same thing, "a hit off the action, a walk on the dark side." That's right. And having walked the lightless street, some of us head home, determined to stay there. Others, like Anthony Loyd, seem doomed walk the planet like the undead, following war upon war, as he has done since Bosnia, endlessly longing for the soft song of a 7.62 bullet whirring by his ear at three kilometres per second, yearning for the plodding, lethal investigations of incoming mortar fire, pining for the dirt and danger of the slit-trench and the smell of death.
These are thrilling sensations; but for what purpose? The Holy Grail of the perfect war leads, as do all true addictions, to one's own nemesis. No war correspondents in history have been so close action for so long, so free to roam around the killing-sprees, and been able to report back so quickly as have Anthony Loyd and his peers. Earlier war is to modern war what opium is to crack cocaine and its devils, and, God knows, Anthony Loyd has his devils. He seems a good soul, a brave man and a fine writer. May his devils spare him. Alas, such devils seldom do.