Nothing can prepare you for Anthony Loyd's portrait of war. It is the story of the unspeakable terror and the visceral, ecstatic thrill of combat, and the lives and dreams laid to waste by the bloodiest conflict that Europe has witnessed since the Second World War.
Born into a distinguished military family, Loyd was raised on the stories of his ancestors' exploits and grew up fascinated with war. Unsatisfied by a brief career in the British Army, he set out for the killing fields in Bosnia. It was there--in the midst of the roar of battle and the life-and-death struggle among the Serbs, Croatians, and Bosnian Muslims--that he would discover humanity at its worst and best. Profoundly shocking, poetic, and ultimately redemptive, this is an uncompromising look at the brutality of war and its terrifyingly seductive power.
Central Bosnia, Winter 1993
"Don't shoot, don't shoot," the three soldiers cried out to their comrades as they staggered up the rain-sodden slope towards the Muslim lines at the end of the Novi Travnik. The BiH troops scrambled out of their bunkers among the trees, stumbling down the narrow trenches to take up their positions on the knoll of ground overlooking the Croat-held houses little more than a hundred yards below them. These were confused moments, though once in place it took the fighters only seconds to understand the full horror unfolding before their eyes.
The men approaching them were their own, captured days earlier during a dawn infiltration of the Muslim lines by the HVO. Now, forced back across no man's land, the prisoners lurched unnaturally up the hillside. Their hands were strapped to their waists. Improvised claymore mines were attached to their chests, linked to the Croat houses by coils of wire that unraveled slowly with each stop of their robotic progress. The human bombs were returning home.
"A fascinating look at war from a front-row seat." --Denver Rocky Mountain News
"Loyd's fragmentary reports morph into first-rate war correspondence from Bosnia that places him into the great tradition of Hemingway, Caputo, and Michael Herr." --Boston Globe
"An extraordinary evocation of the war in Bosnia, that is also a painful personal story . . . idiosyncratic, unsparingly graphic, refreshingly critical, and beautifully written." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"What a writer, what a vision. It's hard to read and not be impressed." --San Diego Union Tribune
"Battlefield reportage does not get more up close, gruesome and personal." --The New York Times
