Another Bloody Love Letter
by Anthony Loyd
Headline Review, HK$148
Picking up where My War Gone By, I Miss It So leaves off, war correspondent and recovering heroin addict Anthony Loyd takes the reader on a tour of physical and mental hellholes that are war's only real legacy. One reviewer says that with Loyd 'you are guaranteed a terrific buzz, with a lingering dark aftertaste'. Another Bloody Love Letter is quite unlike his earlier book: he's been changed by his experiences, not least by the death of his front- line comrade Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone along with cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora in May 2000. Loyd continues his examination of the nature of war and its often unseen consequences, but there's more to it than that. 'It is a recognition that war kills the ones we love,' Peter Beaumont writes in his review in The Observer. The writing is at times deeply moving and quite simply superb. Consider his image of Baghdad, 'capital to a thousand and one tombstone tales of dead dreams and broken hope'. His clearly dangerous job is to witness war. Why do it? Because it's better than heroin, and he should know.