Ever since William Howard Russell reported the nature of battle from the Crimea, the intention of 'the luckless tribe' of war correspondents has remained the same: to paint a picture of the horrors of war and to bear witness.
But what drives each war correspondent varies. Hemingway, some may argue, did it for machismic vanity. Martha Gellhorn did it to tell the story of simple people caught in horrific circumstances, as did George Orwell, James Cameron or the American World War Two reporter, Ernie Pyle. Then came the New Journalism, and with it Michael Herr's Dispatches, his mesmerizing, personal and hallucinogenic reports from Vietnam. Anthony Loyd (right), who followed the Herr tradition with his much-acclaimed memoir in 1999, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, took the genre a step further and made the war memoir his personal diary. |
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Another Bloody Love Letter (Headline £16.99) picks up where the last book left off. Loyd still fights his heroin addiction but manages to find a compassionate detox programme which he reports to between wars. He watches his beloved mother lose her fight against cancer. He is haunted by the death of his mentor, the great Reuters war correspondent, Kurt Schork, on a lonely jungle road in Sierra Leone.
Loyd is a brave reporter and for me, his memoirs are braver still. He is honest about his addictions to both heroin and war; honest about how tough it is to kick both; honest about the pain of loss and grief. In a field rife with macho boasting, his self-analysis is touching and important. Some may think it self-indulgent - a criticism Loyd has heard before - but I find Another Bloody Love Letter even gutsier than his most graphic reporting from the front. 
FIRST POSTED MARCH 29, 2007
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