Another Bloody Love Letter Anthony Loyd Headline, 352pp, £16.99 ISBN 0755314794

What is the role of writers who witness the very worst that modern-day military conflict has to offer? They are there to report what happens to those of us fortunate enough not to be present when bombs fall on civilian areas, or when children have their arms cut off by marauding militias. But once the battlefield dust has settled, is it not understandable that such writers would consider how they themselves have been affected by the experience of so much distress? Perhaps they will also ponder what drove them to choose such a job in the first place, and then commit some of these thoughts to paper. Or would this be the worst kind of self- indulgence, turning the war in Afghanistan or the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo into nothing more than the backdrop to a writer's own emotional crises?

This is the question that hangs over the latest book by the journalist Anthony Loyd, a former army officer, on-and-off heroin addict and Times war correspondent. Another Bloody Love Letter is a gripping and often painful-to-read account of the fighting in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. But it is also a meditation on what drives Loyd, and others, to take up this calling as a war correspondent, and what it does to them.

"You get what you were looking for?" an American NCO asks him sarcastically, after they see one of his comrades shot dead on the banks of the Euphrates. This book considers that proposition in all its depth.

But that is not to understate the more straight-forward reportage. Loyd has an original and compelling voice, as he describes what he calls "war's random handouts of tragedy and reward". I will not forget easily his account of the Afghan prisoner of war who is told he is being released, but is then driven instead to the local football stadium where he has one leg and an arm sawn off in front of an appreciative crowd. Nor the revelation that many people who step on land mines suffer severe secondary injury when their own foot is blasted into their groin.

Loyd has a particular penchant for the absurd, perhaps an essential psychological survival tactic for anyone in his position. He is enthralled by the "curious moment" when he watches US special forces call in air strikes against an Iraqi position. As the planes approach, the Iraqi soldiers being targeted are still wandering about, gazing innocently at the sky - prompting the Americans to whisper desperately under their breath: "Get down, you dumb motherfuckers!" Instinctive humanity is a continuing theme in this work, as much as the cruelty.

Where Loyd falls short is in offering any rhyme or reason behind that cruelty. He displays extraordinary bravery in hopping back and forth across enemy lines, yet only once, in Sierra Leone, does he ask members of the psychopathically violent rebel group RUF how they can behave so monstrously, and these are children whose response is to laugh. Meanwhile, the Serbs, he tells us, "had ethnic cleansing down to a fine art". But the Serb troops' apparent propensity for committing atrocities is rendered no more susceptible to human explanation than a horde of invading Daleks.

This gap is all the more marked given Loyd's frank and often fascinating efforts to account for his own psyche, and particularly his drug addiction. He is far too canny simply to blame heroin use on the trauma of his work. On the contrary, it is only during the periods away at war that he feels no need for the deadly powder (although there is plenty of battle-zone dope-smoking, womanising and hilarious efforts to get hold of alcohol in the most unlikely places).

There are hints, but no pat answers to the source of Loyd's perpetual unease - mention of an estranged father, for example, who on his deathbed chooses not reconciliation, but instead to write his son a letter of damnation. Heroin addicts, and war reporters too, Loyd seems to conclude, are "unable or unwilling to accept the terms their life has to offer".

So does all this reflection amount to wilful self-indulgence in the midst of horror? Loyd has pre-empted the accusation by positively inviting it. His first book, on Bosnia, carried the provocative title My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Reading this second book, you get the feeling he will have rather less nostalgia for the latest round of killing. But given that he possesses a far more poetic sensibility than most hacks could muster, we should hope this does not leave him any less eager to recount the conflicts ahead, to be, as he puts it, "the skilled conduit of other people's pain".

Paul Moss is a reporter for BBC Radio 4's "The World Tonight"

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