Black Hearts
One platoon's descent into madness
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'Combines elements of In Cold Blood and Black Hawk Down with Apocalypse Now as it builds towards its terrible climax... Extraordinary' New York Times Iraq's Triangle of Death, 2005.
A platoon of young soldiers from a U.S. regiment known as 'the Black Heart Brigade' is deployed to a lawless and hyperviolent area just south of Baghdad. Almost immediately, the attacks begin: every day another roadside bomb, another colleague blown to pieces. As the daily violence chips away, and chips away at their sanity, the thirty-five young men of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company descend into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality - with tragic results.
Black Hearts is a timeless true story of how modern warfare can make or break a man's character. Told with severe compassion, balanced judgement and the magnetic pace of a thriller, it looks set to become one of the defining books about the Iraq War.
'Black Hearts is the obverse of Band of Brothers, a story not of combat unity but of disharmony and disarray' Chicago Sun-Times
'A riveting picture of life outside the wire in Iraq, where "you tell a guy to go across a bridge, and within five minutes he's dead."' Kirkus Reviews (starred)
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intense document, Time magazine editor Frederick recounts the events leading up to and following the rape and murder of 14-year-old Iraqi Abeer al-Janabi and the subsequent murder of her family-parents Qassim and Fakhriah and six-year-old sister Hadeel-committed by members of one U.S. Army deployment in Iraq's "Triangle of Death." In the build-up to the crimes, Frederick chronicles 1st platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, of the 502nd Infantry Regiment (the regiment known as "Black Hearts"), finding a list of leadership failures at the platoon, company, battalion and brigade levels; the overarching problem was a tragically undermanned area of operations. A distracted and bristly battalion commander managed to alienate B Company with charges of ineptitude, fueling a persecution complex that led company members to ignore Standard Operating Procedures-many soldiers, not just the perpetrators, felt they could commit any number of crimes against the fog of war. Initially, the al-Janabi murders were blamed on insurgents, but a retaliation attack two months later (against a U.S. traffic control point) spurred the investigation that sent five U.S. soldiers to prison. Fast-paced and highly detailed, this volume is difficult to put down despite wanting to look away; in the end, no one comes away blameless, but readers will better understand how wartime conditions can, on either side, spark unimaginable, catastrophic crimes.
Customer Reviews
Superb!
A riveting, superbly researched & shocking account of a period of the Iraqi war.