Black Hearts
One platoon's descent into madness in the Iraq war's triangle of death
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- 69,00 kr
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- 69,00 kr
Publisher Description
The best book by far about the Iraq war' Guardian
Iraq, 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 south of Baghdad. As the unstopping violence destroys their morale, the soldiers descend into brutality, substance abuse and madness – with horrific results.
Black Hearts is a timeless story of how warfare can reduce men to animals. Told with insight and compassion, but with the magnetic pace of a thriller, it is one of the defining books about the Iraq War.
'There have been many books about the Iraq war, but this is an unusally gripping one ... A shocking story, vividly told' Max Hastings, Sunday Times
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.
