Black Hearts

by Frederick, Jim

• ISBN13: 9780307450760
• ISBN10: 0307450767
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2011-02-01
• Publisher: Broadway Books

Summary

This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division's fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment--a unit known as "the Black Heart Brigade." Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq's so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the country's most dangerous location at its most dangerous time. Hit by near-daily mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, and enduring a chronic breakdown in leadership, members of one Black Heart platoon--1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalion--descended, over their year-long tour of duty, into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality. Four 1st Platoon soldiers would perpetrate one of the most heinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed during the Iraq War--the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-blooded execution of her and her family. Three other 1st Platoon soldiers would be overrun at a remote outpost--one killed immediately and two taken from the scene, their mutilated corpses found days later booby-trapped with explosives. Black Hearts is an unflinching account of the epic, tragic deployment of 1st Platoon. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with Black Heart soldiers and first-hand reporting from the Triangle of Death, Black Hearts is a timeless story about men in combat and the fragility of character in the savage crucible of warfare. But it is also a timely warning of new dangers emerging in the way American soldiers are led on the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

Author Biography

JIM FREDERICK is a contributing editor at Time magazine. He was previously a Time senior editor in London and, before that, the magazine’s Tokyo bureau chief. He is coauthor, with former Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, of The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea. He lives in New York City.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. xiii
Prelude: March 12, 2006	p. 1
Summer 2005
ôWe've Got to Get South Baghdad Under Controlö	p. 11
The Kunk Gun	p. 24
October 2005
ôThis Is Now the Most Dangerous Place in Iraqö	p. 41
Relief in Place, Transfer of Authority	p. 51
1st Platoon at the JS Bridge	p. 65
Contact	p. 77
November 2005
Route Sportster and Bradley Bridge	p. 93
Communication Breakdowns	p. 108
The Mean Squad	p. 119
ôSoldiers Are Not Stupidö	p. 125
December 2005
Nelson and Casica	p. 135
ôIt Is Fucking Pointlessö	p. 148
Britt and Lopez	p. 161
Leadership Shake-up	p. 170
January 2006
Gallagher	p. 185
February 2006
February 1	p. 203
Fenlason Arrives	p. 223
March 2006
Back to the TCPs	p. 241
The Mayor of Mullah Fayyad	p. 251
The Janabis	p. 258
Twenty-one Days	p. 271
April-June 2006
ôWe Had Turned a Cornerö	p. 285
The Alamo	p. 301
Dilemma and Discovery	p. 310
ôRemember That Murder of That Iraqi Family?ö	p. 316
July-September 2006
The Fight Goes On	p. 333
ôThis Was Life and Death Stuffö	p. 340
Epilogue: The Triangle of Death Today and Trials at Home	p. 350
Postscript	p. 365
List of Characters	p. 371
Military Units and Ranks	p. 375
Acronyms and Abbreviations	p. 377
Acknowledgments	p. 379
Notes	p. 385
Selected Bibliography	p. 417
Index	p. 431
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