Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death

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Description

This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division’s fabled 502nd Infantry Regiment—a unit referred to as “the Black Heart Brigade.” Deployed in late 2005 to Iraq’s so-known as 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-day by day mortars, gunfire, and roadside bomb attacks, affected by 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 crucial heinous war crimes U.S. forces have committed all through the Iraq War—the rape of a fourteen-year-old Iraqi girl and the cold-blooded execution of her and her circle of relatives. Three other 1st Platoon soldiers would be overrun at a remote outpost—one killed in an instant 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 usually a timely warning of new dangers emerging in the way American soldiers are led at the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

From the Hardcover edition.

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