Release Date:- 2010-02-09
Reviews Counts:- 197
User Average Rating:- 4.5
Availability:- In Stock
Kind:- ebook
āRiveting. . . a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.āāNew York Times Book Review
This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Divisionās fabled 502nd Infantry Regimentāa unit known as āthe Black Heart Brigade.ā Deployed in late 2005 to Iraqās so-called Triangle of Death, a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad, the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the countryās 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 platoonā1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 1st Battalionādescended, 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 Warāthe 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 outpostāone 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.