Jim Frederick

one platoon's plunge into madness in the triangle of death and the American struggle in Iraq

Black hearts

Charles Robert Jenkins

Features the story of the United States sergeant who defected to the North Korean army in 1965 and his subsequent forty years as a political prisoner there.

My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea

The Reluctant Communist

'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

One platoon's descent into madness in the Iraq war's triangle of death

Black Hearts

'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

One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in the Iraq War's Triangle of Death

“Riveting. . . a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.”—New York Times Book Review 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.

Jim Frederick

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