Black Hearts

Starred review from February 8, 2010
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.

Starred review from December 15, 2009
Harrowing account of the atmospherics, commission and aftermath of a war crime.

In March 2006, deployed in the south of Baghdad, the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division faced a countryside in uproar. Arguably the most dangerous spot in an extremely dangerous country, the Triangle of Death featured IEDs that made every Humvee ride"an exercise in terror" and a civilian population indistinguishable from the death-dealing armed militias. With too few men to mount proper patrols and suicide car bombings and videotaped beheadings circulating to instill an extra bit of horror, every soldier had to endure constant stress and resist hating the very people they were charged with protecting. Relying on scores of interviews with soldiers and Iraqis, journals, letters, classified reports and investigations, Frederick (co-author: The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, 2008) carefully reconstructs the events that led to the breakdown of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, when four soldiers raped and killed an Iraqi girl and murdered her family. War atrocities, of course, are as old as Achilles' rage, and why particular soldiers succumb to madness and surrender their honor, while others who have undergone the same hardships don't, remains a mystery. Still, the author answers the questions he can, plumbing 1st Platoon's psychological isolation, a consequence of having three of their leaders killed in a two-week period, the resulting disarray compounded by a leadership vacuum and by constant, invidious comparisons by senior officers with Bravo's other platoons. Their heightened sense of self-pity, the belief that they faced unevenly distributed risks and the perceived disrespect or indifference of high command—all these factors created the conditions that led to an unspeakable crime. While never absolving the four perpetrators of their individual responsibility, Frederick makes clear that the atrocity had identifiable antecedents and spreads blame much wider than four out-of-control GIs.

A riveting picture of life outside the wire in Iraq, where"[y]ou tell a guy to go across a bridge, and within five minutes he's dead."

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