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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death

Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death

Frederick, Jim

Paperback

Armed ForcesGeneral Middle Eastern HistoryIraq War (2003-2011)

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0307450767
ISBN13: 9780307450760
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Published: Feb 1 2011
Pages: 464
Weight: 0.80
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.10 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
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.

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