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 Heartsis 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 Heartsis 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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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