Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death

This is the story of a small group of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Divisions fabled 502nd Infantry Regimenta unit known as the Black Heart Brigade. Deployed in late 2005 to Iraqs so-called Triangle of Death a veritable meat grinder just south of Baghdad the Black Hearts found themselves in arguably the countrys 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 platoon1st Platoon Bravo Company 1st Battaliondescended 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 Warthe 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 outpostone 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.