Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death Paperback – February 1, 2011

I was assigned to MiTT Team 4 (2nd BCT, 101st ABN) and lived/worked/fought with all the men in this book from 2005-2006; I knew them well enough to know they wouldn't pull any punches and Jim Frederick did a great job of capturing the madness of the 2005-2006 deployment. What matters to me more than anything is that the fight that those guys fought was recorded for posterity while it was still fresh; their sacrifices and their risks and their love for each other were overshadowed by the awful events of a few, and all of their hard work was overshadowed by what followed. We hear Fallujah and Tal Afar talked about as household names but no one knows about Rusdi Mullah, the JSB and Route Sportster-- no one who wasn't there and suffered through it...except those who read this book.Well written, and no pulled punches. Everyone takes their lumps equally-- Ebel, Kunk, Goodwin, Norton, Fenalson-- all of them are part of this and no one gets off scot free. Even so, no one is painted as the only bad leader or the only good apple in the bunch. He captures the aspects of all of them-- Kunk's personality, Captain Goodwin sleeping in his plaid flannel pajama pants in his folding chair in the TOC, Fenalson's demeanor, the frustration of the platoon sergeants, the anger of the men, the sense of hopelessness...it is as real as it gets. I could almost hear the crackle of the radios, hear Sergeant Loper on the mic in the TOC or SFC Laskoski telling someone they were stupid or hear Biggers laugh as someone was caught doing something stupid on the J-Lens.The criminals who raped and killed are portrayed accurately, too-- shown for all that they were and were not and the leadership decisions that were made or failed to be made that directly led to the events of February 2006. The author does a great job of humanizing an inhuman act. It was all right there, in the book.I had to put the book down several times and take a break. I would have loved to read it cover to cover but it was like drinking from an emotional firehose. So much came rushing back. I've been to the house where the rape occurred and seen the burn marks; I've sat on the TCPs on Sportster; I've drank crappy coffee at the TCP on the corner of Mulla Fayad. I know the places and the men and the author captures them as well as possible.If you are a veteran of OIF, served south of Baghdad or were in an infantry company at war, this book will be like gazing into your past. If you are a vet of the Strike Brigade-- especially First Strike-- and have not confronted your personal demons before reading this book, this may be too much to handle on your own. I was glad to have my wife and friends who served there too so I could talk about what I was remembering; it is a very real and personal book that I highly recommend to anyone who was there, or wants to know what it was like.

Black Hearts is the most extraordinary work of nonfiction. Jim Frederick tells the story of the entire deployment of a group of soldiers in the Triangle of Death who suffered the most terrible losses and were under attack almost every day. They lived outside the wire in "the most dangerous place at the most dangerous time" in Iraq. Black Hearts is not just for those who like war books, it's a book for anyone who wants to read about characters, about human character, how it is tested, about how war really is (some passages are difficult to read, so raw and real), how humans interact, how they behave under the kind of pressure most of us will never have to suffer. This book is for anyone who wants to read a beautifully crafted tale, sensitively and fairly handled. You feel as if you were there, watching the soldiers the whole time, willing them to step back two inches, a step that would spare the insurgent a clean shot; urging leaders to choose this course of action, not the one that results in yet more losses, with little overall gain; urging those who ended up committing the worst crimes of the war to hold back, to dig deeper, find the good in their character, to spare the innocent Iraqis their lives, their brothers-in-arms the inevitable tainted-by-association. Black Hearts is about leadership, about friendship, about the extraordinary tests on the character of a person, why those who endure the same things cope, or don't. It's about why some people choose to behave the way they do. (The chapter on the rape of the girl and murder of her family by 4 soldiers --all now in jail in the US -- is extremely difficult to stomach.) There's nothing Hollywood -- though it would make the most incredible movie actually -- or sanitized about Black Hearts, so real are the characters and images conveyed. We need to know this is what war is without, thankfully, not debating the been-there-done-that pros and cons of going into this particular war. This is the best and most emotive book, not just war book but book, I have read in years. Some scenes made me weep openly. It has changed the way I think about men at war, about character, good and bad, right and wrong, how not every leader is a good one, not every soldier is a hero -- a point Frederick makes very well, -- mostly because soldiers and leaders are human, too. But it also makes you realize how an army needs to sort those who can lead from those who obviously cannot, that is those whose errors in judgment have catastrophic consequences, those whose orders decide whether people live or die and, for those that live, how they live, how they cope, how they work within the larger group, how they rebuild their lives outside the wire, inside, if they're lucky enough, and how they deal when they return home. This is stuff we need to know and think about. It would be an amazing book were it fiction. The fact it is not makes it all the more riveting and shocking. Frederick is an extremely talented writer. I absolutely recommend Black Hearts to all Amazon customers.