Overview

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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Harrowing account of the atmospherics, commission and aftermath of a war crime. . . . 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.-- Kirkus Starred Review Harrowing account of the atmospherics, commission and aftermath of a war crime. . . . 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. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Riveting...A narrative that combines elements of In Cold Blood and Black Hawk Down with a touch of Apocalypse Now as it builds toward its terrible climax...Extraordinary. -- New York Times Book Review

Author Information

Jim Frederick is managing editor of Time.com and an executive editor at Time magazine. He is coauthor, with former U.S. Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, of The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Columbia University and an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business. He lives in New York City. Corey Snow, a full-time audiobook narrator and voice actor living in the great Pacific Northwest, has been everything from a paratrooper to a software developer. Working from his studio in Olympia, Washington, he has recorded numerous audiobooks, including Crescent Lake by David Sakmyster and several titles in David Niall Wilson's DeChance Chronicles. Corey's love of reading and storytelling shows in every word, regardless of whether he is bringing characters from a novel to life, clearly detailing military history, or making software theory riveting.

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