He will win the war whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks," says Sun Tzu in his seminal treatise on military strategy, The Art of War.
In the theatres of Iraq, kindred spirit and able leadership are something the United States-led coalition troops have often felt shortchanged on and dozens of books have examined the shortcomings of the war on Iraq. But for Jim Frederick, the trigger for Black Hearts was two successive news reports on the war in 2006 and a phone call from an army lawyer.
One of the news reports was about three US soldiers from the Bravo Company of the First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division, who were overrun by insurgents at a remote checkpoint near Mahmudiyah, one of the corners that constitute Iraq's infamous Triangle of Death. The other story was about four US soldiers — from the same company and even the same platoon — who were charged with the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and her family.
The lawyer told Frederick: "America has no idea what is going on with this war. … What the [Bravo] Company is going through, it would turn your hair white."
The three disparate incidents and comments were provocation enough for Frederick — a veteran journalist and author who has been Time's bureau chief in Tokyo, the magazine's senior editor in London and is now the managing editor of time.com — to delve deeper into the madness of the Iraq war. The result is an extraordinary and dramatic narrative that shocks you at every turn but also goes far beyond the superficiality of headline news on Iraq to take you deeper into the heart of war gone topsy-turvy.
For the next three years, Frederick would talk to scores of soldiers and officers from Bravo Company, interview dozens of sources who would provide him access to incriminating military data and intelligence — sometimes still classified — and scan courtroom proceedings and criminal investigation reports of the army to get a clear idea about what plagued Bravo Company in particular and troops in Iraq in general. He would combine that information with his first-hand experience of reporting on the Iraq war from 2006 to 2009 and two trips to Iraq which included an embedded three-week stint with the 101st Airborne Division at the Triangle of Death in 2008.
The meticulous research that went behind the reconstruction of events, characters and the context of the Bravo Company's deployment at one of the most dangerous places in Iraq at one of the most dangerous times is evident throughout the book.
The narrative begins with the arrival of the 2nd Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division — the Black Heart Brigade — to southern Baghdad in 2005. The deployment, however, quickly degenerates into a shortage of people and morale, fuelled by two of the troops being shot dead by an unassuming Iraqi man at a checkpoint, some others getting blown up by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and yet others being evacuated due to injuries.
In a reflection of ground realities, some of the troops in the first platoon are assigned to stay in an empty potato processing plant where "faeces and other waste clogged the gutters" while "discarded food, including slabs of meat, was welded by heat and sand to the floor of the chow hall" and "other provisions rotted in the open freezers". The constant public berating of the platoon's performance and its alleged incompetence by battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel Tom Kunk only adds to the troops' sense of despair: "They [1st Platoon] became isolated in every sense. After being continuously told that they were screwups and outcasts, 1st Platoon consciously or unconsciously decided to live up to their outcast status. … Extreme hatred of Iraqis was now common."
The problems of the platoon are dealt with by the senior army management by appointing one platoon leader after another in quick succession that would leave the men even more demoralised. The platoon is routinely denied reinforcements despite rising casualties, but when three soldiers go missing, the army is able to mount a massive search operation comprising 8,000 coalition soldiers in a matter of hours.
Frederick captures the inescapable irony of the situation that ensued after the soldiers' bodies are discovered: "In keeping with the pattern of making changes only after a tragedy had occurred, or, as 1st Squad Leader Sergeant Chaz Allen put it, ‘Nothing is taken seriously until something serious happens,' tonnes of defensive equipment flooded down to the JSB and the TCP and a new staffing directive was issued."
Most of the characters of Black Hearts stand out neither as overtly moralistic heroes nor as damnable villains but as men battling an unknown enemy in a constant state of fear and struggling to distinguish the blurred line between good and evil. Apart from Lieutenant Colonel Kunk, some of the senior leadership is shown to be concerned but inept to find realistic solutions or unable to boost their morale. Even Pfc Steven Green, the main perpetrator of the crime that lies at the heart of the book, is shown to be a soldier desperate to save the life of a dying compatriot and keen to make sense of the world around him.
Sometimes, Black Hearts comes across as a terrible drama unfolding only from an embedded journalist's point of view rather than being told by an omniscient narrator who has had the privilege of knowing the denouement. And though it is a collective tragedy of the Iraqis and the soldiers in the field that lie at the core of the book, there is hardly any Iraqi character that is steeped in flesh and blood as much as the privates or the sergeants or the colonels of the army.
However, those remain minor detractions. Black Hearts is a compelling read for those interested in warfare and its impact on people and nations. And for those who are not, the book is a dramatic initiation into the gruesome theatre of modern war, a parable of courage and cowardice that demolishes the clichéd rhetoric of heroic battles.
Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death, By Jim Frederick, Macmillan, 464 pages, $26
