About book Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent Into Madness In Iraq's Triangle Of Death (2010)
This was a brilliant book that talks about the Iraq deployment of a US infantry company, and the members of that unit that perpetrated the Mahmudiyah killings. The journalist found out about the story, and then learned that the same platoon had also had a three man outpost overrun with one man killed outright, and the other two missing (later found dead). In the ensuing court martial cases the author was told that to properly understand the killings it was worth hearing about what happened to Bravo company and the first platoon during their tour in the Iron triangle in Iraq. It is a definite page turner and the murder of the Iraqi family is probably the climax, but is only part of the story. Many narratives of military units in action tend to follow a "band of brothers" theme, but this war story is not like that. The story goes on from one bad thing after another, and when you think things cannot get much worse, they do. To sum things up, you had a battalion deployed dangerously thin on the ground in the middle of an insurgency with a lot of ethnic killings. The battalion CO and senior NCO are just awful, Bravo's own CO is less than fully capable and the first platoon suffers a leadership vacuum when its platoon commander, platoon sergeant and several squad leaders become casualties early on, mostly from IEDs. The command relationships are dysfunctional in the extreme and the unit's mission in light of their numbers is an accident waiting to happen. Add to this a string of replacement leaders of dubious quality and some poor troops, one of whom is diagnosed psychopath who should have never been there, and tragedies ensue. None of this of course excuses the rape and murder of an Iraqi family, and the author does not argue this, but one can quickly understand how something like this could have happened. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is that aside from the perpetrators, the only people that suffered adverse consequences after the investigation were two enlisted men who tried to cover it up, and the platoon commander who got relieved of his command primarily because he happened to be in charge at the time. There was a gigantic number of problems with the battalion and the company, but the official response was to view the whistle blowing soldier as a misfit and the platoon to be a collection of screw ups that needed to be disbanded. This was a great book! I remember the media stories following the incident this book depicts. What interested me most about this book, is how the story got mixed up in the media. Four lowly soldiers committed a disgusting crime for which they were punished. The book, however, tells of the failure of the commanders of the military and the covering of their own butts. They committed their own atrocities, but were never held accountable. Military Buffs: Read this book!
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Powerful book - important to understand the events and environment leading up to this tragedy.
—c0wski
