About this item
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.
About the Author
Jim Frederick is Managing Editor of TIME.com and an Executive Editor at TIME Magazine. From 2006 to 2008, he was a Senior Editor in TIME's London office and, before that, TIME's Tokyo Bureau Chief. He is co-author, with former US Army Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins, of "The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea," (University of California Press, 2008) . He graduated with a BA in English Literature from Columbia University and has an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business. He lives in New York City.
