Back to 'Black Hearts': Why this book stands out so much as a study of the Army

By "PKL"

Best Defense guest explicator

Another damn army scandal, another damn book about it; worse, a book
with a lurid title: Black Hearts, and an even more
lurid subtitle: One platoon's
descent into madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death. War weariness
and a proliferation of books about individual actions in Iraq and Afghanistan
seem to have left this book in publishing's
no man's land: number 286,309 in the Amazon hit parade this month. Hard to
understand why more than a quarter million other books at Amazon outsell it.

This seems a pity. Black Hearts is the battle name adopted by the 1st battalion, 2nd brigade combat team, 101st Airborne.
The book by senior Time magazine editor Jim Frederick is described by senior
British war and military correspondent Max Hastings as matching In Cold Blood, Truman
Capote's 1965 account of the murder of the Clutter family on their farm in
Holcomb, Kansas. Three Black Heart soldiers murdered the Iraqi al-Janabi family
of Yusufiyah, a father, mother and six- and 14-year-old daughters. The cousin
who found their corpses in March 2006, demented by grief and his desire to
offer some propriety to the scene, snatched a kettle and ran back and forth to
a nearby stream, gathering water to put out the fire that had consumed every
part of the 14-year-old's upper body, other than her fingertips.

As Frederick recounts matters, the army was called in minutes later,
and contrary to physical evidence on the scene, was content to attribute the
crime to other Iraqis. Then a Black Heart's conscience started to trouble him
and the reality of what happened to the al-Janabis came to light. Those who
entered the house and killed them were prosecuted and in his masterwork,
Frederick sets the incident in the context of army administration as it was in
2006.

Why his book is a masterwork,  its ten-page foreword makes clear.

At sundry officer levels, the 101st's leading edge units
were administered in an atmosphere of public insults and sarcasm. 1000 men were
required to do the work that by 2008 was being done by 30,000, and those lonely
first thousand were bleeding heavily. Black Hearts platoons lost their leaders
to enemy action one by one; three months after the al-Janabis died, three
Americans were overrun by insurgents. One died during the battle. The survivors
were later mutilated, beheaded and their bodies were booby-trapped.

In Tokyo, having read reading brief wire service reports about the
al-Janabi family's deaths and the later small battle, Frederick, then Time
Magazine's bureau chief in that city received a phone call from army captain
James Culp, a former infantry sergeant turned lawyer who had been assigned to
defend one of the three Bravo Company men accused of the Yusufiyah atrocity. He
wanted Frederick to come as a reporter, "if not for the sake of my client, then
for the sake of the other guys in Bravo." He did, and later, he gained
assignment to Iraq both as a reporter and, in time, in preparation for what
turned out to be his book.

His research occupied much of the next three years, and what marks the
difference between Black
Hearts and most other books
on similar subjects was that he started contacting101st men to see if they were
willing to talk. Surprisingly, they were.

Frederick writes: "Despondent over being judged for the actions of a
few criminals in their midst, they were eager to share their stories ... They
were generous with their time, unvarnished in their honesty ... arguing that I
could not properly understand the crime and the abduction if I did not
understand their whole deployment.

"[As well,] I could not understand (the errant) 1st platoon if I did not understand 2nd and 3rd platoons, who had labored under
exactly the same conditions but who had come home with far fewer losses and
their sense of brotherhood and accomplishment intact."

In some cases he interviewed individual veterans repeatedly, building
a history, scaffolding it with context. He spoke to relatives of the al-Janabi
dead and attended the trials of the men charged with killing the little family.
He used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain reams of official documents.

"Every opened door led to a new one," his foreword recounts. "Most
soldiers and officers I talked to offered to put me in touch with more. Some
shared journals, letters and emails, photos ... classified reports and
investigations."

Honorable men. The heart and sinew of Black Hearts is those few sentences. The conclusion
of this multidimensional examination of army practice is its head. So also is
its conclusion: "I had thought that the Army way was for everyone to accept a
small piece of the responsibilities for any debacle truly too big to be of one
man's making ... [and so,] make the fiasco something that the army could study
and learn from. But the ordeal generated so much bile and rancor for so many
people that the army seems more interested in forgetting about the tragedy
entirely, than in ensuring that it never happens again ... 

"[M]any men feel that blame was unfairly pushed down to the lower
ranks and not shared by a higher command they believed was also culpable."

The ten-page foreword is a clear and fair introduction to the rest of
the book's contents.

Those closing remarks match what General Antonio Taguba told West
Point in an oral history
interview available on the web. If you question Frederick's conclusions as
reported in his book, ponder the calm and confident retired general telling his
interviewer that his investigation of Abu Ghraib satisfied him that army abuses
there were widespread through Iraq, and that, given permission to do so, he
would certainly have sheeted home some responsibility for them to general
Ricardo Sanchez,  V Corps' 1st
Armored Division commander
when those abuses were in flower.Keep in mind also that Frederick was writing down his conclusions before
the 5th Stryker
murders of Afghan civilians were widely known, and before this year's Panjwali
massacre, in which 16 Afghan peasants were killed. All these actions were
performed either by an individual or a very small and aberrant criminal group.
Virtually all other soldiers despise them. And, as Frederick suggests, their
recurrence suggests the army isn't very good at forestalling future such
outbreaks, staining as they do the name of an entire military arm of this great
nation.

Keep in mind also that Frederick was writing down his conclusions before
the 5th Stryker
murders of Afghan civilians were widely known, and before this year's Panjwali
massacre, in which 16 Afghan peasants were killed. All these actions were
performed either by an individual or a very small and aberrant criminal group.
Virtually all other soldiers despise them. And, as Frederick suggests, their
recurrence suggests the army isn't very good at forestalling future such
outbreaks, staining as they do the name of an entire military arm of this great
nation.