Death Squad

Illustration by Paul Sahre and Jonas Beuchert; photograph from “Black Hearts

March 14, 2010 - Review by JOSHUA HAMMER

BLACK HEARTS One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death.
By Jim Frederick. Illustrated. 439 pp. Harmony Books. $26.

Of all the crimes that sullied the record of the United States military in Iraq — the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the killings of 24 Iraqi men, women and children by Marines in November 2005 in Haditha — the murder of an entire Iraqi family in the village of Yusufiya may rank as the most chilling. On March 12, 2006, United States soldiers were summoned to a small house in the heart of the insurgent-filled “Triangle of Death” south and west of Baghdad, where they discovered the charred remains of a 14-year-old girl who had been raped, shot to death, then burned with kerosene, along with the bodies of her 6-year-old sister and her parents. At first the killings were attributed to a feud between Iraqis, but after a soldier came forward with information he had gleaned from comrades, the Army arrested the real perpetrators: four soldiers from Bravo Company, a casualty-plagued unit in the Army’s First Battalion, 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. Press attention centered on the group’s ringleader, Pvt. Steven Green from Midland, Tex., “a petulant loner and a hard-drinking druggie” according to Newsweek, who was afflicted by a “seething, seemingly random rage.” Despite Green’s repeated troubles with the law, he had easily enlisted in an Army hurting for recruits and breezed through basic training. Before his deployment, Green made no secret of his bloodlust, reportedly telling one neighbor, “I’m gonna go over there and kill ’em all.”

Jim Frederick’s “Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death,” is a riveting account of the crime and the events leading up to it. Frederick, a former Tokyo bureau chief for Time magazine, became curious about the case after learning that the platoon to which the killers belonged had been traumatized by another gruesome episode around the same time: the abduction, torture and murder of three men in their ranks by Iraqi insurgents. A short time after that, he received a phone call from an Army lawyer representing one of the accused, who described near-continuous violence, chain-of-command failures and the breakdown of discipline in Bravo Company’s theater of operations: “What that company is going through, it would turn your hair white,” he said. Frederick interviewed dozens of soldiers, followed courtroom proceedings and inspected documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The result is 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.

Suddenly I was reminded of a film about US soldiers in Iraq, and couldn't think of it, at first. An OPAC search was inconclusive, so I went to my film blog, and there I found it: Redacted.

Frederick’s tale begins with the deployment of Bravo Company in the fall of 2005, when United States forces in Iraq were losing ground to the Sunni insurgency. Impressing the brigade commander with its combat readiness, the company was assigned to a 50-square-mile patch of villages and farmland south of Baghdad. “The terrain was perfect for guerrilla warfare,” Frederick writes, describing warrens of houses, 10-foot-high elephant grass and irrigation canals that “diced up the land like a maze.” Bravo’s mission was to keep insurgents out of the capital by seizing control of key highways and winning the hearts and minds of the local population. They set up shop in an abandoned potato processing plant, a “gigantic corrugated-tin barn” whose previous military occupants had left the place a shambles and provided a foretaste of the stresses that lay ahead. “Feces and other waste clogged the gutters. Discarded food, including slabs of meat, was welded by heat and sand to the floor of the chow hall, while other provisions rotted in open freezers.”

What im,pressed the brigade commander so much? How could commanders at all levels send their troops out into a landscape perfect for guerrilla warfare without adequate resources?

Thrown into the heartland of a growing insurgency, with undefined goals and a shortage of manpower, Bravo Company began piling up casualties at an alarming rate. An unassuming Iraqi man shot two of them dead at point-blank range at a stationary checkpoint; others were blown apart while searching for improved improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, on foot patrols. As the deaths mounted, the troops grew resentful of the superiors who sent them into hazardous missions without rest or proper equipment, and increasingly hostile to the Iraqis they were supposed to be winning over.

Undefined goals? Shortage of manpower? What did VP Cheney say? They'll throw flowers at us as liberators?

Frederick captures the terror of men who knew they could be blown up at any moment, and the way that fear soon metamorphosed into indiscriminate hatred. Describing the aftermath of an I.E.D. explosion, he writes: “There’s a man on a cellphone, a lady putting out some washing, a kid walking down the road, and you just cannot figure it. How can none of these people know anything about what just happened here? . . . How could you not want to kill them, too, for protecting the person who just tried to kill you?” Of the three platoons in Bravo Company, First suffered the most losses and had the hardest time coping. Some drank heavily and numbed themselves with drugs; they entertained one another by passing around video montages of corpses and battle kills: “One, with a title card dedicated to ‘Mr. Squishy Head’ — a dead body whose skull had been smashed in — was set to the track of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man.’ ”

Life imitating art?

Aside from the perpetrators, Frederick refrains from singling out villains, steeping his character portraits in ambiguity. The closest approximation of a bad guy is Lieut. Col. Tom Kunk, 47, whose “large, shiny, hairless dome earned him the unit-appropriate nickname of ‘the Bald Eagle.’ ” Publicly humiliating those who fell short of his standards, Kunk shrugged off complaints and singled out First Platoon for special abuse. Sgt. Jeff Fenlason restrained his soldiers’ impulses to lash out at Iraqis, but he rarely left the base and failed to notice how strung-out and desensitized to violence his men were becoming. Sgt. Anthony Yribe, the squad leader, “a walking, talking G.I. Joe action figure,” was a fearless soldier who exerted a magnetic hold on his men, but his ethical ­lapses and contempt for Iraqis seem to have percolated down the line. In one telling scene, he accidentally shoots to death an Iraqi woman at a checkpoint, then gives tacit approval to a cover-up; later he has to be stopped from summarily executing a 72-year-old Iraqi man who panics during a nighttime raid on his house and fires a pistol. After Green confesses to Yribe, the sergeant tells the killer to keep quiet and says nothing about the crime. (By contrast, Pfc. Justin Watt, who braved his comrades’ scorn and threats and went public with what he knew, emerges as one of the book’s few heroes.)

Nice man, that Lt. Col.

In the end, flawed leadership, bad luck and a virulent mix of personalities seem to have led inexorably to the horror of March 12. Just six months into their deployment, one sergeant told Frederick: “First Platoon had become insane. What does an infantry rifle platoon do? It destroys. That’s what it’s trained to do. Now . . . let slip the leash, and it becomes something monstrous.” Frederick’s extra­ordinary book is a testament to a misconceived war, and to the ease with which ordinary men, under certain conditions, can transform into monsters.

Joshua Hammer, a former bureau chief for Newsweek, is a freelance foreign correspondent. He is writing a book about German colonialism in southern Africa.