Black Hearts – full title: Black Hearts: One platoon’s descent into madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death – is the harrowing story of one company’s experience of war in Iraq. This company – Bravo Company of the Black Heart Brigade – is notable because four of its soldiers committed one of the highest-profile war crimes in recent US history: the rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Abeer al-Janabi, and the murder of her family.
Black Hearts examines not what happened on 12 March, 2005 – the four men pled guilty and the events themselves were never contested – but how it could have happened. How four young soldiers could sneak off, unsupervised, in a locked-down conflict zone. How manpower could be so scarce that there literally weren’t enough boots on the ground to maintain order and safety. How so many men could experience the same war, yet these four could deliberately and cruelly take four innocent lives. And even, how this act could possibly come as a surprise, when the institution of warfare demands so many volatile ingredients be put under such pressure, and for so long.
I read Black Hearts before covering a Frontline Club panel discussion featuring Frederick. I genuinely enjoyed Black Hearts. Frederick is a gifted storyteller (he’s an accomplished journalist, an executive editor at TIME magazine and the managing editor of time.com, so no surprise there) and his knowledge of his subject is exceptional.
Frederick spent several years researching this book, conducting investigations on the ground in Iraq, holding myriad conversations with the victims’ relatives and with nearly all the soldiers of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, and spending months of his life reviewing court transcripts and military documentation. His scope runs from broader geopolitical factors right down to platoon leadership and the details of day-to-day fighting. His portrait of the days, weeks and months leading up to the crime is informed yet admirably evenhanded. Somehow, it’s also desperately hopeful: this wasn’t supposed to happen.
Reading this book, I got the sense that even as he wrote his final draft, Frederick was still refusing to take sides, still hoping that some explanation would present itself and reveal how this terrible thing could have come to pass. If we cannot trust ourselves to be disciplined and decent in the practice of warfare, where are we then?
The military – that supremely disciplined, hyper-regulated institution – is designed to safeguard against this sort of lapse in human decency. Yet Frederick’s investigation exposes the frailty of the political, technical and human systems we rely on to order the chaos of war. Things went wrong for the entire Black Heart Brigade, but for 1st Platoon, Bravo Company they went terribly wrong. Those systems failed the soldiers, whose day-to-day reality consisted of fear, death, desperation, disorder, lawlessness, substance abuse and mental illness, and they tragically failed the al-Janabi family.
Yet while Frederick doesn’t shield the perpetrators from blame, neither does he labour the point. The focus of his story is the context of the crime, a series of failures from the top of the military machine, down. His search for a reason as to why these men did what they did is ultimately fruitless: who can explain why some people innocents, and some don’t? Yet what he uncovers about this specific platoon’s experience of war and of the “barbaric yet quintessentially human institution of organized, leader-mandated, group-on-group killing” makes for riveting, sobering reading.
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2 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.Quote: “If we cannot trust ourselves to be disciplined and decent in the practice of warfare, where are we then?”
Throughout history, war has been the very place that we are least able to trust ourselves to be disciplined and decent.
I think this is precisely why people oppose wars. They know that such acts – and the systemic failures that silently make them more likely – are absolutely inevitable. They are not aberrations, but an unavoidable side effect of conflict and invasion. The question for us is: is a war justifiable even in the face of the inevitability of this sort of abuse? We are not helped by the “support our boys” bombast that surrounds any war; when assessing the moral cause for a war, we should imagine our reaction to the forthcoming abuses and reconsider. All of which is not to say that war can never be justified, but rather that our cynicism about the probity of soldiers should be cranked up to 11.
I’m awfully slow on the reply, James, but here it is:
The sentence you flag up does whiff of naivete, but hear me out on this. Warfare is our most barbaric engagement, taking us as close to our animal selves as we dare to go. Rules hold us back. Procedure, protocol, rule of law. We *need* these. We cannot stray close to the edge without knowing that something is holding us back. And if that something fails? We fall.
So yes, I agree with you that we should crank our cynicism up to 11, but we should also hold onto those rules. We should value them and work towards them and believe in them. And we *should* be horrified when they are broken. Abuses of power like this might be inevitable, but we should never, ever take them as a given.
I hope that provides some clarity as to where I was coming from with that. Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate the prompt to consider the argument from another side.
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