Adrian Weale
Horror in Iraq
Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death
By Jim Frederick
Macmillan 439pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
In October 2005, the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment (1/502) of the 101st Airborne Division deployed to Iraq to take their turn garrisoning the area south of Baghdad known as the ‘Triangle of Death’. This was the time when the Bush Administration’s scheme for ‘invasion lite’, followed by a self-funded reconstruction programme using Iraq’s oil revenue, was dramatically unravelling. Dangerously low Coalition troop numbers and implausible expectations of success had given armed factions in both the Shi’a and Sunni communities the time and space to organise themselves. At the same time, the Jordanian Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ – in reality, a vicious Sunni faction with little real connection to Osama bin Laden’s organisation – had established a campaign of atrocity targeting the Shi’a community, with the presumed intention of provoking all-out sectarian conflict.
Spread desperately thinly and lacking a coherent tactical approach, the soldiers of 1/502 struggled to maintain security within their area of operations and quickly began to take casualties from snipers and the seemingly
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553