Word: platoons
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Suffering from a particularly heavy death toll, a leadership vacuum and rapidly declining morale and discipline, four soldiers from the 1-502nd's 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, would perpetrate one of the worst war crimes known to have been committed by U.S. forces during the Iraq war, or any war for that matter. On March 12, 2006, Specialist Paul Cortez, Specialist James Barker, Private First Class Jesse Spielman and Private First Class Steven Green raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamzah Rashid al-Janabi and murdered her, her parents and her 6-year-old sister...
...first excerpt of TIME contributing editor Jim Frederick's new book, Black Hearts: One Platoon's Descent into Madness in Iraq's Triangle of Death, demonstrated Steven Green's downward psychological spiral. The second and final excerpt highlights how Green and his co-conspirators masterminded their crime...
...spring of 2006, the psychological isolation that 1st Platoon had been experiencing throughout the deployment was becoming nearly total. "First Platoon had become insane," declared platoon-member Sergeant John Diem flatly. "What does an infantry rifle platoon do? It destroys. That's what it's trained to do. Now turn that 90 degrees to the left, and let slip the leash, and it becomes something monstrous. It's not even aware of what it's doing...
...graphic, computer-video compilations of collected combat kills and corpses found in Iraq. Iraqis were not seen as humans. Many soldiers actively cultivated the dehumanization of locals as a secret to survival. "You can't think of these people as people," opined Sergeant Tony Yribe, another member of 1st Platoon. "If I see this old lady and say, 'Ah, she reminds me of grandmother,' but then she pulls out a f___ing bomb, I'm not going to react right." Children were considered insurgents or future insurgents, and women were little more than insurgent factories...
...Bravo Company's primary tasks was to man traffic control points (TCPs) on one of the main roads in the area. This was a particularly loathed assignment, since the TCPs were remote and dangerously underfortified. At the beginning of March, Bravo Company's 1st Platoon began a rotation out at the TCPs that would ultimately last 21 days, two weeks longer than the usual rotation. Specialist Paul Cortez was put in charge of TCP2. The spiral of poor discipline, substance abuse, brutality and lack of senior oversight that began months ago was continuing unabated. By March 12, the small group...