Band of Brothers in Black Hearts by Jim Frederick Essay

Among these leaders was Bravo Company’s 1st platoon’s SFC Robert Gallagher. The platoon endured terrible living conditions including no running water and filthy living space. These inadequate living conditions must be met with some relaxation on the standards they were expected to follow. Company leadership viewed this as a bribe to keep the soldiers in high spirits. In reality, they set the stage for the erosion of the morals the enlisted soldiers are supposed to possess. While the morals were being chipped away, so was the original plan the battalion had hoped to follow. Fragmentation orders became a pseudo-standard for the boys of Bravo Company. What had originally started as short-term overnight patrol bases turned into fortified traffic control points with the exception of any form of fortification other than in notion only. Despite the fact that platoon-level leadership requested for supplies they were repeatedly turned down. A major breakdown in the communication between the leadership created a loss in faith in the higher leadership for the lower-enlisted soldiers on the ground. Very soon into deployment, Bravo Company began to experience contact with unseen enemy forces. The enemy was able to engage and plant IED’s and cause casualties while remaining elusive. After the first few casualties within the company, the mission to start set up traffic control points was to begin. While conducting patrols down the road time and time

As they began to clear the routes in the AO the casualties starting occurring. After some time had passed all the platoons had experienced many deaths and were starting to lose a lot of their platoon leadership. The mounting pressure of combat combined with the pressure coming down from LTC Kunk communication between the company and battalion level leadership began to digress. With morale lowering with every day and casualty that went by the men began to run the tactical checkpoints that they had set up ruthlessly. They weren’t treating civilian harshly and would even harass them physically. This gave them a notorious record among the Iraqi civilians. Going into December 2005 the men had begun to relax on their own standard operating procedures along the

Black Hearts was about the 2005-2006 deployment of the 101st‘s second brigade‘s 1-502nd (First Strike) to Iraq. The book more specifically honed in on Bravo Company and their first platoon’s decent into complete madness throughout the deployment. The 1-502nd and its commander Lt Col Kunk, was tasked with the mission of getting control of and hold the land in-between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Kunk was a particularly difficult man to get along with. He would explode and go on a tirade over just about anything, big or small. This caused serious problems at meetings when he only wanted things his way and would personally attack his commanders who he thought he could not trust. This area had been recently dubbed as the “Triangle of

They found out they were going to one of the most if not the most dangerous place in Iraq South Baghdad also known as the Triangle of Death. October 2005 2nd Brigade started to arrive Kunk dispersed the Companies: Bravo-West, Charlie-South, Alpha-central, and Delta-North. Kunk assigned Bravo and Charlie who he believed to be his best companies the mission he judged to be the toughest. The relief in place and transfer of authority was quite displeasing many men said that the National Guard unit 48th were quite beaten up and done for. They claimed the men looked beat and scared letting the enemy dictate where they could and could not go and had very little intel on the AO and surrounding areas to pass along to them. As everyone started to settle in to their AO Kunk started focusing on the overall mission to fight the insurgency and support the people and train the IA. Now focusing in more on Bravo, Goodwin took over the Yusufiyah area and was very

While I was reading Brotherband The Invaders, by John Flanagan. Thorn told the crew to run down the shore and back but he told Edvin to stay back and cook. Then when they got back, they got to eat their breakfast and then Thorn told Edvin to run.

There are few companies in the 101st Airborne that achieved the status the men of Easy Company would gain during their career in World War II. From the making of formation of the company at Camp Toccoa, in Georgia, the men of Easy Company were destined to impact the course of the war. They became legends in American military history with their acts of bravery and heroics they showed in the face of the German army. From Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, their fame grew with each great mission they accomplished. The generations that would follow respected the uniform they wore, and the company’s comradeship grew deeper than a normal soldier’s companionship would in a war with his fellow- man. Throughout the book, Stephen Ambrose, pointed

There were sometimes conflict between the troops, in one instance O’Brien tells of a conflict between Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk who got into a fight over a missing pocket knife. Jensen breaks the nose of Strunk during their encounter. Filled with remorse of breaking his friends nose bowwows a gun and breaks his own nose to make things even. The men laugh and end up making a pact that if either one of them is seriously injured or crippled instead of living like that the other would find a way to kill the other. Later in October Strunk had stepped on a landmine a lost his leg. Strunk was now terrified that Jensen would hold up their pact and kill him. The soldiers later find out that Strunk had died which relieved Jensen of having to kill his

Colonel (Col) Michael Steele’s resolute beliefs regarding how to prepare his unit for combat and his bravado demeanor commanded respect from other bemused military officers. While serving as Commanding Officer (CO), 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, Col Steele aggressively cultivated a command climate focused on three core principles: personal protection, precision, and lethality. Although these three core principles narrowly aligned with the Army's "Soldier's Creed", Col Steele’s principles did not reinforce the Army’s individual and organizational core values. 3rd Brigade’s disassociated ethical subculture fostered a toxic environment which compromised both subordinate commanders' and individual soldiers' moral standards to various extents. Col Steele’s vague guidance concerning proper ethical behavior during the execution of high stress Counter-Insurgency (COIN) missions resulted in subordinates failing to conduct kinetic operations in accordance with established Army ethical standards. The military establishment shall remember May 09, 2006 as the day the revered "Rakkasans" failed to personify the unit's motto of "Ne Desit Virtus," meaning "Let Valor Not Fail". For on this day, four soldiers assigned to Charlie Company, known to the “Rakkasans” as the "Kill Company", murdered eight unarmed Iraqi citizens during Operation Iron Triangle. These four soldiers failed to understand the nature and consequences of their iniquities as they could no longer distinguish

This literature review seeks to examine the death of un-armed black men by police officers in the United States. It includes rationale that supports unconscious bias, poor police training, explicit racism, a biased judicial system, the inherent violent tendencies of black males and overall societal culture. Throughout the course of this examination a constant them emerged. Unconscious bias, a poor judicial system and insufficient police training seem to be the cause of this phenomena.

Being alive during the time of slavery in the United States was hard both for blacks and whites alike. Harriet Beecher Stowe was a white woman growing up in Cincinnati during the time of slavery and she wrote her novel to express her anger and disbelief of the practice of slavery. When she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin she shows the horrible experience that the slave’s endured and also how many white slave owners were actually against slavery. She communicates her dislike of slavery by showing the audience the lives Tom and Eliza.

It was true, the black soldiers didn’t know from their left to their right, however they were fast learners and Shaw saw that. In one scene the Sargent major, who was tasked to teach/instruct the black soldiers, was screaming at the soldiers due to their improper marching. Later on it can be clearly seen that the black soldiers were marching in sync like they were supposed to. The next scene was combat training using rifles and bayonets. At that point Shaw faith towards the regiment increase and was confident about their skills and their capability in fighting this war. This is confirmed when Shaw stated that the men were learning faster than a white man and how they were so tense during training and is able to relax without a care in the

I believe Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a greater public impact on the issue of slavery than the prior works of the abolition movement because of its emotional appeal. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was able to capture emotions spreading from the North, South, and Europe. However, these emotions ranged in the North and Europe empathy was expressed as Stowe represented slave owners as monstrously cruel and inhumane while southerners looked upon this book as untrue and the North’s prejudice against the southern way of life. This story gave “fuel” the anti-slavery movement in the north because, the book- addressed the many issues of slavery, such the fugitive law and treatment of slaves it integrated anti-slavery into a common topic in the north. Stowe was able to

Harriet Beecher Stowe's 19th century novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, gives an unimaginable knowledge into the slavery that was practiced throughout America during the Civil War. During this time southerners would buy and sell slaves to use for slave labor to produce crops. One crop that was highly demanded was cotton, because after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin cotton became king. Only a few Southerners actually owned slaves and treated them like people. The other Southerners treated their slaves worse than dogs and worked their fingers to the bone. Although slavery was illegal in the Northern states, only a few Northerners actively opposed it. In the beginning of the novel the story takes place on the Shelby plantation in Kentucky and has

Band of brothers a 10 part series that we watched, it is about a world war 2 101st airborne company called easy company. The mini series starts while they are at training the easy company commander LTC. Herbert Sobel was really strict on the company because he wanted them to be the best company. Later on when 2nd LT. soon to be Maj. Richard d. Winters got promoted from 2nd LT. to 1st. LT., LTC. Sobel had promoted him in secret instead of doing it in front of the company. Then when they had went to jump LTC. Sobel had been dempted and got sent to go train the other paratroopers to jump out of the plane, while the rest of Easy Company went to normandy for D-Day. Then Easy company had to storm into Germany, then they had to take a town to get

The book Black Hearts opened my eyes to how leadership from a single Officer can have a grappling effect on such a wide range of soldiers from the lowest of ranks. One of the best takeaways from Black Hearts is to never do anything: illegal, unethical, or immoral. Although this is a easy statement to repeat, Black Hearts demonstrates the difficulties that lie behind these words. It has also painted a picture of how leadership can topple extremely quickly from a top down view. The Army is portrayed in a bad light throughout the book relentlessly. This is due to the concentration of poor leadership of the 1-502nd Regiment (Referred to as “First Strike”), a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division.