It's the wet work that is frightening:
"Jim Frederick, 42; wrote book on Iraq war crime" by Bruce Weber | New York Times August 09, 2014
NEW YORK — Jim Frederick, a former foreign correspondent and editor whose 2010 book about an atrocity committed by US soldiers in Iraq was praised for its thorough reporting and acuity in parsing the psychological erosion of men in war, died on July 31 in Oakland, Calif. He was 42.
The cause was cardiac arrhythmia and arrest, said his wife, Charlotte Greensit.
Mr. Frederick spent most of his career at Time Inc. as a reporter and editor for Money and Time magazines. At Time, he was the Tokyo bureau chief, a senior editor based in London, managing editor of Time.com, and managing editor of Time International before leaving the company in 2013.
His book “Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death” explores a grievous crime committed by four US soldiers: the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family in their house in the village of Yusufiya, south and west of Baghdad, in 2006.
Such things are so forgotten in the long U.S. campaign to liberate ladies across the Globe.
Without blinking and without excusing, Mr. Frederick documented the intense and withering experience of a group of men who were poorly commanded, overwhelmed with stress, and witness to myriad bloody calamities, including the deaths of comrades. One of the book’s most noted strengths was in demonstrating the state of mind of men who have seemingly been stripped of all sense of their humanity.
He sounded very sympathetic and I'm sure the excuse was good.
Mr. Frederick’s “riveting account of the crime and the events leading up to it,” Joshua Hammer wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “combines elements of ‘In Cold Blood’ and ‘Black Hawk Down’ with a touch of ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ”
James Durkin Frederick was born in Lake Forest, Ill. He studied English literature at Columbia University and received an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
He was the coauthor of “The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea,” Charles Robert Jenkinses 2008 memoir about his misguided desertion from the Army into North Korea in 1965.
In addition to his parents and his wife, a journalist whom he met at Time in London and married in 2011, Mr. Frederick leaves two sisters, Laura Biagi and Sharon Frederick; and a brother, Edwin III, known as Ted.
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