README.txt

by Chelsea Manning

For me, at least, being trans is less about being a woman trapped in a man’s body than about the innate incoherence between the person I felt myself to be and the one the world wanted me to be.

the classification system exists wholly in the interest of the U.S. government, so if it’s in the interest of public affairs to declassify something, we will. In other words, he seemed to say, the classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe, it exists to control the media.

Do we become monsters in response to monstrosity?

I am now convinced that what the army is actually trying to do in basic training is mimic the effects of low-level PTSD. They need to ingrain you with the deep-grooved reflexes to behave in certain ways under pressure, and the easiest way to do that is to burden you with an enormous amount of stress; then, once you’re already weak and tired and afraid, they give you things to do. And even though all you want to do is go home, you know you have to keep going. Something about the trauma makes you retain the instruction more, teaches you how to react on autopilot in a high-stress environment.

“We don’t negotiate with protesters—but we sure as hell negotiate with mobs.”

And so our unpressurized military transport plane nose-dived down. My inner ear blossomed with almost unimaginable pain, my stomach took a wrong turn into my chest. It was like a roller coaster, if the roller coaster were designed by a sadistic clown and if, rather than an amusement park, it deposited you into a war-ravaged country.

You could look at the accumulation of death, after years, on all sides, and think that this war was unwinnable. Or you could consider whether pouring enormous resources into a never-ending war was actually the point. If that’s what it was, then this war was dick-waving by people who were half a world away from the conflict. Meanwhile, on the ground, it was about survival. We were dying over posturing, over bullshit.

Every potential resource represented a risk.

With enough grief and adrenaline and fear, we can all become amoral, even malevolent.

Somehow, supposedly just by accident, nearly all the white prisoners end up in one section of a housing unit, all the black guys in another, the Latinx in a third.