README.txt

by Chelsea Manning

There are things the media has made public about this story that I can’t comment on, confirm, or deny. Certain details remain classified. I am limited to some degree in what I can put on the record. I know this can be annoying. However, I have already faced serious consequences for sharing information that I believe to be in the public interest. This book is an honest accounting of what I witnessed, what I experienced, and what I felt.

Compartmentalizing is something I was good at. I was grappling with my gender identity and working inside an army that didn’t officially allow people like me to serve openly.

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.

Everyone now knows—because of what happened to me—that the government will attempt to destroy you fully, charge you with everything under the sun, for bringing to light the truth about its own actions. (“Nuts and sluts” is the term for how the government often tries to portray leakers—as being crazy, drunk, or sexually off in some way.)

I was constantly confronted with two different realities—the one I was looking at, and the one Americans at home believed. So much of the information they received was distorted or incomplete. The irreconcilable differences became an all-consuming frustration for me.

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. I realized that not only did I not think this stuff needed to be secret, neither did the higher-ups, at least not when it suited them. In that instant, I began to consider whether the public deserved to have the same information that I did.

Casey had to grow up fast. My parents’ drinking was the backdrop to her adolescence; she became my caretaker and babysitter, and also took care of my parents when they drank too much.

When I was four, I asked my father if I’d get to live like my sister, with her makeup and her clothes, when I grew up. He told me that I needed to go outside and do “boy stuff.” He banned me from watching my favorite movie, The Little Mermaid, and filled my room with military toys: model fighter jets, G.I. Joes with plastic tanks and rifles. Even my coverlet was military themed, decorated with drawings of F-14s and F-16s.

It was thrilling, and it was a way to be closer to my father. So was programming. My father showed me how to code not long after I’d learned to read. At first I didn’t really understand it—I’d simply type in exactly what the instruction book told me to do—but by the time I was ten I was imagining and creating my own simple games, like a ski jumper zigzagging down a mountain. I built my first website when I was ten, too—a simple fan site for a popular Nintendo 64 game.

he pushed me off. Get off me, you faggot. I couldn’t stop weeping. “Homosexual sex” was a criminal offense in Oklahoma until 2003. And so, when word got around about what I’d done, the bus driver reported what he heard from other children, and the school intervened. The next day, the principal pulled me from class. Dad, the bus driver, Sid, and Sid’s father sat in his office. The school weighed suspension as a possibility. I’m not sure whether my father even paid enough attention to me to think about the question of whether this was a real sign that I was gay. The fact that he was called out of work, and had to drive an hour to my school, was all he cared about. He seemed embarrassed.

Terrorism, thanks to the close-to-home tragedy of the bombing, loomed large over my childhood. I saw from an early age that loss of life could be senseless, and that Americans could damage our own country as much as or even more than an outside threat could.

In private, I harbored an even bigger secret. My experimentation with gender presentation had expanded beyond sneaking into my sister’s room. I’d go to little stores in town—the mall was too far away, and I didn’t want to ask one of my parents to take me there—and steal things to try on in front of my mirror at home: makeup, bras. I’d stuff socks into the bras to see how I looked. But when I was done, I’d throw it all away and promise myself I would never do it again.

for me, the fear that my mother was going to die colored everything. I now knew how difficult it was for her to take care of just herself, let alone me. By the time she died, in January 2020, I had been reckoning with what that would feel like for decades.

at that age, about the consequences of our new heightened fear of Islamic terrorism. I got into an argument with a history teacher—who doubled as my basketball and track team coach—about whether this militant jingoism would end up leading to martial law or restrictions on freedom of speech. He didn’t think it would, but I had seen the movie The Siege, starring Denzel Washington and cowritten by Lawrence Wright, a few years before that: it imagines a series of terror attacks in New York City, in which the official response is to round up Muslims and detain them in stadiums. The intense xenophobia, justified by calls for security, felt familiar. I had the movie’s central question circulating in my head: Do we become monsters in response to monstrosity?

My mother couldn’t handle life on her own. At age fourteen, I started to handle her bank account, her tax forms, the monthly checks for our bills.

It was nihilism mixed with loneliness—I felt like I’d never find anyone to build a secure life with, never have a job that got me away from central Oklahoma, with its judgment and boredom. I felt barely human. Most of the free time I had I spent alone on my computer, with multiple screens for gaming. My mother had another stroke, and this one was bad.

In Chicago, I was able to see myself as desirable, and to be comfortable in who I was.

I wasn’t just living on the margins, I was falling off the edge. I figured that I was going to end up in jail sooner or later, and that it wouldn’t be that bad. I didn’t care about having a record. Three hots and a cot sounded about as stable as sleeping around for food and shelter. I didn’t regret coming to Chicago, but I needed this particular adventure to end.

Through it all, my already debilitating gender dysphoria was getting more acute. The best explanation I’ve ever heard is that it’s like a toothache that never goes away. You’re not always consciously thinking about it, but it’s this persistent thing you can’t totally shake, that keeps holding you back.

I wanted to go to Iraq. I wanted to experience the fight firsthand. Be there. Smell it. Even risk my life. If I died in Iraq, I wouldn’t die in a way that would embarrass my dad. I also wouldn’t die of the targeted violence so many queer people like me fear and experience. Instead, I’d die for equally pointless reasons overseas. I could live with that.

the paperwork reminded me that the military was not going to ask me about my sexuality, and that I could not disclose my sexuality, engage in any “homosexual acts,” or get married in a same-sex relationship. This uncomfortable balance seemed like no big deal then. I would do my best to hide my sexuality while still working and getting paid, no questions asked.

The main way the army breaks down recruits is through nonstop, punishing exercise all day long. Picking up a duffel bag and running around in circles. Constant running. Drill sergeants sounding off: “Front leaning rest position. Move!” Tens of thousands of push-ups. Pull-ups. The side straddle hop. Every exercise approved under the old field manual, and even some made-up “home brew” exercises.

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.

It also seemed like many in the group were overqualified or overeducated to be enlisted persons. Often, people had ended up in the military because they found themselves in their thirties and unable, despite their natural abilities and even a college degree, to lift themselves out of poverty.

Trolling gives you a human connection. Even though it’s a negative response, it’s still a connection. You’re yelling angrily into the void, but instead of hearing an echo, someone yells back. It’s acknowledgment of your existence, your humanity.

Many of them had also learned, through that experience of watching repeated and sustained casualties, that we could do nothing to “win” the war. We were there to hold territory. We might make an advance here or there, but it was whack-a-mole.

My brigade-mates’ mindset affected my mindset. I learned quickly: our job wasn’t to win, it was to come back home, to keep as many of our people and innocent civilians alive as possible. There is no such thing as winning in a war.

People believe their thoughts, at least, are private, but they’re not. Browser history, for instance, can tell a lot about someone’s private inclinations. Humans are absurdly predictable, and any step a person takes outside their pattern, or even just our knowing what is important within that pattern, can potentially become a tool for coercion. I was supposed to take all of that, the most intimate knowledge of a human being it was possible to gather without being in their brain, and make a dispassionate military assessment, to notify higher-ups of my clinical evaluation, to predict how a person or a group might behave.

There’s a huge difference between people who have done a tour in a war zone and people who haven’t. It’s more than rank; it’s respect.

UPSTATE NEW YORK NOVEMBER 2008 While I was at Fort Drum, I wasn’t just learning how to be an intelligence analyst. I was also figuring out how I wanted to live as a gay person.

And regardless of my changing understanding of how history happens, for the first time I truly understood that the fundamental promises of this society—liberty and justice for all—are just words, unless they are supported by meaningful values and concrete actions. My intellectual and political life can be divided into pre– and post–Proposition 8.

So for me, direct action meant showing up online, late at night, by myself, using the skills I’d learned through my involvement with Anonymous. We doxxed the Family Research Council, a right-wing evangelical political organization that is so antigay that the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a hate group.

army command was sending us to Iraq instead of Afghanistan, and the timeline rapidly accelerated. Months and months of pre-deployment work was instantly worthless. We’d prepared for a rural mountainous region, and now we were going to an urban environment in the high desert, in a different country, on a silty floodplain. I had to develop a brand-new set of maps and imagery, build new data sets and entirely new professional relationships, grasp a whole new set of knowledge. The political geography was also new—eastern Afghanistan lies in the shadow of Pakistan, while the drive from Baghdad to the Iranian border is shorter than the drive from New York City to Washington, D.C.

Dylan did drag shows sometimes, and I didn’t think he fully understood the difference between doing drag and being trans. I wanted reassurance that he loved me for who I was; he wanted me to talk about something else.

Camp Liberty, where we stayed temporarily after landing, was part of a sprawling U.S. military complex near Baghdad International Airport. It was filled with burger joints, lattes, trinkets, buy-one-get-one-free sales, as if we’d been deployed to a shopping mall. The message was clear: American freedom—the thing we’re exporting to the Middle East—is defined by the ability to buy things.

It didn’t matter how many episodes of Metalocalypse I binge-watched, I was still in Iraq, and I was still part of an apparatus that was dehumanizing people at every moment. I couldn’t compartmentalize anymore. Day in, day out, for twelve or fourteen or even eighteen hours a day, we watched real-time surveillance feed of the destruction all around us. We read about endless death in our reports, and then looked at U.S news outlets, where it wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I was living in a horror movie mash-up of Office Space and Groundhog Day.

War was being built on unreliable binaries of “good” and “bad.” And we ignored what we didn’t want to see. The officers often didn’t listen when I brought them inconvenient information.

I began seeing a therapist again. Not by choice. The command referred me. Nearly everyone in the intelligence shop saw one, of course. I’d received a litany of misdiagnoses over the years, generalized anxiety disorder being the most common. Of course, it was gender dysphoria that caused the anxiety and depression spirals, but I wasn’t ready to face that yet. I’d first gone to see someone when I had panic attacks as a teenager in Oklahoma. But in Iraq, depression, anxiety, anger, and extreme stress were logical reactions to what we were seeing. How could I watch people die and not be affected?

Lots of people wonder whether my later disclosures were an unforeseeable event, or whether the real surprise is that many other people didn’t also make these kinds of disclosures. I wonder, too.

While wearing my analyst hat, I could give my frank personal opinions, ask questions, criticize certain decisions—and the command considered that vital to the healthy functioning of the shop. (Of course, this meant we occasionally clashed with people from operations, who liked to pull rank above all else. We threw the refrain “intel drives ops—not the other way around” right back at them, and at the end of the day, they knew we were right.)

I was frustrated by the jarring dissonance between what those of us deployed to combat zones knew to be true and what the rest of America believed was happening. It was all-consuming. People needed more information to understand what was happening. I even saw it on my own Facebook account. My friends—fairly liberal people—posted links to op-eds that reflected a deep misunderstanding of what was actually going on.

We had the logistics and the capability and the impetus to do it, if not the political will. The reasons for staying at all seemed to be more about optics than strategy. Things were going to fall apart if we were there, and things were going to fall apart if we left. Part

I didn’t care if it was some kind of dark expression of relief. I was horrified. I couldn’t stop thinking about the near-universal belief among soldiers that those human lives, in comparison to ours, were utterly expendable. I watched civilian deaths on a screen all day, every day. Sometimes it was the result of mistaken identity. But reporting by The Washington Post has also confirmed that certain units used a technique called “baiting,” in which something as innocuous as wire or as blatant as a Kalashnikov-style rifle was left on the ground. Any Iraqi who picked it up was now holding a weapon, in the sights of American snipers.

I didn’t celebrate the holiday; I missed the Christmas meal because I was briefing people on the Route Aeros incident. There was no one at home for me to call to mark the day. My aunt was away, Dylan had stopped answering my phone calls most of the time, and I had nothing to say to either of my parents.

No one has enough time to understand, and I can’t find enough time to take a breath of fresh air.” I told him that I’d lost hope in humanity, felt like “a pawn in this game, like everyone else.”

The eighteen-minute version contained editorial touches like a quote from George Orwell—“Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”—and

I sent an email to Master Sergeant Adkins, attaching the selfie I’d taken in February at Tysons Corner Center, of me in a blond wig and lipstick. I labeled it “Breanna.jpg.” “This is my problem,” I wrote. “I’ve had signs of it for a very long time. It’s caused problems within my family. I thought a career in the military would get rid of it. It’s not something I seek out for attention, and I’ve been trying very, very hard to get rid of it by placing myself in situations where it would be impossible. But, it’s not going away; it’s haunting me more and more as I get older. Now, the consequences of it are dire, at a time when it’s causing me great pain in itself.” I told him that my entire life felt “like a bad dream that won’t end.” I tried to delete it after I’d sent it—regret closed in and overwhelmed me instantly—but by then it was too late. My superiors, from both the intelligence and operations sides of the unit, effectively ignored the picture and the email. I was too useful to the unit.

I reported having no sense of time, and had the dissociated feeling of watching myself on a screen. I would stop midsentence in conversation, and I’d stare blankly when talked to, he chronicled.

Kuwait in the spring was 120 degrees. It felt like walking through sludge—slowly, into hell.

The part of my brain that understands if-then statements, that considers the relationship between the past and the future, had withered away. All my memories of that time are trauma memories—unclear, difficult to think about.