The Passion of Bradley Manning (3 page)

(11:34:19
AM
) bradass87:
around this time (middle school)… my parents divorced

(11:36:34
AM
) bradass87:
my father in a drunken stupor got angry with me because i was doing some noisy homework while he was watching TV… he went into his bedroom, pulled out a shotgun, and chased me out of the house… the door was deadbolted, so i couldn't get out before he caught up with me… so my mother (also wasted) threw a lamp over his head… and i proceeded to fight him, breaking his nose, and made it out of the house… my father let off one or two shots, causing damage, but injuring nobody, except for the belt lashing i got for “making him shoot up the house”

(11:36:59
AM
) bradass87:
i went to school the next day, and my teachers noticed the wounds, and got social workers involved

(11:37:11
AM
) bradass87:
he immediately stopped drinking, and my mother filed for divorce

(11:37:29
AM
) bradass87:
after the divorce, my mother attempted suicide…

(11:38:23
AM
) bradass87:
after taking care of her for awhile, and gaining custody of me, my mother took me to her hometown, haverfordwest, wales… to live and go to school

In Wales, Bradley found himself more an outsider than ever: still small, still nerdy, but now a foreigner with a funny accent and all the more easily bullied and ostracized. (His mother remembers Bradley going on a group camping trip only to awake in the morning to find that all the other campers had pulled up stakes and ditched him overnight.) But the outspoken independence of mind had not changed. “He always had this sense that ‘I'm going to right a big wrong,'” says Welsh school friend Tom Dyer. “He was like that at school. If something went wrong, he would speak up about it if he didn't agree with something. He would even have altercations with teachers if he thought something was not right.” By sixteen, he achieved the British equivalent of a high-school diploma. With a few of his mates—Manning had a small circle of friends, all into computers—he tried his hand at an internet startup venture. Like the great majority of such endeavors, it went nowhere. He cared for his mother, who, ailing from a series of strokes, leaned on her son more heavily than ever. Manning was not happy. Lonely and despondent, the seventeen-year-old surprised his father in the summer of 2005 by calling him up and asking if he might have room for his son at his new home, with his new family—Brian Manning had remarried— back in Oklahoma.

Brian Manning found a job for his computer whiz son at Zoto, a software company in Tulsa. His boss, Zoto cofounder Kord Campbell, told the
Post
that he was wowed by young Manning's skills, and by his adult intellect. With the Iraq War becoming more unpopular by the day, international politics were a topic of conversation everywhere in America, and Bradley had a point of view. “Here I was, a grown man, and he could run circles around me” talking about Iraq and Afghanistan, Campbell told the
Post
. “He didn't like that people were being killed, particularly the citizens, innocent people. I remember us specifically talking about how we were having a hard time getting information on how many people were being killed.” Campbell seems to have gone above and beyond to help his young employee along, even taking time to teach Bradley how to drive. But though Bradley had the computer skills, the teenager did not have the emotional stability to hold down an adult nine-to-five job. Campbell recalls Bradley zoning out and going catatonic on the job, and with reluctance, he had to let the boy go. (Manning's version is a little different; he later told a friend that “it was company funding and lack of manpower that killed my job at zoto… Flickr creamed us because my boss was a marketing retard;” he also claimed to have proposed an engine that would convert uploaded videos and stream them through Flash, i.e. YouTube before it was a reality, but that his boss didn't heed his young intern's advice.)

At home, tensions grew, and he fought with his father and stepmother about money, his smoking, his attitude, his sexuality. After one particularly energetic row, she called the police. The next day, Manning left, later telling a reporter at a rally against Don't Ask Don't Tell in Syracuse, New York that he was thrown out of the house for being gay; his father denied that his son's sexual orientation had anything to do with it. An unemployed adult child made to leave home after friction with a stepparent: it's a scene that plays out every day in every state of the union.

Bradley fled to Tulsa, moved in briefly with his boyhood pal Jordan Davis and took minimum-wage service jobs. He drifted to Chicago, doing odd jobs there. He was a pícaro, a Joad without the family, a homeless kid on his own who slept in his pickup in the O'Hare parking lot. He was all alone. There are thousands in America like him.

In the spring of 2006, Bradley moved in with his father's sister in the Washington DC area. He got a job in retail at an Abercrombie & Fitch shop, and then a better job behind the counter at Starbucks. He enrolled in a local community college, then dropped out after doing poorly on an exam. “He was extremely organized, extremely tidy,” his aunt told the
Washington Post
. “This was not somebody who was flailing around.” He networked with people in the DC political world—staffers, people on the hill. He liked to know things; he liked to know what was going on politically.

Then, in late 2007, Bradley Manning did the last thing that anyone would expect of a 5'2” openly gay nineteen-year-old with a fierce independent streak.

He enlisted.

Why do so, and in addition do so in the middle of a shooting war that to all indications he did not approve of? We have already noted Bradley Manning's high-minded spirit of service to his country, a spirit far removed from chauvinistic nationalism that often passes for patriotism in America today. Then there is the example of his father, however estranged, still exerting a strong gravitational pull on the teenage son. (Brian Manning admitted to a PBS “Frontline” correspondent that he did twist his son's arm a bit to get him to enlist and give his life some direction.)

Like all the other soldiers he wound up with at FOB Hammer, Brad Manning wanted to get something out of the army aside from the fulfillment of patriotic duty. Peter Van Buren, the foreign service officer who overlapped with Manning at Hammer, recalled the soldiers there: “Each of them was proud to serve but each of them had at least another reason that they carried around for joining the military, their own little secret weight.[…] Ran away from an evil girlfriend, needed money for college, father said get a job or get out, that sort of thing.” Bradley Manning could check more than one of these boxes.

Bradley wanted to go to college, but he had no money and apparently no financial support from home. With the GI Bill, the Army could pay his tuition later. (When deployed at Fort Drum in upstate New York, he told a friend “i hope i can SOMEHOW get into a nice university and study physics for a bachelors or masters (doctorate if im smart enough?)” He dreamt of “those fancy sounding colleges […] UC Berkely, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, University Chicago.” He even exhorted his friend to think seriously about going to college; after all, “someone like me is spending 4 years in the military just to get the opportunity.”

Manning reported for basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri in October, 2007. How would he fare in the army, this 5'2” eighteen-year-old with an independent mind and mouth, a young man whose sexual orientation was not so difficult to detect?

In basic training, Bradley Manning stood out. The drill sergeants picked on him. He fought back; it's his way. They picked on him some more. Before long, Manning found himself in the “discharge unit”—the separate barracks for soldiers who have essentially flunked basic training and are being “outprocessed,” that is, rejected and expelled from the military.

A team of investigative reporters at
The Guardian
newspaper found a contemporary of Manning's from the Fort Leonard Wood discharge unit. It is worth quoting at length from
The Guardian's
interview with the discharged soldier who knew Bradley Manning.

Manning seems plainly not to have been soldier material. But he was not discharged. Instead, he was “recycled” back into the system. The unnamed soldier from the Fort Leonard Wood discharge unit had thoughts about this, too: