The Passion of Bradley Manning Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    The kid was barely 5 feet—he was a runt. And by military standards and compared with everyone who was around there—he was a runt. By military standards, “he’s a runt, so pick on him,” or “he’s crazy—pick on him,” or “he’s a faggot—pick on him.” The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone. And he tried. He really did. […]
    He wasn’t a soldier—there wasn’t anything about him that was a soldier. He has this idea that he was going in and that he was going to be pushing papers and he was gonna be some super smart computer guy and that he was gonna be important, that he was gonna matter to someone and he was gonna matter to something. And he got there and realized that he didn’t matter and that none of that was going to happen. […]
    He was in the DU. That means he was not bouncing back. He was going home. You don’t just accidentally end up in a Discharge Unit one day. You have somebody saying, “You know what, he is no good—let’s get him out of here. There are a lot of steps to go to before you even hit a DU let alone before you go from a DU to a bus or a plane home. […]
    The DU at any given time had about 100+ men. It was basically one big room, it had a group of bunks, bunk-beds and that’s where we all lived.
    He was being picked on—that was one part of it. Because you know Bradley—everybody said he was crazy or he was faking and the biggest part of it all was when rumors were getting around that he was chapter 15—you know, homosexual. They’d call him a faggot or call him a chapter 15—in the military world, being called a chapter 15 is like a civilian being called a faggot to their face in the street. […]
    For Bradley, it was rough. To say it was rough is an understatement. He was targeted […] by bullies, by the drill sergeants. Basically he was targeted by anybody who was within arm’s reach of him.
    There was a small percentage, I’d say maybe 10–15 guys tops, who didn’t care what chapter he was, who just wanted to coexist until they could get out and just get along. But the rest of them—we’re