Chelsea Manning

In a new memoir, “README.txt,” the former military intelligence analyst tells her life story and explains her decision to blow the whistle on U.S. actions ...

From then on, “he’d thread my brows into a feminine shape, a small thing that made me feel more like the person I knew I was.” That she and her advocates managed to get the U.S. Lawyers might have reached a plea deal if Manning had been willing to admit to malicious intent but she resisted the pressure to make what she called a “moral compromise.” She disputed, all along, that aiding the enemy was either the intention or the result of her actions, and she refers to the former defense secretary Robert Gates’s view, stated at a news conference, that the leaked information did no significant harm to U.S. The writing in “README.txt” is vivid, as its narrative moves from an Oklahoma childhood to community college in Maryland to an unpredictable decision to enlist — brought about partly by dire financial need — which eventually brought her to the Middle East. Comey had earlier promised him: “a head on a pike” to make the point that leaking is unacceptable. Reality Winner, who leaked a single classified report, was sent away for years as President Trump (himself no scrupulous handler of classified information, we now know) found the scapegoat for leaking to the press that he wanted. To the cyber-savvy, “README” is an old-school internet term for an explanatory file, a kind of road map accompanying a package of software, so dubbed to make it easy to find. The embarrassment caused to world leaders by the meant-to-be-secret details of diplomatic cables (including diplomats’ commentary on their host nations and their leadership) caused Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian, to say that, with the exception of a war or a terrorist attack, “I’ve never known a story that created such mayhem.” The narrator’s gender dysphoria, which began to play out in childhood and culminated in her triumphant coming out as a woman while still in prison, brought about soul-deadening nastiness and physical attacks by schoolmates and military colleagues alike. “The most shocking thing about this video, in which innocent people are killed simply for being in the wrong place,” she writes, “is that everything about it was perfectly legal under the Geneva Conventions and our own rules of engagement.” Manning weaves together her role as a whistle-blower — utterly disillusioned by what she saw and experienced in the military — with her sad personal story. Arrested and removed from her post in Iraq in May 2010, after the leaks were traced to her, the analyst then known publicly as Pfc. Army intelligence analyst’s decision in 2010, while still in her early 20s, to alert the world — largely through illegally transferring huge amounts of classified or sensitive military data to WikiLeaks — to some portion of what really was happening in America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Chelsea Manning's “README.txt: A Memoir” refuses the confessional mode — and offers something more radical in its place.

Late in the book, Manning charts her organization of and involvement in a prison strike at Leavenworth. Though she is required to receive biweekly haircuts, the barbers treat her kindly, soothing her through the forced conformity to a misrecognized gender, even improvising to provide the feel of a salon experience: “Sometimes they’d wash my hair to make it feel more like a beauty appointment than a ritual shearing.” Are all these barbers queer and trans? But she also shows us how her experiences with homelessness, familial estrangement, sub-minimum-wage jobs and other forms of precarity opened the fissure wider. Manning’s memoir reckons with this complex relationship of sex and gender to political radicalism, a legacy fraught with [Cold War demonization and red-baiting](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520395589/loves-next-meeting), by showing us the process of her political bildung — that is, the way she came to be herself, especially as Proposition 8 opened a fissure around nationalism for her. This soup is Manning’s milieu, and her evocation of it is agile and granular. The hushed sublimity of the halls of the Rand Corp. “It exists to control the media.” In 2015, after more than a year of litigation, and other forms of resistance by Manning herself, including a hunger strike, Manning received hormone treatment. Her imprisonment included long periods in solitary confinement and other forms of severe and inhumane punishment, including the denial of gender-affirming hormones. In May 2010, Manning was arrested for disclosing military and diplomatic documents that included, as the American Civil Liberties Union [README.txt](https://amzn.to/3TlzsZm),” she is 22 years old, on leave from a deployment in Iraq and attempting to upload classified documents to WikiLeaks from a Barnes & Noble computer with a guttering internet connection.