README.TXT

The trans Army analyst who served seven years in prison for disclosing documents tells her story.

"It is not possible to work in intelligence and not imagine disclosing the many secrets you bear,” writes Manning, who documents the pressures she was under during her service in Iraq, leading her to load thousands of documents and videos onto a hard drive and share them with WikiLeaks in 2010. Her disillusionment with the U.S. operation in Iraq was earned the hard way, by witnessing firsthand mistakes with bloody results, institutionalized xenophobia, and other infamously oxymoronic qualities of "military intelligence." Manning doesn't make that joke, or any other one, in this memoir. As the title suggests, she writes like a computer programmer, albeit a very smart and literate one, who read more than 1,000 books during her imprisonment. Manning's story as it has unfolded over the past decade has been difficult to parse, but what becomes clear is that she is not a political partisan: The principle she holds most dear is transparency. Whether she is describing her unhappy childhood in central Oklahoma or her time locked in a cage in Kuwait, her story is rich in detail but somewhat flat in affect. She grew up with gender dysphoria from an early age. As soon as the internet was invented, she became a troll and a hacker ("My chan buddies and I were baby edgelords"), and it was these computer skills that "got me noticed—in both good and bad ways" in the Army. Once she realized that her apparent gender was inconsistent with her true self, transparency required she claim her identity as a woman. Doing so from military prison put her at odds with the institution in a whole new way, which she faced with grim determination. A prefatory note clarifies that this manuscript passed through the Department of Defense approval process, with only a few paragraphs redacted.

Manning demonstrates her integrity in this meticulous account of a person constitutionally opposed to secrets and lies.