America, elite politicians have called for his execution, and former ACLU bigwigs have eagerly admonished us “to be tough on the people in the government who are like Manning.”4 Fierce defenders have also stepped forward, among them veterans, peace activists, writers and intellectuals—a sprinkling of solidarity groups have sprouted up across the nation—across the world, in fact. The months of extreme solitary confinement inflicted on Manning made the State Department’s head public relations spokesperson, normally a bland font of official euphemism, erupt in a diatribe against the punishment, which led swiftly to his resignation. Abroad, Pfc. Manning has inspired passionate defenses on the floor of the German Bundestag, earned enthusiastic plaudits from the staid Council of Europe and won a major British newspaper’s readership vote for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize—and by a wide margin.5 Bradley Manning has been denounced as an immature, treasonous, pathological headcase who embodies why gays and lesbians should never be allowed in the military. (Manning is gay, and according to as yet unauthenticated instant-message chatlogs, he was seeking to commence male-to-female gender transition at the time of his arrest.) Manning has also been praised as a whistleblower, a patriot and a hero who sacrificed his freedom for the honor of his military, the good of his country and the world’s enlightenment—a young lion of dissent against state secrecy and imperial violence.
But before he allegedly exfiltrated the Iraq War Logs (including the gruesome “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunsight video), the Afghan War logs, and 251,287 State Department cables from the SCIF at Hammer and passed them all to Wikileaks; before he become a hate-figure and a public enemy; before he became an icon, a cause and an international hero, Bradley Manning too came from somewhere.
Crescent, Oklahoma is the kind of place that lazy metropolitan journalists often respond to with Gertrude Stein’s shopworn laugh-line that “there is no there there.” Of course, Oklahoma is dense with historical there-ness, being both terminus of the Cherokee Nation’s Trail of Tears and origin of the great Dust Bowl exodus. As journalist Denver Nicks was the first to point out, Bradley Manning isn’t even the first gay whistleblower of stature to pass through this small town: before him there was Karen Silkwood, the trade unionist who worked at the now-defunct Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant, also in Crescent.6 After taking note of safety failures at the plant, she died in a mysterious car crash while driving to meet a reporter from the New York Times on the night of November 13, 1974. This small town of 1,400 people has a rock-solid claim to be the queer whistleblower capital of the world. The red dirt of Oklahoma has bred hardy rebels, from Woody Guthrie to Ralph Ellison to Clara Luper.
Not to mention Angie Debo, the whistleblowing historian from Marshall (pop. 354) whose 1940 masterpiece, And Still the Waters Run, chronicles how local whites stole vast portions of the state from the Indians.7 Her book named plenty of locally prominent names, had its initial publishing contract canceled and got the author blacklisted from teaching in Oklahoma universities. Debo, who came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon in 1899 at the age of nine and died in Marshall in 1988, has since become a revered local hero whose work is now quoted in gubernatorial inauguration speeches.
More prosaically, Crescent is a bedroom community about an hour’s drive north of Oklahoma City. Although the camera crew of PBS “Frontline” made a point of shooting the town’s main street right at dawn, with long and lurid shadows over empty parking spaces, Crescent is far from a ghost town.
Bradley Manning (born in 1987) grew up with his parents and big sister on a few acres three miles outside the town center. A two-story house—Brad has his own bedroom—and a “hobby farm” with a couple horses, a cow, pigs and chickens; as described by his older sister to the Washington Post, it sounds positively idyllic.8 His parents, Brian Manning and Susan (née Fox) Manning, met and soon married in her native Wales where Brian Manning was deployed at the Cawdor Barracks with the US Navy in the 1970s. What precisely he was doing in the military he’s not allowed to say, but he had a security clearance and learned enough about computers to later land work as an IT manager with the Hertz rental car agency in Oklahoma City, a job that made him good money and took him around the world.
Young Bradley took after his father, a tech whiz from an early age, always playing with his father’s hand-me-down computers. In fact he was a bit of a prodigy, reading (by his own recollection) at age three, doing multiplication and division by age four. According to family members, Manning was doing C++ programming by age eight and had designed his first website at the age of ten. Bradley took the grand prize three years running at the Crescent science fair, beating out students several grades ahead. With a few other classmates, he represented the town at “academic bowl” competitions all over the state. While other boys might be content to play video games, young Bradley liked to hack them and tweak the coding.
Bradley Manning definitely has a mind of his own. Despite being raised Catholic, the boy refused to utter the “under God” part of the Pledge of Allegiance, a startling act of freethinking for an elementary school student anywhere in the United States, let alone a small town that is heavily Evangelical. As Rick McCombs, currently the principal in Crescent, told reporter Denver Nicks, “You would say something, and he would have an opinion which was a little unusual for a middle school kid. This young man actually kind of thought on his own.”9 Sometimes he took it upon himself to correct teachers. “Well Bradley, little munchkin that he is, he would stand up for what he believes,” remembers Mary Egleston, a family friend and former substitute teacher in Crescent.10 Bradley was precociously high-minded, arguing even in elementary school that the US had a right to assert its military power overseas to protect its interests, according to hometown friend Jordan Davis. As Davis told the Washington Post, even the video game “Call to Power II” soon led young Manning to a serious conversation about the powers of technology to achieve democracy. “He was basically really into America,” Davis told one reporter; “He wanted to serve his country.” When Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001, Bradley Manning’s friends turned to him as a source of wisdom and judgment. An independent mind joined to a deep sense of patriotic obligation is a constant in Bradley Manning’s life, even as his concept of what it meant to serve his country matured with age and experience.
Bradley Manning was a child who enjoyed knowing things; he read the encyclopedia for fun. Manning learned to be a quiet child—not anti-social, but quiet. It probably didn’t make Bradley’s life at school any easier that he, like his father, was on the small side and grew to be 5′2″. The boy got his share of bullying and abuse. And there was something else. As he later confided to a stranger over instant messaging in 2010:
(11:33:46 AM) bradass87: i didnt like getting beat up or called gay [didn’t really know what gay meant, but knew it was something bad]
(11:34:06 AM) bradass87: so i joined sports teams, and started becoming an athlete
At age 13, Bradley Manning told his two closest friends that he was gay, a difficult conversation for any teenager virtually anywhere in the United States. Still, these are no different from the troubles that other young people face and overcome, hopefully with the help of a supportive family.
It is not clear that Manning ever got such support from his family. Today, his parents are in the supremely unenviable position of having their childrearing dug up and held up to the light by a curious public. How many mothers and fathers could survive this without looking at least a little like monsters? And yet this is essential to the story of Bradley Manning. The locals of Crescent have had unkind things to tell reporters about Brian Manning—that he was demeaning, “a dick”, verbally and physically abusive, that his son was “more afraid of his father than normal.” Manning’s mother was an alcoholic through much of Bradley’s childhood; she told the Washington Post that she started the morning with vodka in her tea and finished the day with rum in her Coke. Despite living miles from town, she never learned to drive a car, and leaned heavily on her young son to write out checks to pay bills. (Her ex-husband describes her today as semi-literate.)11
