It’s a desolate place. “The base was in the middle of the desert. There was sand everywhere, we had dust storms quite often, I don’t know, once a month or so while I was there,” said Jimmy Rodriguez to The Guardian. “Just a bleak place, everything was brown over there.”¹ Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republic and since his return to civilian life has been working at a boxing gym in New York while apprenticing as a carpenter. Rodriguez’s impression of FOB Hammer is widely shared. “There was a fog that would come in almost every morning that was pollution from nearby,” says Jacob Sullivan, who served as a biological and chemical weapons expert with the Second Battalion Special Brigade, redeploying home with the rank of Private First Class. Sullivan comes from Phoenix, Arizona and is now back there again, a full-time university student with entrepreneurial aspirations. “[The fog] smelled sour and nasty, and would just wave through and linger, and create an eerie atmosphere.”²

The tedium of landscape is by all accounts a pretty good metaphor for the monotony of a deployment at FOB Hammer. “Life on base for many of the FOBbits—that’s what they’re called—was really very boring, with nothing to do but work, eat and sleep, and the work was twelve, fourteen hour shifts with the same people, day after day,” says Peter Van Buren, a State Department Official who was posted at the base from October 2009 to May 2010. “There were a lot of Groundhog Day jokes.” Van Buren’s in northern Virginia now, having just been squeezed out of the State Department after two decades in the Foreign service, with stints in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the UK and Hong Kong. (Van Buren’s sin was linking to one of the thousands of leaked State Department documents on his personal blog, a violation of official policy; his real crime was publishing a scabrous memoir of reconstruction follies in Iraq.) During his time in Iraq he saw a lot more of the country than most of the people at Hammer. “I got outside the wire several times a week, but a lot of the FOBbits never left the base at all during their whole deployment. They got flown into Baghdad under cover of night, and a year later got flown out, also at night. For many soldiers, the base was all they ever saw of Iraq.”³

It bears repeating: a deployment at FOB Hammer was no great adventure. “Morale I think was generally really low for everyone that was there that I talked to,” says Rodriguez. “All the soldiers, they didn’t like it, nobody had a purpose out there.”

The harsh climate doesn’t help any. Temperatures can hit 100 degrees even in springtime, said another soldier, “but I’d prefer the heat over the peanut butter that forms when it rains… I grow three inches in height when it rains here.” These are the observations of Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who served at FOB Hammer from October 2009 till late June 2010. Manning is brainy, and he kind of knows it. (“I don’t think 99% of the people I work with would make such observations.”) He also has a habit of thinking for himself, which can be a liability in the military. During his deployment, which lasted from October 2009 till late June 2010, Manning spent many long shifts at a computer terminal inside the base’s SCIF (pronounced “skiff,” for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), where access is granted only to those with security clearance. Like many of his fellow FOBbits, Manning was, by his own admission, pretty miserable for much of his deployment.

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.

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:

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 Neither parent attended parent-teacher conferences at Bradley’s school, and when their son was the first Crescent student to win a statewide academic trophy in Oklahoma City, his parents were absent from the audience. And then they divorced. How they arrived at this domestic cataclysm is best told by Bradley himself from these (as yet unauthenticated) instant messages from mid-2010.