(PFC Bradley Manning out of uniform, and apparently feeling OK.)

I had the opportunity to meet a former Governor of the Sooner State a couple months ago. He is a legitimately Great American. He had just begun his term when that nutcase Tim McVey slaughtered the innocents at the Alfred P. Murrah Building in OK City.
 
The Governor- he bristled when I called him that, insisting I use his first name- shoots off energy. We talked about the tragedy in his state, and Mr. Clinton visiting, and the horror of it all. A remarkably normal guy, the Governor is, and he made me think about going out to his state and having a look around sometime.
 
Maybe there is something about a place that explains better to the casual observer what goes on within it. I don’t hold out that same hope for Arizona, for example, since that loser who ran amok last week appears to have deep mental problems.
 
There are others, though, who do awful things for perfectly understandable reasons.
 
I wondered if that was the case with former Specialist Bradley Manning, the biggest leaker of all time, had been there to be affected by the explosion in some way. I had to do the math. Manning is serving time now as a 23-year-old; that means he was born in 1987. McVey’s truck bomb detonated in April of 1995, so he would have been eight at the time.
 
Impressionable, he would have been. The idea that the Big City just 38 miles down the road could suffer such carnage so suddenly must have had an impact. Manning was born in Crescent, OK, a little village of 1,200 people whose population had been declining since the series of events that were captured in the Academy Award-nominated film “Silkwood.”
 

(Meryl Streep in the lobby poster for the film “Silkwood.”)

I don’t need to recap the story in any but the broadest brush. Karen married young, had three kids, and split up with her husband. So far, just another Country-Western story, but Karen went back to work at the local big employer: the Kerr-McGee plutonium processing complex that supported America’s nuclear deterrance program.
 
Karen participated in a bitter strike just after hiring on, and moved into Union activism, uncovereing what she thought was a pervasive pattern of neglect and abuse that threatened to contaminate the work force. Management would not respond, and so she decided to blow the whistle.
 
Along the way, she discovered she had been exposed to high levels of radiation, and decided that something had to be done.
 
She made contact with the New York times, and in mid-November of 1974, she left a union meeting at the Hub Cafe in Crescent to head for Oklahoma City and a meeting with reported David Burnham and national union official Steve Wodka. A co-worker testified later that she had a binder and a thick envelope of documents with her when she left.
 
Here is what happened:
 

 
You can see the damage that happened with her little car went off the road and struck a concrete culvert head-on. You can also see that the rear end of the car is significantly deformed. Here is the official story:
 
Oklahoma City (AP) — The state medical examiner said today the traffic death of KAREN SILKWOOD, a laboratory technician at a nuclear plant in Crescent, Okla., was an accident and not related in any way to radiation exposure.

Dr. A. J. Chapman also said the Highway Patrol has concluded that damage to the rear bumper of her car was caused by a wrecker which towed it away from where it crashed Nov. 13. He said there was no evidence any other auto was involved in the accident.

No binder and no documents were found with Karen’s body. Case closed.
 
Except for the movie.
 
Karen Silkwood was long dead by the time Manning and his older sister, Casey, were born in Crescent, OK, but the movie was only four years old, and Karen would have been a source of continuing civic pride and embarrassment, just like the continuing problem of nuclear waste from the shut-down Kerr-McGee plant.
 
Kerry-McGee shut down the two nuclear operating locations near Crescent in the mid-1970s, but the remediation for the plutonium contamination has not been completed yet. The story of the murder of Karen Silkwood, enflamed by a famous movie, would have kept her legacy alive in the little town.
 
Having your little town memorialized by a stunning performance by A-list actor Meryl Streep would be an eternal topic of conversation in an otherwise sleepy little town. There is not much question in my mind that the glamor of Hollywood and the buzz around the 1983 film would have continued to sear the concept of conspiracy and injustice into the fabric of civi life and young Bradley’s consiousness.
 
Manning’s father Brian had married his wife Susan while he was in the Navy. Susan was a peaches-and-cream Welch lass who lived near the SOSUS station at Brawdy, Wales, when Brian was assigned to the NAVFAC, monitoring Soviet submarine activity in the North Atlantic, including the boomers who held the cities of America at risk with ballistic missiles through the Cold War.

When Brian’s tour waas up, he rotated home and decided not to re-enlist. Susan went along, of course, but out of the Navy, she found that Oklahoma was not a place she thought was OK.

The marriage was not a happy one, since Susan could never really make the adjustment from the mild wet and windy weather of her homeland to the astonishing temperature variations of the great grassland. She missed her land of stormy beauty, castles and dragons.

Brian moved out when Bradley was 13, a tough enough time for a kid even in the most stabile families. Brian stayed on in Crescent, working as an IT manager for Hertz Rent-a-Car. Susan took the kids back to Wales, and that is where Bradley spent the rest of his adolescence.

Haverfordwest is the largest town in Pembrokshire, Wales, and is Susan’s family home. The Naval Facility at Brawdy shut down in in 1995, so the Americans were long gone.

Tough way to spend your teen-aged years. Manning knew he was different at an early age. He came out to his classmates in Crescent, but life in the UK was much harder. He was small for his age. The Guardian interviewed his classmates at the Tasker Milward School when he became famous. One characterized him as “a hot-headed computer nerd” with a distinct attitude against perceived injustice.

The Guardian says he was bullied for being effeminate and an American, a tough combination for an outsider in high school overseass.

He returned to the States after he sat for his “O-level” exams, the rite of passage for British kids to get out of school. He moved in with his sister and father in Oklahoma City and bounced around a series of entry-level dead-end jobs.

Brian did not approve of his orientation, and Bradley moved to Tulsa, where he delivered pizza and apparently lived out of his car. Then it was on to Chicago, and ultimately crashing for a while here in the DC area with his Aunt in Potomac, Maryland.

He enlisted in the army in 2007, and was smart enough to qualify for Miitary Intelligence, which he shortly found out was an oxymoron. Basic training was at Fort Leonard Wood, and then intelligence school at Ft. Huachuca in Arizona.

The system should have recognized that there was a problem. Bradley was acive on social media sites talking about what he was doing, and posting videos on YouTube. He settled down in a relationship, which made him happy. He advanced to Specialist, a non-NCO rank equivalent to Corporal.

That fizzled, and in October of 2009 he was deployed as part of the surge in Iraq against the Shia insurgency. He was assigned to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division, based at Contingency Operating Station Hammer, near Baghdad.

His orientation may have caused problems. According to ABC News, he was reprimanded while he was there for assaulting a fellow soldier, and was busted down to PFC. He also was referred to the Chaplain for abberant behavior by his Lieutenant, and it was a pity that no one followed through on things. It is more than a little like the strange case of Major Hasan, the crazy psychologist that was handled with kid gloves long enough that he was able to run amok.

Bradley Manning was reading the messages on the Secret Internet Protocol Routing Network- the SIPRNET. He saw some things that alarmed him.

He thought about it pretty hard, and made a decision to do a Silkwood. In his way, he was about to do something as explosive as Tim McVey, and with consequences that would reverberate not just in one city, but around the world.

There is continuing violence in Tunisia, which is part of it. I need to run down to Refuge Farm, though, and I’ll have to get to that tomorrow.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
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