The prison guards were children. They were soldiers, eighteen or nineteen years old, never having so much as sniffed a deployment but given a badge of authority.
—Chelsea Manning, README.txt, (London: The Bodley Head, 2022), 188-189.
Interestingly Manning’s longtime partner Dylan was introduced on page 95 as „eighteen, just finishing high school“ (presumably also never having sniffed a deployment). On page 113 Dylan, now a freshman at Brandeis and perhaps nineteen, wears „a pin that read army wife.“ Was Dylan then a child bride?
