U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning has marked five years since her arrest by publishing her most detailed account of her trial and imprisonment to date. Writing in The Guardian, Manning describes how she was initially held in a “hot, desert cage” in Kuwait, and threatened by Navy guards with “interrogation on a brig on a U.S. cruiser off the coast of the horn of Africa, or being sent to the prison camps of Guantánamo Bay.” Manning also describes her nearly year-and-a-half-long battle to receive hormones for gender dysphoria. She announced her transition to living as a woman in 2013 after she was sentenced to 35 years in prison for giving secret files to WikiLeaks. Manning also discussed her motivation for releasing the documents, including information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She wrote, “Once you come to realize that the co-ordinates in these records represent real places, that the dates are our recent history and that the numbers represent actual human lives — with all of the love, hope, dreams, hate, fear and nightmares with which we all live — then you cannot help but be reminded just how important it is for us to understand and, hopefully, prevent such tragedies in the future.”