Steve's Diary

July 12, 1939

Dear Diary,

I brought only the necessities with me like they'd said... though it appears I've brought more books and paper than anyone else here. Well, as long as I've got this, my diary, I suppose I'll be okay. 

Anyway, here I go... day one without Bucky.

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"Recruits! Attention!" I heard a woman's voice coming from my right. "Gentlemen, I'm Agent Carter. I supervise all operations for this division." I watched her as she made her way in front of us. She was in a British army uniform and sported a beautiful British accent. She had short, curly brown hair and brown eyes and wore red lipstick. The guys all around me all seemed to be dazed by her looks. 

"What's with the accent, Queen Victoria?" the man a few positions away from me had asked her. I didn't want to look, but he sounded like a complete asshole. "I thought I was signing up for the U.S. Army."

"What's your name, soldier?"

"Gilmore Hodge, your majesty," he replied without second guessing, not even for a second. 

"Step forward, Hodge," she demanded. He looked back at us like he was making advances on her... like he was getting some sort of special treatment. "Put your right foot forward."

He did. "Mmm, we gonna rassle? 'Cause I got a few moves I know you'll like,"he replied with a wink. 

Without a word, she drew back and punched him square in the face. I, along with the whole lineup of other men, watched him fall the ground with a thud and a grunt. I had to restrain myself from laughing. 

"Agent Carter!" An older man called out to her.

"Colonel Philips," she answered with a salute. 

"I can see that you are breaking in the candidates, that's good." He looked down at Hodge, who was still on the ground. "Get your ass up out of that dirt and stand in that line at attention until somebody comes tell you what to do."

"Yessir!" he replied, his nose bloody. 

The man looked down the line in the opposite direction of me before he started pacing and giving a speech, one I assume he had practiced beforehand. "General Patton has said wars are fought with weapons, but they are won by men. We are going to win his war because we have the best- men..." he looked at me and stumbled on his words, probably realizing how small I was, comparatively. I watched him look over at Dr. Erskine with a lack of confidence in his decision to allow me to enlist. "And because they're going to get better," he added, looking right at me. "Much... better."

"The Strategic Scientific Reserve is an Allied effort, made up of the best minds in the free world," he continues, scanning through the lot of us and seemingly weeding through each and every one of us and our visible abilities. "Our goal is to create the best army in history. But every army starts with one man... at the end of this week, we will choose that man," I looked over at him for a second before he could see me, wondering what he was talking about. "He will be the first of a new breed of super soldiers," he said. "And they will personally escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell."

All throughout the first day, we started right in on all the difficult training, starting, first, with making our way up a cargo net. We had to climb up with all the other men, but I ended up falling. It sucked because the other men just kept going and didn't even take a second look.

Later, we crawled through wooden pegs in the ground with barbed wire on top while holding rifles. Hodge was ahead of me and he kicked one of the wooden barriers to the side so that the wire fell right onto me. Colonel Philips yelled at me to keep my 'rifle out of the mud' after that... it was unfair because they were all waiting for me and Agent Carter was timing us. Whatever.