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Bucky in the Army, part I

When a draftee got his notice to report, he was expected to show up at his local draft board on a specified date. http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/pages/exhibits/ww2/services/pdf/induct5.pdf (This links to a .pdf of a helpful pamphlet designed by Oregon officials for potential draftees, and outlines the induction process, as well as covering common questions.) Once there, he would receive a physical examination and fill out some paperwork. If he passed the physical, and couldn’t (or didn’t) claim a deferral on the basis of one of the few exempt categories, he was sent home with a grace period of about 21 days to set his personal affairs in order—arrange for payments of personal financial obligations, set up a power of attorney, and similar tasks. At the end of those 21 days (it might be a little longer, depending on delays in the training system, but that was the standard), he was expected to report to his assigned Army Reception Center (or Naval Training Station, but Bucky is not a Navy man, so we’ll ignore the Navy from now on out). At the Army Reception Station, draftees spent up to 7 days undergoing testing, were issued uniforms, were barbered to suit the army’s standards, started the necessary vaccinations, and were assigned to the army posts where they would undergo their basic training. At this point I’m going to break into the schedule to talk about how the US Army was organized in World War II. A numbering system was set up for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisions_of_the_United_States_Army army divisions (the typical US Army division now averages 17,000-21,00 soldiers, and is commanded by a major general, for those not experienced military details) in 1917, during World War I. Numbers 1-25 were Regular Army divisions—the Regular Amy was the US peacetime army, which was quite small at that time. Numbers 26 through 45 were for National Guard units; and Numbers 46 through 106 were the Army of the United States (with some exceptions, like the 82nd and 101st Airborne, which became Regular Army divisions when they switched from straight infantry to airborne infantry.) The National Guard units already had the necessary organizational system in place (although many officers weren’t up to their wartime jobs and were replaced later), but to staff all those new divisions, the army took a cadre from an existing division—usually around 1300 men and officers. This core group would start training as the recruits were collected and began basic training. The Army also started pulling the necessary officers from officers in the existing Reserves (my father was one of these, as he did 4 years of ROTC to get through college in the Great Depression), ROTC programs, the Army’s own Officer Training Corps, and officers awaiting reassignment for one reason or another. At this point, the division would be formally activated, so it could receive its new recruits, and this expansion would continue until the division reached full strength. The entire time the US was fighting in World War II, it was also continuously training new soldiers, and for much of the time it was forming new divisions. http://www.historyshotsinfoart.com/USArmy/backstory.cfm This is what training involved for these new soldiers: 17 weeks of basic and advanced training (Basic is where they learn to be soldiers; Advanced training is where they learn their particular specialty—artillery, infantry, armored, or the support units and special skills.) 13 weeks of unit training (This is where they learn to work as a group.) 14 weeks of combined arms training and large-scale exercises (These would be division level exercises.) 8 weeks of final training (They have now been training 52 weeks—after the first 17 weeks all of it has been in the same unit, with the same people; they will have become very attached to each other, which is important in keeping an army working well.) At this point, they’d do some more training—multi-division exercises. The Army’s first big operation outside of the Pacific Theater was Operation Torch—in invasion of North Africa. Not all the troops involved had gone through this full regime of training, and the lack showed. The troops that invaded Sicily and Italy had the chance for more training. After this, the division traveled to a Port of Embarkation, and went overseas. If it was possible, they trained some more, usually for the specific mission they would undertake. So how long has Bucky been in the Army? If he was called up in early 1942, possibly while waiting for his enlistment paperwork to be finalized, he probably went into training in late February or March—which would mean embarkation leave (this would be about 10-15 days, depending on the travel involved—no flying, so they went everywhere by train, pretty much) in May or a little later would not be unreasonable. This fits pretty well with CA:TFA. So how did Bucky get to be a sergeant? Nowadays, the army has training programs for its noncommissioned officers, and a soldier has to have a certain amount of time in the service, and a good record to get into these programs. In World War II, they were still operating on the old-school principle of promoting sergeants from inside a unit, and they used a variety of ways to select them. One would be pre-enlistment skills and training—if a man was able to type, handle bookkeeping and other clerical tasks, he would be in a position to help handle the amazing amount of paperwork running an army unit requires. Another important factor might be how well he’d absorbed basic military skills, and how well he did in helping his fellow-soldiers along. Those who were natural leaders, as the phrase goes, might also be promising candidates. Ideally, you wanted someone who combined all of these to some degree, and who was comfortable with military discipline and methods. We don’t know a whole lot about what Bucky did between the time he finished school and went to war, but in those 6 or 7 years he may well have acquired skills the Army saw as useful in an NCO. So at some point between starting his unit training and going on his embarkation leave, the US Army saw they had a useful man in James Buchanan Barnes, and made him a sergeant, responsible for the training and lives of his fellow-soldiers, and for making sure the officers over him have the help they need to get things done.

(Need I say that, like everyone else, I have headcanon ideas about what Bucky did between the time he left school and joining the army? For later posts…)

Next post I’ll give some details about what Bucky would have gotten into once he got on board ship to head out to the shooting part of the war. Books and such may be recommended. *Link goes to a .pdf file

Also, I really hate Tumblr’s insistence on saving me from the burden of hand-inserting a link. Especially since their system works so well on a tablet.

this is all, at the core, @lake-shark ‘s fault and all criticism should be directed at her

we were doing our catws10 rewatch and i said that in the highway scene, I had heard that sebastian’s pronunciation of russian is quite bad and instead of saying “i have her, find him”, he’s saying something about a brick. i am trying to be humorous.

misha shoots back “yeah almost like the language got brute-forced into his head.”

i don’t know why it never occurred to me how stressful bucky learning russian probably was, probably because he already speaks it in the comics, but now i’m running through everything regarding language and it’s through a whole new filter. holy shit. he’s got to learn it from torturers and abusers.

first, how fucking isolating. how embarrassing and degrading in a real way. people talk to him like he’s stupid. he doesn’t fully understand why he has this other language in his head that he wants to use, but is almost certainly not allowed to. his internal language is severed from his external language. the words he does say feel unwieldy in his mouth and harsh to his own ears. he can’t practice it, and no one is gonna sit down and teach him.

second, to quote dialect quoting james baldwin, “people evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, in order to not be submerged by a reality they cannot articulate”. if you don’t have the right language, you cannot describe what is happening to you. you can’t call for help. you can’t beg for mercy. you don’t have the words to picture your future as different from your present.

third, no wonder bucky takes to pierce better than karpov. no wonder karpov needed specific words and pierce has many to control him. much has been said about how pierce tries to manipulate bucky with his words, like what weak points he presses on to try to keep bucky on track, how he uses language as weapon, and to top it all off, pierce literally speaks his language.

i am chewing on glass.

How the Winter Soldier shot Nick Fury

I’ve been wanting to make a post about this for a while, even though I might be the only person invested in this, but anyway, here we go. I’ve seen mentioned several times, in posts about the movie and in fics that the Winter Soldier shot Nick Fury through the window of Steve’s apartment, and every time it makes me groan in frustration because no.

The Winter Soldier didn’t shoot Fury through a window, he shot him through a wall, and I don’t know about you, but it seems like a pretty big difference to me.

(bullet hole in the wall!!)

When I saw the scene the first time, I remember thinking holy shit??? that’s crazy, and for me that’s when the Winter Soldier really became a real, terrifyingly good assassin, that’s when his image as a serious threat solidified.

Read about the blogger getting carried away under the read more.

Read More

JUST NOTICED LAST NIGHT THAT BUCKY WAS ALSO ON A DRIP IN THE ENTIRE CHAIR SCENE

I know it’s a fucked up scene, I do, but that to me just is nOPE. What the fuck are they putting into his system on top of the mind wiping and the physical abuse and the conditioning. 

So I wrote up all this stuff weeks ago and drafted it and forgot about it until I seen these tags from @kahuna-burger

And they are absolutely right. And I’m so glad someone agrees with me on this analogy, because this is EXACTLY how I see him, and exactly what I get into below. This is the whole thing I was writing up previously:

“The winter soldier was treated like a living weapon.”

Mmm, yes. The whole living weapon thing is not a wrong metaphor. But I’d argue that there’s something else far more accurate (aka what the now added tags say).

He wasn’t their weapon. He was their dog. In such an uncanny way, almost literal sense. I wouldn’t even say a guard dog, I’d actually say he was Hydra’s hunting dog.

I mean think about it. Really. They actually treated him like a dog.

He wears a harness. He wears a fucking muzzle for gods sake.

But that’s just the bare minimum of similarities.

What do they do when he gets out of line? To punish him, to put make him obey and learn to fall back into good behavior? They shock him. Just like how people have always used shock collars and electric fences for dogs. When he’s been “bad”, when he does something he’s not supposed to, he gets shocked to correct that behavior.

They also smack him and get physical. People don’t do that with weapons. There’s no point in that. And you wouldn’t wanna damage or harm a weapon. But people do smack dogs. They hit their dogs when they don’t behave or do something wrong because harm, pain, and damage will teach it. Just like it teaches him. And they’ll heal so it’s not a concern.

He was trained to obey commands. Just like dogs. He does any little thing he’s told because he’s conditioned with a rewards system. He even has specific command words that trigger compliance. Just like you teach a dog to sit or roll over with trigger words, he has em too. I mean literally, he has a Pavlovian response to said words. And what was the original Pavlov experiment done on? A dog. The only difference is he doesn’t get physical treats. His treat is praise, which they manipulated him into being desperate for. They even go as far to incentivize him with this praise (think about the bank scene, where Pierce praises him), just like you would present a dog with a treat when you want it to do a trick. Hell, actually praise is a way you reward dogs too, because they listen and learn when you tell them they’re a “good boy, good dog”.

Hydra asserts their dominance over him just in case he turns on them, just to remind of who’s the “alpha”. Because they know (just like big dog owners) that he can tear them up, he can attack and shred them to pieces, but if he thinks he’s not the “alpha” then he’ll back down.

And yeah, he’s protective and reliant on his “owners” like most dogs would be. But like I said, not just a guard dog. A hunting dog. Because just like people teach their dogs to track down and go after bears, squirrels, dear, etc. he was also taught how to track down stuff to kill. Stuff that his owner wanted dead. That’s his whole purpose, to hunt for them.

Also, think about how Hydra obtained him. It’s like if a person saw an injured dog in a ditch, brought it to a vet to heal up, then took it home to have as their own pet. Because that’s exactly what they did with him. It’s just the owner was an abusive one.

He wasn’t treated like some expensive tank or powerful arsenal of guns. He was treated like well trained hunting dog.

do you think bucky was sexually abused? that Selby scene in tfatws makes me wonder every single time

Thanks for the question.

I’ve tagged this post but just in case tumblr glitches, trigger warnings for: rape, sexual abuse, dissociation, sexual assault, imprisonment, torture, war, ptsd, mind control. I’ve probably missed others so read at your own risk 😬

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is 1) unethical human experimentations were rife during WW2, and Hydra is supposed to represent the worst of them; 2) super soldiers were highly sought after for decades and we’ve seen no evidence it could be reproduced from Bucky’s blood, therefore they are likely to try more direct methods of reproducing a super soldier; 3) sexual violence is common during conflicts, and male survivors of war-related sexual violence are increasingly being recognised as a large population of silent sufferers; 4) dissociation may have been something Hydra wanted to achieve as part of Bucky’s mind control, and dissociative symptoms are commonly linked with extensive sexual abuse.

Before I go to the super long essay, I just wanted to say that the scene in TFATWS was most likely written as a snide joke (cos rape jokes are funny amirite, especially if a guy is the victim), but Bucky fans have read it straight because his traumatic past makes that suggestion a real possibility. Unfortunately, in the context of Zemo’s comment and Selby’s leer, that adds a possibility that I haven’t mentioned above — which is that Hydra wasn’t just sexually abusing Bucky as a power play or to break his mind, but they were deriving pleasure from the acts and offering him up for sexual favours…which, is so deep in HTP territory that it…says a lot about the sheltered life the creators live to pass that off as a joke.

1. Experimentation on POWs were horrendous during WW2. I happened to click on a collection of Japanese war crimes but the Nazis led a lot of the unethical research on their own front. For those who (rightly) don’t want to click, the Japanese were doing stuff like forcing prisoners to have sex with each other so they can infect the woman with syphilis and then forcefully impregnate female prisoners, then experiment on their babies. Or they were experimenting on prisoners to see the limits of physiology, like submitting them to severe frostbite, animal blood transfusions, unsafe vaccines, deliberate infections, and likely other drugs and poisons.

Prisoners were seen as subhuman, and particularly if you take the headcanon that Bucky may have been Jewish, there would have been very little ethical incentive holding Hydra back. Especially with the heightened healing ability, Bucky would have been a matter of great curiosity (not a good thing when you’re an experimental subject and a prisoner) and would have been subjected to inhumane experiments you and I couldn’t even dream up.

2. Now put this in the context of super soldiers being extremely sought after as a commodity. I use the word commodity because none of them have been afforded rights like humans. We know canonically, that experimentation on trying to create super soldiers continued for much of the 20th century. There were the unethical experiments on Isaiah’s squad, the “Winter Soldier program”, the Hulk, that Russian dude and probably more we haven’t yet heard of. This means that for those 70 years Bucky was imprisoned, Hydra wanted more of him, but ones that were lower maintenance, easier to control and believed their own values. We already talked about how they have no ethical limits on what experiments they might do. Without going into details, but when you for some reason can’t get more serum from his blood or recreating the formula, and you don’t want to or can’t clone, then the method left is reproduction by harvesting sperm.

3. As I’ve mentioned above (and if you clicked through to the article), sexual violence were extremely common during war and occupation against female prisoners. But what about towards men? Turns out, it’s not rare at all, except like many incidences of male survivors of sexual violence, it’s not talked about publicly if at all.

The proportion of affected victims are devastatingly high. This article addresses conflicts in Africa, but I can’t think of any cultural reasons why it would be different in Nazi-occupied Europe.

If you can stomach the article, it talks about the social pressures that prevent men from speaking up. The shame of being seen as emasculated, the strict gender roles enforced by society, the fear of losing their social supports and their loved ones. These are all psychological pressures that would have been relevant in Bucky’s time, given the general poor acceptance of sodomy and male victimhood, as well as (depending on your headcanon) his own perception of his sexuality, which may already be negative due to internalised queerphobia. The flip side of all this, of course, is that sexual violence is an effective torture method to cause shame, fear, self-doubt and suffering. It is a kind of pain that I have no doubt perpetrators understand the permanence of. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no possibility of comfort even should they get back to their old lives, as all these male victims could do is to live in endless silent suffering. Importantly, it fractures your sense of identity especially if a large part of that is tied into enforced gender roles.

4. Lastly, while Bucky’s mind-control is movie science, I think dissociation, derealisation and depersonalisation are an integral part of his mind control process. Sebastian spoke of his headcanon that Bucky was “in a dream like state”, which sounds like derealisation.

And this scene of him placidly letting the Hydra scientists work on him and not responding to Pierce’s questions could be an episode of dissociation.

Dissociation is likely something Hydra wanted to achieve. We know that dissociation is very common in victims of prolonged sexual abuse. That is not to say that physical abuse alone couldn’t have caused dissociation. I haven’t looked up data for this but I’ve seen amputees describe the surreal and recurring flashbacks of seeing their limb beside their body and we know, canonically, that Bucky was awake to remember at least one stage of his amputation, so that alone might cause dissociative symptoms. That said, unless Bucky was already dissociating reliably, Hydra would try to worsen his dissociation by causing other trauma, and sexual violence as mentioned earlier causes the type of psychological injury that makes him vulnerable to them further degrading his sense of identity and self-belief.