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. 

At midday, they had us running. Dear God, I think I nearly died. I mean, I was so far behind everyone else and practically at the verge of an asthma attack the whole while and they wouldn't;t stop yelling orders at us. 

"Pick up the pace, ladies!" the one man kept shouting, and I knew he was talking to me specifically. 

"Let's go! Let's go!... Double time! Come on!... Faster, faster! Move, move! Squad- halt," he yelled and they all listened. I trailed behind and stopped as soon as I caught up. He pointed up at the flag pole that was to our right. "That flag means we're only at the half-way point. First man to bring it to me, gets a ride back with Agent Carter... Move, move!" 

And, with that, they all ran to the pole in attempts to climb up it and detach the flag from the pole all the way at the top. I stood to the side, well aware that there was no way I'd ever make it up there. I watched as Hodge climbed up the pole... he had been the only one to make it nearly halfway up before slipping down. 

"Nobody's gotten that flag in seventeen years," the man yelled to them with his arms crossed as they continued to fight to get up there. "Fall back in line... come on! Fall in! Let's go! Get back into formation!"

As they all walked away into their spots, I approached the pole and looked it up and down, yet again verifying the fact that I couldn't climb it... but, I did notice, in observing the whole thing, that there was a bolt at the bottom, near the base. 

As I looked down at it, the man yelled at me, "Rogers! I said fall in!" 

I reached down for the bolt and wiggled it out of place. I watched as the pole fell to the ground. I, then, walked over to the end where the flag had been, unclipped it and walked over to the man who had just yelled at me.

I handed it to him and said "thank you, sir," before I got into the jeep with Agent Carter and we drove away.

As the day came closer to an end, we were told to do push-ups... I would barely do one. I was struggling so terribly, but I kept on. They let me in and I wasn't going to give up, not now and not ever. 

I looked up for a brief moment to see that Ms. Carter was pacing off to the side and watching after us. "Faster ladies, come on," she said in her British accent. "My grandmother has more life in her, God rest her soul... move it!"

"You're not thinking about picking Rogers, are you?" I heard Colonel Philips ask as he approached us from a distance with the Doctor. 

"I wasn't just thinking about it, he is the clear choice," Dr. Erskine had replied. 

"When you brought a ninety-pound asthmatic onto my Army base, I let it slide I thought, what the Hell, maybe he'd be useful to you - like a gerbil - I never thought you'd pick him," he said loudly, probably hoping I'd hear him and give up. It, honestly, kind of hurt. I knew people thought and said these things about me but, I'd never really heard it first hand. Especially not without Bucky there to help me through it. 

"Up!" Agent Carter yelled at us, and we all stood there before her, waiting for our next task. "Jumping jacks," she said. So we started. 

"Stick a needle in that guy's arm, it's gonna go right through him."

"Come on girls," she came at us, trying to insult us to perfection.

I saw them stop by an army truck. "Look at that. He's making me cry," he told the doctor. 

"I am looking for qualities beyond the physical," Dr. Erskine replied, defending me in a sense. 

"Do you know how long it took to set up this project?" the Colonel came back. All the groveling I had to do in front of Senator what's-his-name's committee?"

"Yes, I kno- I know, I'm well aware of your efforts-"

"Then throw me a bone, Hodge passed every test we gave him. He's big, he's fast, he obeys orders. He's a soldier,"

"He's a bully," Erskine replied. I knew he was referencing me. I don't like bullies, I told him, and in Hodge, that's all that he saw. 

"You don't win wars with niceness, doctor," he began, "you win them with guts."

He paused and I looked away, trying to focus on getting my jumping jacks right, even though I knew how impossible that was. 

"Grenade!" he yelled as a round green ball rolled across the dirt ground towards me.

I watched as it stopped before me and all of the other recruits. Everyone scattered and, as my first thought of what to do, I jumped on top of it, even as I saw Ms. Carter making her way towards it.

Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Agent Carter stopped in her tracks as she watched me grab hold of it... I watched the other recruits made their way to safety; even Hodge yelped as he jumped behind a Jeep. 

"Get away!" I yelled out to everyone in the area. "Get back!" I clenched myself around the grenade, accepting the fact that everything was about to be over... and for real this time. No more scrawny little Steve, no more Hodge, no more being terrible at everything, no more military, and- no more Bucky.

After a few seconds, everyone started coming back as it was announced that it had been a dummy grenade. They told us to get back into formation. I sat up and looked at General Philips, Doctor Erskine and Agent Carter and asked "is this a test?"

They both looked at each other for a long moment before I heard General Philips say "he's still skinny" and walk away.

Doctor Erskine smiled at me and... I had no idea what to do with what had just happened. 

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After that Doctor Erskine pulled me to the side to tell me I had been chosen for some government experiment. He gave me some small details on what it was all about.

I'm gonna get more than I ever could have dreamed of. I'm not just gonna be a soldier.

I'm gonna be a super soldier.

~ Steve Rogers