Fort Bragg
After a whole year of intensive physical training, and 'brainwashing', one evening Barry – who was very close to a nervous breakdown due to tiredness - realized how much his chest had grown after all of those months of continuous and heavy training.
His chest was enlarged and his arms covered with well-defined muscles, and as hard as a rock.
Even his veins were larger than before and almost rising above his skin
Other than enormously big, Barry could now walk as silently as a cat, use the shadow around him to become invisible and fight with his bare hands as never before.
He could also shoot perfectly with any kind of firearm, both US and Soviet made.
The training for conventional warfare (open-field fighting) had just begun.
It was just like Trautman had revealed to them in advance one year before.
Garner and Trautman were giving them a description of the Vietnam war scenarios with an amount of detail that was generally spared to conventional soldiers, and those details created a picture of warfare that was the opposite of everything everyone used to think about it.
That night, Barry finally understood what Trautman was really doing.
It was not just a matter of making them become 'the best', no... Trautman's wish was to create 'smart-soldiers', some extremely critical-minded soldier whose opinion was always useful to listen to, and that's why they were teaching them all of that strategy.
Barry and the others had to become able to run both CIA-style missions and 'classic' warfare ones too, to both coordinate themselves with the rest of the regular army and work on their own, when necessary.
He had to become humint (human-intelligence) man too, and even if he had never thought about himself in that role before, he had to because their opinion, and so their team's opinion had to become as valuable as a colonel's one.,
From this point of view, Ortega was one of the finest.
He was literally learning by heart everything they were teaching them about strategy, and Barry admired him because of that.
If they continued to workout and study for long enough, soon Trautman would get what he wanted from them.
The problem was that now that he was halfway through the course and was starting to understand Vietnam for real... He wasn't so sure any more about his wish to get back there.
And that night, all of the unfinished business he thought he had there was further away than ever.