Fort Bragg
Ortega was stretched out on his bed in the middle of a dark room full of sleeping recruits.
He couldn't sleep.
His thoughts drifted back to his first meeting with John Rambo, a couple of days before.
Rambo appeared to be a rather shy guy at first, but he occasionally smiled. He would tend to loosen up and share things with people he felt he had something in common with, and that meant people who had already fought in Vietnam. Once the ice was broken, Rambo was a good talker, and talking with him had been a pleasure for Ortega.
His eyes had a strange look for someone so young.
Rambo was barely twenty - so three years younger than Ortega - and yet he had already fought in worse circumstances than he had.
This made him different from the other guys of his age, and in some of the things Rambo had said that day that difference became more obvious.
Ortega liked him immediately and that night he hoped they would both pass the selection program and be assigned to the very same team.
Ortega was so proud to be there, with such worthy guys as John Rambo and Delmore Barry.
And besides, he was not scared by the competition. He was sure to pass.
In his opinion, they weren't even adversaries.
He didn't see it like that.
If he was one of the best, he would join the special forces. Otherwise, someone else would deserve it more than him.
Failure didn't scare him.
He definitely wouldn't like it, but he wasn't scared.
From their breathing, it sounded like most of the other guys were already sleeping, but he couldn't. He was too excited.
He knew what was going to happen and he couldn't wait to start.
He was ready.
He had heard a lot of stories about the selection program, and those who had spoken to him about it referred to the colonel as 'the-beast'.
That stories said that four out of five soldiers would usually fail the selection program, meaning that they usually ended up injured or - in the worst cases – hospitalized.
Despite all of the stories he’d heard, Ortega was not scared, because after his first tour of duty in Vietnam he wasn’t easily put off or frightened by anything.
So that night, in his camp bed, Manuel Ortega felt concentrated and full of energy.
He wanted to make it.
He wanted to be chosen so much that he had also paid a very high price to pursue his goals. His ambitions caused the end of his relationship with Helen, his girlfriend.
After finding out that he had decided to become a professional soldier, she left him.
During his first tour of duty, they didn't see each other for almost a year, with the exception of a couple of periods of leave, and she knew that Ortega had seriously risked his life at least twice.
It was obvious from the beginning that she would have never ever accepted a decision like that and he had always known it, but he could do nothing about it.
For Helen, his desire to continue this kind of career was nonsense.
It also meant that he didn’t love her, because that job would keep him away from her for a long time. And, most of all, she would risk losing him forever.
But none of this mattered for Ortega.
He had made his mind up, and this selection program was the first part of that decision.
He wanted to join the special forces more than anything else.