Fort Bragg
That night Trautman didn't sleep.
He spent the night staring into the darkness, sat on a metal chair beside his bed.
Coletta was ready to die for a selection process.
I am doing it – he thought.
He was succeeding in making them become exactly what he had in his mind, both Coletta and all of the others.
'Soldiers are scared by death, heroes don't want to die'.
He was doing it.
His personal selection process – conceived, created and run by him – was changing these men into something that had never existed before.
So why did he feel just like that?
He felt proud and satisfied... He could feel those feelings rising inside of him and yet there was also a bitter taste inside his mouth.
Why? - he asked himself.
Because out there Vietnam was waiting for them.
Had there been any other war, they would have been the best, but Trautman was starting to think that this was the kind of war the US just couldn't win.
Simply because, sometimes, there are wars that you can't win at all, because war is not a game nor a movie either, and the world... Well, the world – outside the United States - is a place of absolute evil, where the good almost never win, and the war follows its own rules – and them alone – and none of these rules say that good will finally win over evil.
And war works just like that too, in its own goddamn way, and sometimes there are wars you simply can't win.
The US had just got a draw in Korea and in Vietnam the situation was much worse. It was a drifting country and divided into one thousand factions waging a cold war on each other, and civilians considered all of them worse than the other.
To the Vietnamese, the bad guys were the Americans and the military regime, not the Vietcong.
And that was the reason the US would never get anything from Vietnam but a draw, as had already happened in Korea...
Or worse.
Because for the very first time in their history, the United States were really at risk of losing a war.
The problem was that ' in order to lose a war, many have to die', as someone had told him many years ago.
So Trautman, in his worst moments - as that night was – could do nothing else than imagine all of his young men dead.
Each and every one of them.
And not just that.
He was also worried that the central command could use them without understanding their importance, without realizing what the colonel was creating with all of the sufferance of that selection process and the training that would follow.
He was scared that the brass heads could send them on those fucking missions with a 'life expectancy of fifteen minutes' and that they would sacrifice them just like that, as cheap as cartridges.
And everything that all of these guys were suffering in that moment, in Fort Bragg – because that was it, pure suffering – it was for nothing.
And them, 'his' guys, they would all die without saying a word, from the first to the last of them, exactly as he was teaching them to do.