The 'machine' was nothing more than a children's wheel with lead weights attached to it using an iron wire, so that turning it required a tremendous amount of effort.
Barry had been making it spin for two hours, by then.
Of all the others of his group, Barry was the last one Trautman and Garner were still making do physical training, because he wasn't exhausted yet.
The water streamed down the colonel's face and the wind lashed it with violence, and yet he didn't show any sign of sensing any of it: the cold, wet or lightning.
Trautman wasn't feeling anything at all.
“You don't understand” he said to Barry.
Then he lowered his face beside Barry's one, and started following him, walking in the mud together with him.
“You don't understand anything”
“Sir” Barry replied whispering, clenching his teeth from the effort.
The fatigue kept him warm, but the colonel had been still for hours.
Barry asked himself how the hell the colonel could stand that.
That man was really made of ice.
Barry couldn't hold on like that for long.
The wheel was too heavy and every single step he sank deeper into the mud.
And walking round and around, every turn always made the situation even worse, so that the wheel was starting to tilt.
It risked falling upside down, and onto him.
“Sir” said Barry.
His lungs were hurting.
His arms and back were both hurting, his face was frozen and wet, and the wind never stopped lashing it. The weight of the wheel squashed and pressed his wrists.
The pain would probably last for days.
“Sir....”
“Do you want to quit, rookie?”
“Sir, I...”
“Do you believe that in Vietnam it's different from here?”
No.
Barry didn't believe that. Nothing in the world could ever be similar to the way he was feeling in that moment.
“You are wrong, soldier” Trautman said, as if he could hear his thoughts.
“You are dead wrong”
Barry slowed his steps, to look into the colonel's eyes in silence.
“Because this time, we are really going to lose this war”
Barry stopped.
“But to lose a war, many have to die”
Trautman's eyes were fixed in the void, staring at the distance, and it was then that Barry had a flash of inspiration, a revelation.
Trautman was a good man.
What he was doing to them, that selection... He was living it with them, almost as if he wanted to clear his conscience from what he was doing to all of them.
That's why he was wearing such light clothes, he didn't use the poncho-hood so often and had run and marched for so long together with them. He didn't do all of these things just to stay fit.
No.
In that moment, Trautman was inside the head of every single one of them, and as much inside the heads of those that were still holding on (for now) as in the ones of those that had already quit.
“Why don't you quit?” The colonel asked him.
“Why?”
Because this was just cold, pain and fatigue, for Barry.
Because he had already been in Vietnam, and over there he had found things much worse than what he was experiencing in Fort Bragg.
Most of all, he had left there Alex Roland Simmons.
Him, and many others just like him.
So, to Barry, the cold, fatigue and pain – even if well beyond any common sense – they still weren't serious business at all... Not after having already been in Vietnam.
They were nothing at all.
So he lowered his head and restarted pushing the wheel with his teeth clenched.
And he started slipping on the mud again, as if nothing had changed.