The following day, Trautman refused two calls for the Baker teams, turning them to other Fort Bragg's units.
The first was a special mission in Israel, that had just declared war against Egypt.
The second, was a clandestine mission in Bolivia, against the communist rebels lead by a Cuban guerrilla-fighter called Che Guevara.
Trautman refused those two calls because - as he said to Garner the day before - he hadn't even started to deal with his teams yet.
It was 1967 and Trautman sincerely hoped that the Vietnam war would have stopped much before the two years of training required by the two Baker teams, but he didn't count on it.
In the colonel's mind, having just selected 'the best of the best' was not enough to think he had created an elite unit.
Trautman's objective was to make them become a brand new kind of soldiers, with equipment, training and an attitude of mind completely different from any other already existing unit.
And this meant that he had to train them personally – or almost entirely personally – for the next two years, before employing them.
With the rank of lieutenant colonel of the army special forces, Trautman headed about two hundred men divided in twenty teams, an half of which was employed in Vietnam already, under the command of the MacVsog.
He trained them in Fort Bragg, then the MacV generals used them, even if, technically, they belonged to him.
Adding the South Vietnamese soldiers engrossing their ranks, Trautman's forces went up to almost five hundred men, which were entirely commanded by general Loyd at the time, a general that put in simple words... Was a dickhead.
Because of Trautman's presence in Fort Bragg, maybe Garner and his men had a somewhat heavier hand than usual, during the selection program of those first sixteen men for the two Baker teams.
Maybe Garner, Gates and the others have been so heavy handed with the rookies because of 'political' reasons.
Trautman's adversaries between the bigwigs were many, and they all hoped that Trautman's training program was doomed to give away no noticeable results at all, which was the reason why Trautman and Garner has been so heavy handed.
They couldn't just be two very good teams: they had to be the best.
Trautman was betting on that training program his entire career, because his enemies – and he had many – couldn't stand the wait to see any colonel's failure.
From the point of view of the military establishment, Trautman was just one of the many adversaries to defeat during the career race.
And an adversary of the worst kind, because he belonged to the faction of the 'rebels',which were the ones that never used to lie about the Vietnam War's failures.
Trautman was a 'pessimist', one of those who thought that the Vietnam War was doomed to be a long and bloody one, and that the final victory was no sure thing at all, and he never had any scruple in saying what he thought.
But since the divergence between the war-hawks and the rebels in the militay had become a proper and real feud by the time, any possible colonel's success was at risk of turning itself into a match-score in favour of his ideas about the Vietnam War.
And so, had the 'Baker team' program worked for good, it would have been a bad hit for the war-hawks to take.
Too bad.
The two Baker teams had not placed foot in Vietnam, and yet they had some enemies already in US.
Luckily for them, Trautman and Garner were very well aware of it.