Fort Bragg
Some days later, Rambo started thinking about the course as really similar to an hardcore version of a quite normal camping course.
If it hadn't been for the constantly-present subject about how to kill people, it would have been exactly the same of a course for young boy-scouts: how to read a map, land navigation, how to survive, how to train.
Fighting strategies, concealment strategies, moving strategies...
What they should have eat and what they should not eat, how to prepare it and why, how to survive the jungle without being found by the enemy, how to kill and then vanish in the air.
The second constantly-present subject, was how to be stealth while doing everything.
Every thing that was explained to the recruits, no matter what, was always explained together with the instructions about how doing it in the more silent and invisible way.
As the recruits started healing up the injuries occurred during the selection process, the instructors started ordering some easy physical tasks.
And as the days passed by, the training became more demanding.
The convalescence days were over, by then.
Soon, the training became really hard, and the sixteen men of the two teams started getting back to the showers still aching.
They were getting back to a level of difficulty similar to that of the selection process, but somewhat less intense, because that rhythm was going to last for two years.
The recruits used to train in the morning and study the theory in the evening, during the theoretical courses.
After that selection, from a physical point of view everything seemed easier to Rambo, but he couldn't understand why it was so easy. Had it depended on him, he would have trained like hell every single day, and he couldn't understand why they weren't doing so.
Rambo thought that the purpose of physical training was learning how to manage the physical suffering, and nothing else than that.
The more you suffered, the stronger you got and that's it.
So, every training day that didn't tired him up enough to feel some real physical pain, left him with a bitter taste inside his mouth.
When this happened, he used to go to the showers perplexed.
But one day, Trautman explained Rambo why they were training this way, and not more.
Any time he could, the young man was glad to have a chat with Trautman.
That day, the colonel told him that he was going to explain 'the body' to everyone very soon anyway, but also that that evening, he was glad to explain it to him in preview and in person.
So that day, before dinner, the two talked.