Work Text:
From the unpublished memoirs of Col. Daniel O'Hanrahan
S.H.I.E.L.D. archives, retrieval number 7267704
File note: Document secured 9/21/76. Col. O'Hanrahan sought publication of his memoirs, circulated six (6) copies of the manuscript to agents and publishers in the greater New York area. Existence of document reported by codename Doyle, who alerted S.H.I.E.L.D. to potentially sensitive information therein. All copies secured, informational security established via leverage on four (4) individuals confirmed to have read it. Col. O'Hanrahan addressed personally by Col. Fury, who reports personal confidence in security. No anticipated leak of still-classified names/dates in document; see #7267704A for sanction list in event of unanticipated leak.
Sensitive portion of document excerpted below, see #7267704C for full text.
In 1939, I was assigned to what would become known as Project Rebirth, under General Phillips. I had a BS in biology, and that was enough for the Army. I accepted the posting without question, not having any real idea of what it would become.
Rebirth was one of those uniquely Roosevelt-era projects, a crazy-sounding scheme with a chance in a thousand of success, but The Boss wanted the Army whipped into shape, and there was this half-nutty scientist who claimed he could do it.
Dr. Abraham Erskine. Scientist refugee who'd had the sense to get out of Germany after the Reichstag fire. Poor guy had been hanging around the War Department ever since, trying to get someone to listen to his idea. He'd finally caught the right ear, and the New Deal promptly poured its heart out into a series of lab facilities. What the hell, it was another couple hundred jobs, right?
That was the thing, you see. None of us wanted to admit we were surprised, but Erskine's theories worked. I'd seen my share of Army research projects before, and the overwhelming majority of them were either pie-in-the-sky boondoggles or dressed-up Krag rifles. As the project gathered steam, though, it became clear that Erskine's proposed process could really work. The more tests we did, the more the potential became clear, and we all started getting excited.
By 1940, we were under such high security that we'd faked Erskine's death and given him a code name, just in case. We'd realized by that time that this was a technology that could transform warfare. The nation that mastered this process would have a tremendous military advantage over all others, and having our hands on something that big made us nervous. I've heard the men on security for Manhattan felt the same way.
It was December 1940 when the decision was made to move to a human trial. Obviously it had to be someone who was already Army property, but by the very nature of the process we needed a fresh recruit for the first guinea pig. We visited three recruiting centers before we got to New York: Ohio, Texas, and Florida. I started to wonder how much time and money we were going to spend just so that the doctor could frown and mutter at volunteers. When he did take an interest in one, he would always reject them based on a blood test or some other obscure criterion I wasn't qualified to understand.
It was a cold evening in Brooklyn, I remember, and not the good end of Brooklyn, either. The Depression had not been kind to the neighborhood, or the men in it. These men were volunteering for the Army in order to get regular meals, and it showed in their bodies and in their attitude. The general was unhappy; his ulcer was acting up, I suspect, and the War Department had been starting to ask the same questions about what we were waiting around for.
Erskine's eyes were following Rogers before mine were. Once I noticed the tall blond beanpole, I couldn't look away myself. I'd never seen a human body look like that. Per his induction physical, at that time he stood six feet, two and a half inches tall, and weighed a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Not a healthy one-twenty-five, at that.
Erskine leafed through the notes he carried in his pocket as Rogers went through the physical. We'd tried to get him to quit carrying such sensitive material on him, but eventually decided that his illegible Yiddish-algebraic shorthand was better than most of the stuff the cryptography boys were turning out anyway. Roger's examination results were passed along to us at Erskine's request, and I winced when I saw them. The poor kid was dangerously underweight and had had every illness this side of polio. I passed the copies along to General Phillips and started looking at the waiting room again. I remember thinking that if Erskine was going to be this picky, we'd never get his test subject.
Behind me, I could hear Erskine and the general muttering back and forth as they looked at the results, so I was the only one looking when the commotion broke out. The Rogers kid had gotten his forms back stamped 4F, as anyone could have told you a mile off. Except that then Rogers started pounding on the desk and shouting. Through the glass I could hear tinny, muted cries of "You have to let me serve! You have to!" I tapped the general on the arm to get his attention, indicating the scene Rogers was making. General Phillips broke off his conversation with Erskine to look, and I saw his eyes light up in the strangest way.
You have to understand: Erskine was a scientist, and as brilliant a mind as I've ever met or ever hope to. General Phillips was a soldier. What he saw through those cheap wooden Venetian blinds was a 120-pound kid shouting in the face of a 200-pound staff sergeant with no sense of humor. He saw the fire in Rogers before any of us. He pushed past me out the door and walked up to Rogers with a smile.
With the door open, I could hear them. General Phillips asked Rogers if he meant what he said about being willing to do anything to serve. I will never in my life forget the look Rogers turned on him then. The hunger only Brooklyn can give you combined with the kind of energy that I just don't see in young men's eyes any more. Maybe I'm too old. But that day in the last weeks of 1940, I was thirty-one, I was in top condition, and I'd had commando training, and the first thing I thought when I saw Rogers's eyes was that he was the last guy in that room I'd want to mix it up with.
Well, that was that for our test subject. We piled him into our big staff car and drove him across town to the dingy storefront we were using as cover for
Rebirth. I explained to him three times that he was volunteering for a dangerous and untested medical experiment, because the way he nodded and agreed I kept thinking he couldn't have heard me properly.
Months, then, months of Erskine and myself and the others finding out what Rogers's body was capable of, how far we could push it. Erskine and the other white coats had so many tissue and blood samples out of the kid that I was amazed there was anything left of his skinny frame. I was in charge of the team putting Rogers through a twisted version of Basic by way of the Marquis de Sade, pushing that fourth-rate body of his to its absolute limits.
The limits were pretty pathetic, and I had to keep reminding myself that we knew he was 4F when we brought him in. Every weight he dropped, every rope he couldn't climb, every run that left him collapsed and gasping, he'd just get up and try again, and fail again. He pushed himself harder than we could have pushed him, it just didn't help.
It was January 22, 1941, when Erskine was finally ready. He'd checked and rechecked his work, and was firmly confident that his process would work on Rogers. The equipment was all built and the staff was ready. We invited a dozen VIP observers and scheduled the final test for the 25th.
Pretty regularly, I ask myself how World War Two might have ended if we'd made it the 26th instead.
The evening of the 25th was, to say the absolute least, tense. I made more trips to the john that day than I could count. Everyone was in fidgets as the VIPs arrived. A couple of the Joint Chiefs, Vice-President Truman, a couple senators, a few scientists (including, no matter what he claims now, Richard Feynman) and, last to arrive, an FBI representative named Clemson. His papers looked great: fifteen-year veteran, security clearance barely second to Hoover, everything perfectly in order. Dammit.
Erskine gave a speech about Rebirth and what it could mean, and the techs brought Rogers in, stripped to his shorts. I heard a murmur among the observers as Erskine explained that "zis young man" had been refused service, though I don't think he had to tell them. Our physical program had beefed him up to a burly one-thirty, still so skinny he looked like a famine victim. I hate to draw the comparison, but the next time I saw someone who looked like Steve Rogers did that night, it was in Dachau.
Erskine stepped back and exposed the table to what he called the "vita-rays". I wasn't cleared to know exactly what kind of radiation the rays were, but the emitter glowed a kind of orangey-green. I've never seen that color before or since.
I've also never seen anything remotely like what happened to Rogers' body. As he shook and trembled on the table, eyes shut and teeth hard-clenched, he turned into somebody else.
Now, I served in the Army a long time, and I've seen men get fit. It's a kind of subtle process that sneaks up on you, until you suddenly notice that the double-chinned wide load who showed up on the bus a couple months ago is now a lean, hard soldier. This was nothing like that. Under the vita-rays, muscles swelled on Rogers' body, coming out of nowhere. His chest filled out, his limbs swelled, and his weight about doubled. It took just under ten minutes. I know because I checked my watch. Rogers stopped shaking about halfway through.
In the years since, I've seen a few people who looked something like Rogers did that day, mostly since they started televising the Olympics. Back then, we didn't have the kind of "body builders" that are fashionable nowadays, we just had Charles Atlas posing for statues and advertisements. The guy on the table when the vita-rays faded looked like he could eat Charles Atlas for lunch and have Joe Louis for dessert. I've never seen another human being who looked like Rogers did that day. Maybe it's just because human beings always have imperfections, and he didn't.
In hindsight, we should have been cheering, making noise, making a fuss, but somehow nobody did. The first move anyone made was when Clemson pulled out a German pistol, shot Erskine through the heart, and screamed "Heil Hitler!"
Rogers was up off the table before Erskine fell all the way to the floor. The straps didn't seem to slow him down at all. I was still starting the gesture to get the security forces moving when Rogers crossed the distance to Clemson. I saw him slap the Luger out of his hand, and the autopsy showed Clemson's wrist broken in two places. I'm not sure what he intended to do, or how hard he meant to hit him, but Rogers knocked or threw Clemson, I couldn't quite tell which, ten feet into the transformer for the vita-ray emitter. The casing cracked and Clemson got a measurable fraction of the New York City power grid through his nervous system.
After that, it felt like nothing moved. Sure, the security forces hustled everyone into separate safe locations, but it was dawn before I felt like I was doing anything other than staring at Erskine's bloody corpse and Rogers' surprised, horrified face. I'm pretty sure that when I was being debriefed I said "The kid didn't know what he could do" several times. I don't know how coherent I was.
The thing was, security was so high. Erskine was so scared of the Nazis. The thing was, the formula had never actually been written down. Erskine had calibrated the machines himself, prepared the serum himself. The techs, God bless them, knew pieces, they knew fragments, they compared notes and reconstructed everything they'd seen or guessed or deduced. They came up short of anything like the actual formula. For a month, all we did was try to mop up the pieces and find new jobs for everyone connected with Project Rebirth. We did post-process testing on Rogers, and we got results that would have been inspiring a month ago, but now they were just depressing.
As I came up for air, though, I caught up on current events a little better, and I understood why Roosevelt kept pumping dollars into Rebirth all that time. The war in Europe was getting worse and worse and there was no end in sight. It would take a blind man not to see that we'd have to be in it before long. Sure, we had our ration of blind men insisting that it wasn't our business, but it didn't change the facts.
Then, on what was supposed to be almost the last day we were in the Rebirth facilities, my phone rang. It was Special Services. They asked me if it was true that we had a survivor of Erskine's process. I told them the truth: that Steve Rogers was now the strongest soldier in the history of the U.S. Army. Also the fastest, also the best-coordinated, also several other things, and also, what the hell difference did it make having one man? They asked me if I'd heard of der Rote Schädel, the Red Skull.
Of course I had. Everyone had. Hitler was promoting him harder than Hollywood could, his "perfect Nazi", the masked, mysterious "ubermensch" who represented German might and destiny blah blah blah. It would have been just more blowhard propaganda except that the Skull delivered. The Office of Information tried to downplay it, but the reports I'd seen suggested that he was a phenomenal fighter, a tactical genius, and a master of the use of terror as a weapon. Whole towns would surrender en masse if they even heard that the Red Skull was headed their way. The Nazis were always good with propaganda, and the Skull was their masterpiece.
Special Services thought we needed an opposite number, a symbolic figure our side could rally around, someone who'd let the troops say, "Sure, they got the Skull, but we got..."
Captain America. They already had the name picked out when they called me.
Now, you can say a lot of things against the military, and if I'm honest I'll have to admit that some of them are true. But if there's one thing the military is good at, it's getting something done when they're ordered to. We were ordered to turn Steve Rogers into the most effective fighting man on earth, so by God that's exactly what we did. We brought in tough-talking drill sergeants who trained elite units, we brought in tacticians and strategists from West Point and the Joint Chiefs, we brought in the most battle-hardened commandos the armed forces had to offer, we found a couple old Japanese guys on the West Coast who could take apart guys twice their size and half their age with one hand, plus Olympic coaches, a couple known crooks, even a few circus performers, we brought them all in and we worked Rogers sixteen hours a day without stopping.
The drill sergeants were reassigned after about a month each, when it was clear they had nothing left to teach Rogers. The scholars dumped everything they had into him in a few weeks and he just memorized it. The martial artists... it was funny at first, seeing a guy Rogers' size getting tossed across the room by a tiny refugee from a military state, but after a couple months it wasn't funny any more, it just looked like a big nineteen-year-old knocking around a little old Oriental man with moves nobody'd ever seen before. The old men bowed and left.
Through the whole process, Rogers never complained, never slowed down, never even asked for a break. We put him through exercises that would have literally killed most men, and he'd barely pause to catch his breath before asking what was next. It was inspiring in the damnedest way. Rogers set the pace for all the rest of us. He gave everything he had, he devoted himself completely to what he was doing, and he just plain never quit. I found myself working harder than I ever had, trying to meet the standard he was setting.
It took us a whisker over six months before we ran out of people who had anything to teach him. We reported that to Special Services, and the uniform, costume, whatever you call it arrived two days later by courier. When I first saw it, I thought it was the silliest damn thing I'd ever seen in my life. Then Rogers put it on and went through the exercise room in it, seeing how it moved, and I felt tears in my eyes.
If you've never seen Captain America move, there's no good way to explain it. I tried typing "the flag come to life" and "America moving fast without looking back", but they're just words, and they look trite as hell on paper. Just take an old man's word for it that when I saw Rogers in that costume, I felt like if Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin had been there, they'd have known that the dream they had when they were young men had come true.
I don't know whose idea the shield was. The principle, as it was explained to me, was that a gun would make Captain America, and by extension our country, the aggressor. A shield meant that he was defending, defending the principles and the ideas that America represented, and so on. Special Services asked me, though, if I thought that he could be effective in combat with just a shield. I still remember exactly what I said.
"Gentlemen," I told them, "you could give this man a toothpick and a bottle of seltzer and he could still beat hell out of Germany and Italy together. Only thing a shield would do is make him bulletproof into the bargain."
It was late summer of '41 when Captain America made his "debut", and good lord, he was a sensation. The papers loved him. Saboteurs and Bundists were running scared from coast to coast.
Then, of course, at the end of the war, he disappeared. Died, actually. Private Steve Rogers vanished at the same time, so those stories you hear about "He's still out there, he'll be back when we need him" are so much baloney. He died, along with fifty million other people who also deserved to live.
I did a little checking in VA records a little while back, and it turns out that only thirty-five years after the fact, I'm the last guy alive who worked on Project Rebirth. A lot of them, including General Phillips, died in the war, of course. Most of the rest, even the MPs I used to wave to on the way in to work in the mornings, they’ve just dropped off, one by one. I guess that’s the way of the world.
I've been thinking about Rebirth lately, writing this whole thing down. The fact is, in the end, Rebirth was a failure. The project was to create the perfect soldier. What we ended up with was something else. I'm still not sure exactly what, but it was what we needed. Maybe what we still need.