For nine months, the two Baker teams continued eating only disgusting food: snakes, spiders, rats and berries.
For two years they worked out daily until they almost spat blood, shot at targets until their hands filled with calluses, and repeated fire team schemes until they got sick of them.
In the end Trautman and Garner, after long reflection, chose Danforth as team leader and Ortega as his second man.
Ortega was smarter, but he also showed a certain kind of emotional nature and underwent some difficulties when the situation required reacting fast, and thus he had no time to plan anything at all. During these scenarios, even if less analytical most of the time, Danforth was much faster in reacting, so Trautman and Garner finally decided that Danforth leading together with Ortega counselling was probably the best choice.
Trautman and Garner were not exactly firmly convinced of their choice, because they were both two very good soldiers.
At the end of that course, the eight men of the Baker team B could understand each other with a glance, could move fast, silent and invisible like felines and were as expert on strategy as colonels.
Above all, they were trained at staying lucid under any kind of stress, because everything they could do they had learnt it under stress, and so they could do it under any circumstances.
They were SOG men, by then.
To them, doing push ups in the blazing sun, rain or in the mud was exactly the same thing as doing them inside the gym.
Anger, desperation, fatigue, pain... None of these feelings could cloud their judgement any more.
Underestimating the importance of strategy issues, no matter what kind of task they were up against, had become a mortal sin in their minds.
Every single one of their gestures was fast, silent and accurate... And if necessary, outstandingly violent.
Almost all of them had developed muscles, shoulder width and an overall appearance that made them barely resemble who they had been two years ago.
Even the tasks performed during the selection process looked easier by then, and not because the selection process tasks were tasks for beginners, but because during the last two years all of them had literally doubled their marching, running and weight lifting limits.
And they were ready to try to push them further at any moment, if necessary, just as they had done very often during the worst moments of those last two years.
In order to become what Trautman wanted from them, they changed.
They had become different, and that's the way they were going to be for ever.