hellotailor:

eleveninches:

hardboiledmeggs:

absentlyabbie:

shinykari:

legete:

haipollai:

ok, idk how easy this is to read but since everyone is discussing dates, i went to the movie to check. this is steve’s rejection from the beginning, his birthday is in the upper right corner and there’s ANOTHEr date in the lower left which I think is supposed to be a today’s date kind of thing and it looks to be June 14 1943

so there we go, steve enlists in mid 1943

#this feels late for bucky to be enlisting #but that isn’t the issue

How interesting that you would mention this, because I’ve recently been thinking he didn’t enlist. His serial number, which he’s heard muttering when Steve comes to rescue him, starts “32557.”

According to this fabulous WWII serial number generator, an enlisted man from New York should have a serial number starting with the numbers “12.”

A New York man with a serial number starting with “32”? Drafted. What we may be dealing with here is a Bucky who didn’t choose to go to war but was instead compelled to do so versus a Steve who is desperate to get in. I think it opens up a lot of different and interesting storylines for the two of them.

There’s been some great meta/discussion about this in the last couple days, which I think is great.

Makes you wonder if Bucky got the draft, and then, knowing how Steve felt about things, told his best buddy he was “enlisting.” Because how do you face this skinny, brave idiot who just won’t stop trying to volunteer that you wouldn’t be going if you didn’t have to?

Based on a VERY FAST speed-read of the Smithsonian panel, which I have yet to see a good screen grab or transcription of, Bucky enlisted in 1941, following Pearl Harbor, which was mentioned specifically in the panel text (could also be 1942, i.e. the winter of ‘41-‘42). I’m reasonably sure it said “enlisted.” It also listed his training base as, I think, a (probably fictional) Camp McCoy? That only stood out because it wasn’t Lehigh, which surprised me. Whether or not that’s right, the answer’s definitely in that panel.

i love fandom

My headcanon all along was that Bucky was drafted rather than enlisted, because that adds Extra Agony to this already agonizing relationship. I like the idea that Bucky was kind of unsuited to combat, so while we tend to think of him as this scrappy streetfighter guy, he was never really a natural soldier in the way that Steve was as soon as he left the USO. In another life, Bucky would’ve wound up in a string of random jobs helping to put Steve through art school, and then he’d get dragged along once Steve started getting more and more involved in local politics and human rights campaigns and stuff because Steve always wanted to chang the world, even if it was right there in NYC. :(((

So here is the thing – you can be drafted then choose to enlist. When you enlist you get a choice of duties where as when you are drafted you don’t.