Excerpt from "Cold Turkey," Teddy Granolas expose on the U.S. government's uses and abuses of super powered assets from World War II through the Cold War and beyond:
Chapter IV The Creation of Liberty Five
The casualties were mounting in Europe. Operation Market Garden, Field Marshall Montgomerys daring attempt at ending the war by Christmas by seizing key bridges in the Netherlands, by-pass the Siegfried Line, and thus opening a northern route directly across the Rhine and into Germany with paratroopers, armored assets and elements of the First Hero Brigade, failed in a spectacular fashion. Tons of equipment was lost, scores of regular troopers were killed or captured, and, most importantly, upwards of a hundred super-powered combatants had lost their lives as well. In a desperate attempt to bolster the depleted ranks of the First Hero Brigade, President Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Paragon Project a top secret endeavor, working side by side with the scientists at Los Alamos who were busy creating the atomic bomb and captured German scientists who were key players in the making of the Storm Korps, to develop a super-soldier serum for use in artificially producing ready-made super heroes.
The first 100 test subjects were volunteers drawn from the best and the brightest of the regular U.S. military personnel. Many of them were decorated war veterans from the Marine Corps and the airborne infantry. Among them was Connor Brave, a staff sergeant with the 101st Airborne, Easy Company, who had been recuperating in a hospital in France after suffering a shrapnel injury to his right knee during Market Garden. Connor badly wanted to rejoin his unit in the field, but his doctors had all but ruled out his return to active duty. By the end of October, he was due to be shipped back to the States. Unsuprisingly, Connor went AWOL from the hospital at the beginning of October, and made his way back to Easy Company, limping the entire way. His commanding officer found out immediately, and was about to order Connor to return to the hospital, but was swayed by the young soldiers impassioned plea to stay with his company. Instead, the commanding officer submitted Connors name for the Paragon Project. Connor did not object. He understood that it was his only chance at remaining an active duty soldier.
In hindsight, becoming a part of the Paragon Project proved almost as fatal to its volunteers as a paratrooper fighting in the field with a shattered kneecap. Of the 100 initial test subjects, 44 fell seriously ill from the high dosages of radiation being pumped directly into their blood streams, 22 became mentally deranged, and 25 died outright. Only 5 volunteers from that first batch of 100 exhibited any of the hoped for signs of a successful injection with the super-soldier serum. Luckily for Connor Brave, he was among these 5 newly minted super-soldiers, men who suddenly were able to push the limits of normal human strength, endurance, quickness and agility, and mental acuity. Newly declassified material tells the dark story for the high attrition rate among these first 100 volunteers. Pressed by the War Department to manufacture super men as fast as possible, the scientists in the Paragon Project upped the dosages of serum injections almost tenfold in an attempt to elicit a response from their subjects. In other words, men were being pumped almost round the clock with irradiated material. It is not surprising at all that the successes among this first group of volunteers proved to be aberrations. The reason for the accelerated time table seemed less to do with pressure being applied against the Allies by the remnents of the Wehrmacht, but rather by the pressure being applied against Germany by the Soviet Red Army. Many of the newly declassified documents darkly predicted that if the Allies did not resume an offensive against the Nazis, the Red Army, which was successfully driving the German war machine back towards Berlin on a daily basis, would control all of Germany before the Allies even crossed the Rhine.
Fortunately, wiser minds prevailed and the Paragon Project was shelved for the duration of the war. But as we shall see in the subsequent chapters of this book, the Paragon Project did not disappear into the dustbin of history. In fact, there is much credible evidence to link a handful of the scientists associated with the Paragon Project with the super-soldiers still being created by the 5th Column.
The 5 surviving members of Test Group Alpha (the codename given to the initial 100 volunteers) were given a crash course in commando tactics, then assigned to a newly created special operations unit Liberty Five. They were tasked with the responsibility of penetrating deep behind enemy lines, disrupting supply routes, assassinating key military and political leaders, and sowing chaos and fear among the enemys ground forces and civilian populations. Each of the 5 men were also given codenames: V for Victory, the Living Legend, the Great Seal, the Standard Bearer and the American Dream, which was given to Connor Brave. As Liberty Five touched down in what remained of Nazi occupied Europe, the Battle of the Bulge was just around the corner.
(if they've even voiced an opinion on this)
