No, what Cryptic is talking about was a super soldier project referenced in Razzle Dazzle. I think the specific name he's looking for is "Captain Freedom", which was actually a role played by the unstable failures who the military wanted to dispose of by sending them into battle to die in a blaze of glory. (The successful subjects went into covert ops instead.)
Razzle Dazzle / Part 2 wrote: “Okay, I’ll bite,” Redford sighed. “What was so significant about guys in flag jammies running around in rather questionable situations with young boys?”
“Well, when I finally ran into one of those guys, I noticed that the big guy in the pair was definitely the muscle, but the *ahem!* ‘kid’ was the brains of the outfit. He was the one who was really calling all the shots. I bagged the ‘kid’, and it turned out that he wasn’t a kid at all! He was a guy in his early-to-middle twenties, with a real baby face and a costume that was designed to make him LOOK younger at a distance. When the ‘hero’ came to rescue the ‘kid’, I noticed that he was… not so much upset, as confused… as if he NEEDED the smaller guy for something. I let them get away and followed them. The first thing they do when they’re out of sight, is the smaller guy reaches into his belt buckle, pulls out a small phial, puts it into an injector, and shoots up the big guy. The big guy calms down and looks a lot better.
“I put that together with the fact that right after Pearl Harbor, a bunch of so-called ‘Mad Scientists’, and may I add the better ones, the ones who actually WERE geniuses, not just nuts, suddenly dropped completely out of sight. As in, *poof!* ‘I’m sorry but Dr. Demented has left town and left no forwarding address, and even left his hunchbacked assistant behind’. Now, before they dropped out of sight, most of those guys had been involved in what they called ‘Human Optimization Theory’. Y’know, using drugs, surgeries, implants, conditioning, radiation, and all like that to make people stronger, tougher, smarter, faster, all that ‘Six Million Dollar Man’ hoo-hah?”
“You’re saying that the Government hired those lunatics to create a super-soldier program?”
“Hey, if they’re doing it on their own, they’re ‘lunatics’; if they’re working for Uncle Sam, they’re ‘eccentric’. Now, speaking as someone who saw those yahoos operate up close too many times, I can tell you that the ‘supervillains’ that those ‘mad scientists’ created really were borderline cases. They really would go berserk at the drop of a hat, and they were usually pretty close to the edge. Now, given that the best use of an expensive super-soldier is as a deep-penetration covert ops agent, like for the OSS or the SOE, a time bomb with legs is NOT what you want. Now, these ‘flag heroes’ had a strange tendency to pop up, make a lot of noise on the Home Front for, maybe two or three months, and then sort of drop out of sight for a bit. Then, they’d show up again, and if you looked REAL CLOSE, you could see that it wasn’t the same guy!
“What I figured out, was that the Army had recruited my old buddy Dr. Demented and his chrome-domed colleagues and put them to working on a super-soldier process. I found out that after April of 1942, every, and I DO mean EVERY white man or woman inducted into the service was given an ‘allergy test’, and those that passed that test - which were about 70% of the inductees - were given a barrage of ‘antibiotic’ shots. Most of which were legit antibiotics; but there were about four or five prep drugs for the various super-soldier processes that they were using.”
“Why only the ‘white’ inductees?”
“Hey, Dusty… this was 1940s America we’re talkin’ about here… Nazis or no Nazis, there was NO WAY the Brass was spending money to create a Mexican or Chinese superhero, let alone a BLACK superhero. Now, as I said about the ‘supervillains’ that these guys had created back in the 30s, most of those super-soldiers tended to be a little… twitchy…”
“As in ‘go into crazed super berserks and kill people with their bare hands’?”
“Yeah. No way were they letting these guys loose, so they could kill thousands of their own troops. Only GENERALS get to do that!”
“So, the ‘kid sidekicks’ were actually controls for the ‘Flag Heroes’ as they learned how to use their super powers?” Redford asked.
“Yeah, I figure that the Brass decided that they hadda see how their super soldiers could handle being in a real firefight. Get the goon ready for the field, and see if they could take the stress. If the guy could handle it without flipping out, they liaison-ed him over to the OSS, who sent him into Europe to do all that spy-movie behind-the-lines stuff; if not, they crammed him into the ‘Captain Freedom’ costume and sent him to get his ass shot off in one of those ‘Cap wades into the Nazis and tears them a new one’ scenes that the newsreels loved so much. They usually gave him an amphetamine or other drug, so he was so amped up that he never felt it when he got shot. Of course, the second that the drug wore off, super-soldier or no super-solider, he usually went into SHOCK and died, poor chump. But they always had another patriotic schmuck waiting in the wings.”
“But it was always the same guy in the newsreels, giving the inspirational talk.”
Townsend gave him a mildly disgusted glower. “Tell me… is the word ‘actor’ new to your vocabulary?”
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