Bucky Barnes Has The Most Chaotic Timeline In The MCU

James Buchanan Barnes was born in Brooklyn, NY, on March 10, 1917, more than a year before Steve Rogers’s own birthday of July 4, 1918. The eldest of four siblings, “Bucky” proved an all-around talent who excelled in both sports and the classroom. 

Demonstrating what would become a fully fledged heroic streak, a teenage Barnes noticed the younger Rogers being hassled on the schoolyard and intervened on his behalf. From there, the two made fast friends after Bucky built the foundation of his considerable combat experience defending his diminutive pal from any would-be bullies.

In 1936, Steve Rogers became an orphan when his mother Sarah succumbed to tuberculosis. When Bucky offered to have Steve move in with him and his family, Steve insisted that he could make it on his own, but Bucky changed his mind by saying, “The thing is, you don't have to. I'm with you to the end of the line, pal.” By this point, the two were more brothers than friends, and they’d spend the next century playing out that “end of the line” metaphor to extremes they could never have possibly imagined.

A year or two later, Barnes read The Hobbit for the first time.

On a date that would live in infamy, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the United States formally entered WWII. Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were in art class when they heard the news. Both attempted to enlist immediately, but Rogers was rejected. Barnes, on the strength of his athletic and academic track record, was a shoo-in.

Bucky spent the winter in Camp McCoy, WI, training with the 107th Infantry Regiment - the very same unit Steve’s father had served in during WWI - as a sniper. Before his deployment, he rose all the way to the rank of sergeant.

With his considerable training now complete, Sergeant James Barnes and the 107th received word that they were to be deployed overseas, first to England and then on to the Western Front. Before he set sail, Barnes returned to New York to say his farewells to Steve Rogers and others - and to attend the 1943 Stark Expo.

Barnes defeated one last bully on behalf of Rogers and then made one last attempt to get his friend a date. The next day, he shipped off to London. The next time those two met, the dynamic between them shifted considerably.

Fighting on the Italian Front in Azzano in 1943, Sergeant Barnes and his unit were ambushed by the Wehrmacht’s Hydra-powered tanks and captured as POWs. Alongside such notable names as Dum Dum Dugan, Jim Morita, and Gabe Jones, Barnes was taken to a facility in Austria and forced to construct their enemies’ war machines, including the Valkyrie bomber that Captain America would one day pilot into the ice.

Barnes soon fell ill and was handed over to Hydra scientist Arnim Zola for experimentation. He received Zola’s recreated super-soldier serum, though the process did not seem successful at first.

Unbeknownst to Bucky Barnes, the super-soldier serum injected into him by Arnim Zola was an attempt to recreate Hydra defector Abraham Erskine’s original formula, which had since been given to Steve Rogers. While touring Europe with the USO in November 1943, Rogers learned of Barnes’s capture and made a daring solo mission behind enemy lines to rescue his friend.

After freeing the other POWs, Rogers located Barnes in the medical wing and freed him as the facility counted down to self-destruction. On the way out, they had a brief encounter with the Red Skull, but escaped unscathed. Upon their triumphant return to Colonel Chester Phillips’s basecamp, Bucky led the other soldiers in a rousing cheer: “Let’s hear it for Captain America!”