I honestly can't figure it out, why did Hydra choose Bucky? They could have gotten anyone to become the Winter Solider and yet they chose the guy who was Captain America's best friend. Pretty much anyone could have gotten the job done and the chose the guy who Captain America could get through to the most easily. So why did they choose him?

Zola experimented on a bunch of soldiers in Buckys camp before Rodgers saved them he also experimented on Bucky and it somehow worked having a Super soldier is a very valuable asset Caps friend or not he was dead anyway not to long after Bucky was found

@marvelanddcfan24: So they chose him purely because he was the one person that the experiment worked on? That seems like a big coincidence.

@mister_surreal: that's pretty much what happened

I mean, Bucky must have been one of the best around if he was with Cap. Basically everyone knew of how effective he was on the battlefield.

They wouldn't have thought about Cap getting to him as he was missing in action for decades, so everyone believed he was dead. Also keep in mind that they never said that Bucky was the first Winter Soldier, so it's possible that there were others before him that failed or didn't survive the process. I guess Bucky was the most reliable, based on how uncontrollable some of the later subjects were.

Why wouldn't he be? IIRC they found him when he fell from the train and decided to test stuff on him. So I guess it's just luck that they found him

In the comics, the Russians (not HYDRA I don’t think) literally stumbled across his body in the water. There’s a small flashback scene in the movie that shows HYDRA pretty much did the same. As for why they then decided to take his body and do something with it? Because he was known to be one of the most effective soldiers in the war. He was Cap’s partner because he earned it in the comics (and probably the movie too, but the comic shows his training and skills more so we can say for a fact that he was already one of the best fighters in the world). Why WOULDN’T they want that kind of power on their side? Captain America was known to have changed the war, and if you can’t get Cap, they went for the next best thing.

The better question is how did he survive the fall?

Because they wanted to watch an epic Super Soldier fight filled with heated drama between former best friends. Then Cap has to go get frozen in ice, so they were like, dang, now we gotta make this guy not get old, cuz I really want to watch that fight in case Cap gets not dead.

@ready_4_madness: Cap theorized that a similar version of the SSS that Bucky was given when he was a prisoner must’ve have aided him in surviving the fall.

Lol, this.

I am assuming we are talking about the MCU.

Pretty much this. Everything else is mostly just head-canon and explaining away problems.

The writers demanded Bucky Barnes to be the Winter Soldier, so be it. And as for MCU, since Bucky Barnes is adapted from the Marvel Comics' incarnation, of course they had to follow what happened in the comics.