#steve epting

He's has a pretty strong moral compass and he gets really upset upon seeing a fellow soldier shoot a prisoner (Captain America Vol. 5 #5).

To the point where it's Steve Rogers who is the one to tell Bucky to calm down. Captain America, who is supposed to be the paragon of virtue, is the one to tell Bucky to relax. And then later it's Bucky who reminds Steve about the civilians and that they had to focus more on saving the civilians than going after the Red Skull.

And this whole storyline preceeds the next issue, where the Winter Soldier sets off a bomb in Philadelphia, which killed thousands of civilians, to really hammer home that the Winter Soldier is everything Bucky Barnes never was. Steve literally says so a few issues later when he's grappling with the revelation (Captain America Vol. 5 #9).

The whole Winter Soldier saga hammers home again and again that Bucky Barnes was a good person, a caring person, someone who would hold a dying man's hand on the battlefield (Captain America Vol. 5 #11).

And even as the Winter Soldier he kept trying to turn against his handlers again and again, he kept trying push back and escape (Captain America Vol. 1 #12).

He's someone who despises tortures and human experimentation (which might be why he mysteriously saved Captain America earlier from the AIM robots leading the infamous "why the Hell is Bucky?" confrontation).

And then when it's all over, when Steve gives him his memories back with his Cosmic Cube, when Bucky remembers everything he was forced to do as the Winter Soldier, he's so horrified he wishes he were dead (Captain America Vol. 5 #14).

Bucky Barnes was a good person, a good man, and the tragedy of the Winter Soldier is how such a good person was made to do such terrible things.