Posey wasn't afraid of heights. Or, at least, she hadn't thought she was. Standing atop the wooden jump tower and preparing for her first 'jump', however, - that was, using jump technique without the parachute or the aeroplane - she wasn't quite so sure. Though maybe it wasn't the height she was afraid of, perhaps she simply didn't trust herself to have the technique right.
With each man that took his jump, the line moved a few paces forwards, a shouted, "One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand!" the audio accompaniment to his fall. The words repeated themselves over and over again in her head as she tried to focus and not let the nerves get to her. They'd received an hour long lecture and demonstration before they were allowed up on the jump tower but with every step forwards she feared she was forgetting more and more about what she was supposed to do.
"Stand in the door," Sobel ordered in the monotone he'd been using for the past hour. Posey looked up to find Popeye standing in the doorway of the tower. She'd be next.
"One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand!" Popeye chanted as he jumped, tucked, and rolled to the side to accommodate for the momentum.
"Stand in the door," Sobel repeated once Popeye was out of the way.
Posey didn't let herself think about it, she just jumped.
"One thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand!"
"Congratulations. You just broke both of your arms, Private Wells," Sobel drawled once she'd rolled and jumped to her feet once more. "Do you want to be a paratrooper, private?"
Posey stood at attention as best she could in the uneven sand. "Yes, sir!"
"Then do better."
Posey gave him a nod and hurried to the back of the queue behind Popeye, feeling Sobel's eyes on her all the while. She only caught the end of his subsequent, "Stand in the door," in her haste to get out of his immediate line of sight. She breathed out a sigh of relief once she was back at the end of the line.
"You just gotta keep your arms tucked up," Popeye spoke up helpfully from in front of her, turning around to show her. "See?"
"Right," Posey replied, gnawing on her bottom lip. "Thanks, Popeye."
"Anytime," he replied.
Then it was back to watching the men jump and dreading her next attempt; for all the lecturer had ranted about proper jump technique to minimalise the damage when they landed, it still hurt to slam into the ground like that. She could only imagine what it would feel like once they had to do it for real.
Her second and third jumps went better, though at the end of it she was left feeling sore all over. Her bones felt as though they'd been ground to sand and her muscles as though they'd been driven over with a tractor. Needless to say, she was dreading actual jump training, though she tried to remind herself that at one point she'd dreaded the run up Currahee, and another the obstacle course. As training went on she found herself being repeatedly thrown in the deep end, and actually found that she was made of stiffer stuff than she'd initially assumed.
They all headed to the mess hall as soon as their first jump session was finished, and when they made their way to the barracks promptly afterwards they found chaos.
"What the fuck?!" Guarnere shouted the moment he was through the door. He moved further into the barracks to allow everyone else to see the mess as well.
"What the hell happened?!" Liebgott exclaimed once he'd seen it.
As soon as Posey made her way in all she seemed to be able to utter was, "Oh, fuck."
It appeared they'd had a surprise contraband check, and whoever had done it - likely Sobel - had made sure to leave no stone unturned - or, in this case, mattress.
"My letters!" cried Ed Tipper from behind her, barrelling past her towards the scatter of paper at the foot of his bunk.
Posey's eyes were set firmly on her pillow, which had been thrown onto the floor. She could only pray that it'd been thrown onto the floor in the process of her mattress being upturned and not with human hands. As she approached it she prayed that what she'd hidden there remained inside.
"Oh, thank God," she murmured the moment she'd crouched down and picked the pillow up. In true army-issue fashion, the pillow was thin and the pillow case even more so. She'd had to take increased precaution and hide her contraband not only inside the pillow case but inside the pillow - it hadn't even been terribly difficult to tear it open. But even so, nestled inside and entirely undisturbed was Teddy, her miniature childhood teddy bear stowaway. If anyone had found him, she knew she'd never hear the end of it.
Everything she'd had stowed in her footlocker lay haphazardly scattered about the floor but she knew her feminine cloth had gone unnoticed in her shower kit, for when she checked they'd not even bothered to open it. And, by some miracle, her underwear was still tucked into the pockets of her ODs. Perhaps she was better at hiding things than she thought. She didn't care about the other things - she was allowed a book, even if the message written inside was a bit strange, and they'd left her most recent letter to Mrs. Daniels on the floor beside her pillow.
The gloves Mrs. Daniels had sent her with had disappeared, however. But that was inconsequential now, overshadowed entirely by her relief that her dead-giveaway items hadn't been discovered. Posey didn't know who to thank for that stroke of luck but promised whichever God came to mind first that she'd repay them tenfold.
Posey got to work trying to repatriate everything that had been thrown astray immediately, starting with her overturned mattress. It was heavier than she'd anticipated but she managed to hoist it up and onto the bed frame with little fuss - something she owed entirely to bootcamp, she was sure, because there was no way she'd have been able to do that before.
Everything else was shoved haphazardly back into her footlocker before she started to remake her bed; regardless of who had made the mess, Sobel would be in there ready to chew them out if their bunks weren't made to perfection whenever he felt like it, and Posey had no desire to give him an excuse to tear her to shreds, even immune to his shouting as she had become.
Meanwhile, the barracks was filled with the shouting of angry men.
"God fucking damn it!"
"My shit's all everywhere!"
"Fuckin' Sobel. One of these days I'll shoot him, I tell ya."
"No you wont, Guarno," Toye spoke up in his usual blank tone. He didn't even glance up from where he, too, had begun to remake his bed.
"I will, Joe," Guarnere promised, his Philadelphian accent only growing thicker with his rage. "Throwin' all our shit everywhere, makin' us run Currahee three times a day in full fuckin' pack while he watches wearin' his fuckin' leather jacket. One 'a these days I'll fuckin' shoot him, I swear it."
"Anyone wanna bet?" Luz piped up with his signature grin.
Posey giggled and continued attempting to smooth all of the wrinkles out of her bedsheets. Then she paused a moment, and looked up from her work only to address the group at large, "Hey, did anyone lose anything?"
Even over the noise of complaining and the screeching of bed frames being moved against the floor, a few people turned around.
"Yeah," Skip replied. "White."
"What?"
"We lost White," Skip clarified, gesturing to the bunk beside his. "Apparently he stole something from mess."
"Shit," Luz muttered, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it promptly.
"Was he the only one?" Posey asked, mind racing with the 'what-if' scenarios where she was the one caught for a crime against the army. If they'd searched her shower kit and found her period cloth, or the pockets of her ODs and found her undergarments, she'd have been out of the Airborne quicker than she could say 'Currahee'. And maybe even worse than that, too; she didn't know what the punishment would be for pretending to be an American man purely to get to Britain and she didn't particularly want to find out.
"Yeah," Skip replied, and turned back to what he'd been doing.
Posey nodded but her face had fallen, all movement faltering. Suddenly, she didn't feel so relieved anymore. Up until this point the entire situation had been difficult, yes, and exhausting to be sure, but it hadn't ever really felt as high-stakes as she knew it actually was. At the back of her mind she'd always worried about being caught and kicked out, but what if she was found out and the punishment was worse than that? What if they didn't just send her back to Mrs. Daniels with a slapped wrist and few choice words? The US Army shot people for desertion, after all, and in some lights that may be considered a lesser crime than the one she was committing.
Feeling the pressure of eyes on her, Posey glanced up only to meet Johnny's gaze. She sent him a reassuring smile if only to get him to look away. As soon as he'd nodded back at her, she continued making her bed with renewed vigour, promising herself she'd be more careful from now on and take everything more seriously. Now more than ever she was determined to make it through basic undetected.
Posey forewent her shower that night. She'd managed to convince herself she hadn't done enough PT to warrant taking the risk but deep down she knew she was scared. This thing she'd been doing every night for the past six weeks suddenly seemed just as terrifying as the prospect of jumping out of a moving aeroplane. She felt like she was back at the very beginning again, unsure of how she was going to manage keeping her secret and making it through training simultaneously.
Above all, she felt alone.
Johnny knew and was keeping an eye on her, yes, but he was also keeping his distance.
Whilst she considered him her best friend because of how much his kindness meant to her, she knew he didn't consider her his. And the others - well, she liked them, and she knew they liked her, but would that be the case if they found out she'd been lying to them? Would they be willing to protect her even against the good of their own wellbeings?
So many questions and so few answers. She didn't know where to start. She didn't even want to, in all honesty. What good would it be to find pretty words to lull her into a false sense of security? She needed to be on her guard at all times. She could trust no one. Aside from Johnny, maybe. That was how it needed to be.
In the wake of the onslaught of fatalistic thoughts, the silence of the barracks as she tried to fall asleep became suffocating. The air was humid, as it always was, but now her body had decided it couldn't handle it. The snoring and steady breathing she always fell asleep to was now much, much too loud - almost deafening. The limited light from the window, whatever moonlight had managed to find its way through the thin glass of the windowpanes, was blinding. The sheets were scratchy and the mattress was hard and her hands were shaking and she was sweating too much. So much she was drowning.
Against her better judgement, she slipped out of the barracks anyway.
Making her way briskly around to the back of the barracks, Posey found a large tree and slumped against it, leaning against the side that faced away from the rest of camp. If anyone came out they'd know it was her but at least they wouldn't immediately know she was crying, and it wasn't a crime to leave the barracks to cry in the middle of the night. At least, she hoped it wasn't.
Posey took a breath and forced herself to swallow her sobs. She tried to exhale the desire, the overwhelming need, to weep loudly and desperately into the humid night air. But that didn't stop the tears from slipping from her eyes and tracking their way down her cheeks, dancing gracefully in the pale moonlight.
Never in her life had she felt more alone. She was the ultimate outsider - a girl parading around as a boy, destined not to fit anywhere. Even though they never said anything, the men knew something was up with her - her facial features were too soft, her frame too thin, her voice too high no matter how avidly she tried to deepen it - and whether the few women on base had their suspicions or otherwise, she was forced to let them believe she was just one of the men. A pariah to both groups, Posey found herself without a single person to trust, and whilst many of the faces she trained alongside were friendly she wasn't sure whether they could actually be considered friends. They didn't truly know her, after all. But did anyone? Did she?
Not for the first time, Posey wondered how everything had turned so terribly upside down. She should've been at home in London, sat lounging in the living room with her mother with warm mugs filled to the brim with tea and listening closely to the radio for news on the RAF, secretly wondering whether they'd ever receive another letter from John. Instead, she sat on itchy grass under the cover of a tree, gazing up into a sky devoid of stars whilst covered in tears she didn't bother to wipe away. Utterly alone. If she thought she'd known loneliness before she'd been wrong. At least on the ship over to the States she'd been in the company of other evacuees. Here, on a military base in Georgia surrounded by paratrooper hopefuls, she found herself wondering how bad it could possibly be to simply quit and find another way back home. Would the army really shoot a girl, and a British one at that?
Probably, she thought bitterly, and let out a sobbed gasp of laughter at her situation.
She ran a hand over her hair, out of habit more than anything else, and sucked a sharp breath in through her nose. She hadn't cut all of her hair off to quit.
No, she decided, she was going home as an American paratrooper even if it killed her. And one day she'd tell her family how she'd managed it - once they'd forgiven her for putting herself in so much danger simply to come back home - and she'd laugh. And yes, she'd remember the night she spent curled in on herself below a tree in the grass, listening to the chirping of crickets and the brushing of leaves and wishing she was absolutely anywhere else, but it would seem funny then - trivial and childish and so, so long ago. In the grand scheme of things her loneliness would be inconsequential. She knew home would be worth it.