The rain reminded Posey of home. She hadn't even been sure whether Georgia, in all of its stifling heat, was able to produce rain, but apparently it was. A whole lot of it, too, by the looks of how it was coming down.
When the men of Second Platoon had awoken to the sounds of heavy rain slamming against the window, they'd all cheered.
"Looks like we're in lectures all day, folks," Tab had declared with pure glee written all over his face. "Manoeuvres, positioning, tactics, map-reading, you name it. We've got ourselves a whole day without Currahee."
The cheers that erupted as soon as he'd finished his announcement were almost deafening in the early morning, drowning out the sound of the heavy rain altogether. Posey couldn't help but cheer herself, a huge grin splitting her face. Lessons she could do. She'd been to boarding school for years and had to endure private tutors over the school holidays - between that and the rain, so reminiscent of London, she felt right at home. She could scarcely wipe the beaming smile off of her face for a second, even when having to endure perhaps the most boring lecture she'd ever experienced in her entire life. How this lieutenant, not one she was familiar with, managed to make battle tactics sound so dull was beyond her, but he'd managed it. She fought desperately to keep her eyes from wandering to the windows as he droned on and on in his monotone voice.
At one point, when she hadn't been so successful, she'd met Guarnere's eye. Just for fun, she stuck her tongue out at him. He rolled his eyes and turned away immediately, but it made her giggle. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the confused glance Roe shot at her from the seat on her right but she paid it no mind. Now her eyes were back on the board and she reminded herself of her promise to remain inconspicuous, which meant paying attention in lectures no matter how boring they were and definitely did not mean pulling faces at Guarnere.
By the time lunch rolled around, Second Platoon, once so ecstatic about their day of lectures, were utterly demoralised.
"If I gotta sit through one more goddamn lecture I'm gonna rip my eyes out," Perconte told her and Luz as they made their way to the mess hall.
"How many more things can they lecture us on, anyway?" Posey wondered by way of reply. "We've already done battle tactics, positions, formations, and map-reading. I don't know what else there is to teach."
"Me neither, Duckie," Luz put in through a sigh, "but I'm sure they'll find somethin'. They'll never have us sittin' around doing nothing, that's for damn sure."
"Yeah, and don't we know it," Perconte agreed.
"Nah, one more lecture and we've got the afternoon off," Tab butted into the conversation. "Winters just told us."
"Really?" Posey furrowed her brows.
Tab grinned, throwing a casual arm over her shoulders. "NCO privileges," he explained with a smirk. "We get told first."
Posey shrugged his arm off but she laughed. "I wonder how they went about picking the NCOs," she began, a cheeky grin already making its way onto her face. "I bet they chose those among us already in possession of the biggest egos and decided to inflate them as a sort of social experiment."
"Ha ha," Talbert drawled. "You're just jealous."
"Extremely," she snarked back, laughing along with him.
When they set foot in the mess hall, spirits brightened immediately.
"Hey, guys!" Perconte called out to the rest of Second Platoon behind them. "They're serving spaghetti!"
"No fuckin' way!" Liebgott cried.
"I'm so happy I could cry," Posey said, only half joking.
"I think I already am," added Perconte.
Posey fell in line behind Luz and in front of Perconte and made haste in grabbing her plate, cutlery, and a slice of bread. As soon as the pasta and, subsequently, the sauce, had been slopped onto her plate she couldn't help but laugh deliriously. She only barely noticed Winters overseeing the activity in the kitchen.
"Real food!" she declared to no one in particular, simply unable to keep her jubilation in.
She followed Luz to their usual table and squeezed in between him and Perconte, barely acknowledging those filtering in around her as she dug in immediately. She felt as though she'd been starving up until this very moment, as if this was the first time they were being given food for the entire time they'd been at Toccoa. It wasn't the best spaghetti she'd ever tasted in her life - it didn't hold a candle to the stuff the chef at her house had used to serve - but she was happier and readier to eat it than she'd ever been to eat anything in her life.
"This stuff is orange," Dittrich, sat across from Perconte, spoke up. He was holding a clump of spaghetti hanging from his fork up in front of his eyes to inspect it, wearing an expression of vague disgust. "Spaghetti ain't supposed to be orange."
"This ain't spaghetti," Perconte replied without missing a beat. "This is army noodles with ketchup."
"You ain't gotta eat it," Guarnere commented as he slid into the open seat beside Perconte.
Perconte looked to him, aghast. "Oh, come on, Gonorrhoea, as a fellow Italian you should know that calling this crap spaghetti is a mortal sin."
"Tastes alright to me," Posey mumbled.
All the while Hoobler, from the table behind them, was reaching an arm between Perconte and Guarnere in an attempt to steal Perco's plate. "Don't want it? I'll have it."
"No, no, no, I'm eatin' here!" Perconte exclaimed, elbowing the intruding arm out of the way.
"Hey, get outta here!" Guarnere said at the same time, batting Hoobler away as well.
Posey laughed. "That's what you get for being picky."
Perconte rolled his eyes but a tell-tale chuckle gave him away. "Well, you ain't Italian, Duckie, I wouldn't expect you to understand."
The shrill cry of a whistle interrupted their banter. A voice which sounded remarkably like nails on a chalkboard burst out, "Orders changed! Get up!" whilst stomping into the mess hall.
"Uh oh," Posey muttered around a mouth full of spaghetti as they all jumped up to stand at attention.
"Lectures have been cancelled. Easy Company is running up Currahee." No one moved until he barked, "Move! Move!"
Everyone began tripping over themselves in their haste to get out of the door quicker, pushing at each other in the hopes of speeding up the process. All the while, from behind them, Sobel called out a taunting, "Three miles up, three miles down! Hi-yo, silver! Lets go, lets go!"
Posey's stomach was full of dread and spaghetti as she followed the rest of her platoon back to their barracks and stripped off her ODs to leave her only in her PT gear. They jogged as a group to the path at the bottom of Currahee and lined up between First and Third immediately.
Luz turned to Posey, seeming to either be blissfully unaware of the spaghetti sauce smeared all around his mouth, or simply unbothered by it. "First one to throw up takes the other's next latrine duty?" he suggested. He grinned and the orange spread across his cheeks like a sunrise.
"You're playing a dangerous game, Luz," Posey drawled with a smile of her own, "But I accept."
Sobel's voice cut through the chatter once again. "Three miles up, three miles down, Easy Company! Lets go, lets go!"
As soon as she began to run up the mountain, Posey felt the spaghetti sloshing around in her stomach. Not once in her life up to this point had she ever regretted eating so much but now she knew she'd do a good job of making it to the top without passing out, let alone throwing up.
She had to focus on her breathing, deep breaths in and out even when her lungs screamed at her to breathe faster to accommodate her increased heartrate, and attempted to ignore the nausea crawling its way up her throat. She was not going to be doing Luz's latrine duty, especially after he'd suggested it in the first place.
Men all around her seemed to begin vomiting at the same time. If it wasn't someone in the row in front of her it was someone in the row behind. The sheer noise of the entire affair - of the boots on hard ground, of the gagging, of the throwing up, and of Sobel's shouting - seemed to surround her as though she'd been submerged in water. It was becoming increasingly difficult to focus on not vomiting when all she seemed to hear was people doing just that, or if not, Sobel shouting about it.
But after Sobel had seemed to satisfy himself with the relentless jeers about the vomit, he moved on to taunting.
"You're a washout, Private Hoobler!" he belted, coming up beside the man in question as he choked out some spaghetti and spat it on the ground. "You should pack up those ears and go home!"
He accelerated to sneer at Smokey from First Platoon. "Looks like Gordon's done! Aren't you, Gordon?! You finished?! You do not deserve to get your wings!"
Just when she thought she'd escaped, Sobel slowed himself down so he ended up back with Second. "You're looking tired, Private Wells. Just say the word and you're finished. No one expects you to make it anyway."
Posey felt her blood boil but kept her eyes firmly forwards. Just because he'd said that, she knew she was going to make it, not merely up Currahee but all the way back home. And she'd do it with shiny silver jump wings pinned to her uniform, a souvenir for her desperation and, above all, her resilience.
"Private Randleman, you look tired," Sobel continued once he'd gotten no reaction, addressing Bull in the row in front of her. "There's an ambulance waiting for you at the bottom of the hill. It could all be over right now - no more pain, no more Currahee, no more Captain Sobel!"
Captain? Posey hadn't even known he'd been promoted.
Luz had clearly had enough of Sobel's demoralisation and decided to raise morale the best way he knew how. "We pull upon the risers," he began to sing.
Everyone joined in directly, just as they always did.
"We fall upon the grass.
We never land upon our feet,
We always hit our ass.
Highty-tighty, Christ almighty,
Who the hell are we?
Zim-zam, goddamn,
We're Airborne Infantry!"
"I'm gonna be sick," Posey lamented as soon as they'd finished singing.
"No you ain't," Liebgott spoke up sternly from beside her. "You're fine."
"I'm fine," she repeated, nodding.
"I'm not," Luz choked out, and threw up immediately after.
"Victory!" Posey cheered. She clapped a hand over her mouth as she felt the bile slithering up her throat.
"Don't throw up!" Liebgott ordered. "I don't want your puke anywhere near me!"
Posey couldn't reply, all of her energy having to be focused on breathing through her nose and continuing to put one foot in front of the other to keep up with rest of her platoon. After a few moments she lowered her hand again, feeling more sick than ever. She couldn't hold it anymore.
She threw up all over her PT shirt, and then threw up again at the sight of it.
"I'm sorry!" she squeaked as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then wiped that off on her shirt. "I couldn't help it!"
"Fuck's sake, Duckie," Liebgott grumbled, but he didn't look too angry.
"You alright?" Roe called out from Lieb's other side.
"I think so," she called back. "I feel a bit better now."
"I bet you do," Liebgott commented, his disgust plain on his face.
Posey's time in making it to the top was abysmal compared to her usual time, but at least Sobel wasn't up there shouting about how pitiful their times were. They'd lost him somewhere around the halfway mark after Luz had started singing. Posey could only hope their refusal to bow down to his sneering and the blatant slap in the face that was their sing-song had infuriated him enough to send him back to his fancy officers' quarters. She'd hated that man almost ever since she'd first laid eyes on him but never more than right now, covered in her own vomit and trying desperately not to trip as she began to run the three miles back down to the bottom of Mount Currahee.
She caught up with Luz again at the bottom, breathing heavily and holding her stomach, which was now aching something fierce. "Looking forward to doing my latrine duty?" she asked as she came to stand beside him, mustering a grin in spite of her ailing.
"Shut up," Luz replied, but he laughed a little bit. "I can't believe I lost."
"Well, it was mere seconds before I did, so don't be too cut up about it," Posey replied, chuckling. "It was sheer luck."
"I'll get you next time," Luz promised through a grin.
Posey laughed tiredly. "You're on."