Second Platoon had been dubbed the red team for their first field exercise. They each had red armbands tied around their biceps, secured over the top of their ODs and were dressed in full pack, exactly as they would be in actual combat, they'd been told. Posey was sure she would've felt weighed into the ground if she hadn't already had to run Currahee like this, or had to walk twelve miles in the pitch dark every Friday night. Maybe Sobel deserved more credit. He'd trained them well thus far, she thought.
That sentiment was not to last.
The objective of the exercise was simple, find one of the other platoons before they find you and 'shoot' them - that was, point guns and mortars at them so they couldn't argue about having been found. Second Platoon were at a hefty disadvantage in comparison to First and Third, however, in that they were being led by Sobel. The fears of the majority had been correct; Sobel wanted to win and he wanted to impress. Posey wasn't sure whether he would be doing either of those things even if he had chosen the most impressive platoon of the three. She hoped she was wrong.
Mere minutes into the exercise Posey recognised something fatal; Sobel couldn't read maps properly. She wished she hadn't watched him trying to, for now all she could think as she traipsed through the brown landscape of the woods was that the blind was leading the blind. Sobel had absolutely no idea where they were going, she could tell. This was made all the more clear when they came upon a ditch and he gestured to it hastily, ordering, "Easy Company! Take cover in this ditch!"
Posey found herself perched up on a ledge next to Johnny, aiming her M1 into a sea of nothing but trees and shrubbery. Nothing moved aside from Johnny's eyes as he rolled them.
Posey suppressed her grin and kept her eyes facing firmly forwards.
"Petty! Map!" Sobel ordered almost immediately. Posey turned purely out of instinct upon hearing the aggression in his tone only to find him violently beckoning Petty over. "Come on!"
"Ah, Christ!" Petty mumbled under his breath, slinging the strap of his M1 over his shoulder and retrieving the map for Sobel. As he approached he shuffled past Posey and she heard him grumbling a great many curses directed at Sobel under his breath. When he reached the company commanding officer, he all but shoved the map into his hands.
Posey turned back to face the front to keep her eyes on the woods before her, ready to shoot should anything attempt to jump out. In reality, she knew there was no one ahead of them. They could be miles and miles away from where they were supposed to be for all she knew - and for all Sobel knew, too, evidently. From behind her came those fateful words straight out of the mouth of the man they were supposed to be following: "We're in the wrong position."
In her periphery, Posey watched Winters hurry over to Sobel in a crouched run. When he'd gotten close enough, Sobel informed him, quieter this time, "We're in the wrong position."
Posey shared a look with Johnny, because of course they were in the wrong position. Johnny rolled his eyes again before looking back to the front, though his glare never wavered. He looked as though he'd smelled something so incredibly rotten his face couldn't help but try and twist in on itself to escape. Distantly, Posey wondered how he'd come to perfect his collection of such incredible glares but she remained silent, staring ahead of her and aiming her gun at nothing.
"We're textbook position for ambush, sir," Winters replied quietly. "We should sit tight and let the enemy team come into our killing zone."
Posey saw Johnny nod his agreement at this suggestion in her periphery. She let out a silent sigh of relief - at least someone in a leadership position could talk sense. Maybe they weren't so doomed after all, so long as they had Winters looking out for them.
Sobel destroyed all of this hope in one fell swoop. "They're right up there somewhere," he said, referring to one of the other platoons. Posey didn't turn to see where he was gesturing to and instead kept her eyes trained on the trees lest she should accidentally give away her disdain. "Lets just get 'em!"
"Sir," Winters replied evenly, his patience clearly dwindling, "we have perfect cover here."
"Lieutenant, deploy your troops," was all Sobel said in response to that.
Posey closed her eyes and let out a silent, resigned sigh. They were going to lose this, she just knew it.
"Second Platoon," Winters began in a pitched whisper not seconds after Sobel had begun to march away, "move out. Tactical column."
"Fuck's sake," Posey murmured under her breath. She shared a final look with Johnny before jumping down from the ledge she'd been perched on. She followed after the rest of her platoon and their idiot of a commanding officer with a sour look of her own plastered onto her face, mentally plotting Sobel's death in a million different ways and wondering which option would hurt the most.
Second Platoon was walking for twenty seconds at most before a camouflaged platoon of men rose up out of the shrubbery before them, guns pointed right at them and lips smirking behind their guns. That stopped Sobel in his tracks, and the rest of them behind him.
"Fuck," Skip whispered from beside Posey. She couldn't help but agree wholeheartedly.
One of the majors coordinating and spectating on the exercise seemed to appear out of thin air. He addressed Sobel in an unimpressed monotone, saying, "Captain, you've just been killed along with 95% of your company. Your outfit?"
Sobel didn't look at the man as he replied, only continued to stare at the men who'd 'killed' them. "Easy Company, Second Battalion, 506th."
Posey could only dream of the kind of exhilaration the men before them were feeling right now. They'd just been responsible for Sobel looking bad in front of his superiors, and nothing upset Sobel more than that. Better yet, there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, for they'd done exactly as they'd been told. For the first time in her life, Posey dreamed of being in First Platoon.
The major noted this information on his clipboard briskly. "Leave three wounded men on the ground and report back to the assembly area," he said, and turned to walk away directly.
Sobel paused a few moments before turning. "You, you, you," he said, pointing his sidearm at each individual he'd picked with each word. He didn't spare a single glance backwards as he led the way back to the assembly area. Posey was glad he didn't; he would've seen the full magnitude of her resentment if he had.
"I knew that prick would get us killed," Guarnere snarled to Toye beside him. The pair of them were trudging through the mud and leaves with heads bent together, likely scowling just as much as Posey herself was.
"Yeah, well, lets just be grateful this wasn't the real thing," Toye replied, ever a voice of reason.
"What happens when it is the real thing though?" Guarnere sniped back.
"Then you've just got to hope and pray he's with some other platoon," Posey commented.
Skip nodded as he hopped over a fallen branch. "Got that right."
"I hope the bastard gets demoted," Johnny put in from Posey's other side.
No one replied, but they all nodded.
Back at the assembly area, Second Platoon found Third. The latter looked elated at finally having some company.
"First get you out too?" Blithe asked in his soft Southern drawl, grinning.
"Who the fuck else?" Johnny snapped.
"Alright, Easy Company, get ready to go again. Because they won, First Platoon now have the advantage of choosing where they start. All other rules and objectives remain the same. Platoon leaders, off you go."
Their second attempt at the field exercise went much the same, and they were caught and killed by First Platoon once more.
On their third try, it was Third Platoon that got them, to really rub salt in the wound, and Sobel left Posey among the dead as he was told to return to the assembly area for their final attempt of the day.
Posey laid in the dirt cursing that man's entire existence. Alton More did it aloud.
"If they let that man into combat he's gonna get everyone behind him killed," he was saying as he laid in the mud beside her. "Mark my words."
"It'll be a bloodbath," Posey agreed. She sighed, fiddling with a crunchy leaf and gazing at the sky. "Johnny's hoping they'll demote him for being such a terrible combat leader."
"Aren't we all," commented Skinny.
"True enough," Posey replied.
"You think they'll come get us after this whole thing is finished or will they just leave us here?" Skinny wondered aloud.
"I'm leaving after half an hour. I don't give a shit," vowed More. "Fuckin' leavin' us lying in the fuckin' dirt and mud. Asshole son of a bitch."
"Amen," Posey said dryly.
The three of them, true to More's word, left a little while over thirty minutes later. When they reached the assembly point they found it empty.
"Son of a fuckin' bitch!" More exclaimed.
"They really did leave us," Posey said through a bitter, disbelieving laugh.
"Wish I could say I was surprised," Skinny commented.
The three of them headed back to the barracks cold, wet, muddy, and pissed off. Posey wondered who her platoon had lost to in their final attempt at the combat exercise.
"Third," came the answer, grumbled at the trio the moment they were through the door.
"Fuck," More replied.
"I want him dead," Posey grumbled. She was about to collapse onto her bunk when she remembered she was wet and dirty. She'd have to live with being wet and dirty for the rest of the day, it seemed, which only made her angrier. She scooped up a fresh set of ODs and traipsed to the bathroom block, muttering profanely under her breath all the while, and had to content herself with a quick wash using the water from the tap for the time being.
If there had ever been a time Posey had thought she couldn't hate Sobel any more, she'd been wrong. This, right now, was the apex of her hatred. She wasn't sure she'd ever felt such a fierce burning of resentment in her chest but it remained with her even as she gave her dirty ODs into the laundry and headed back into the barracks.
"Wells?" Johnny asked when he saw her throw herself back on her bunk. She wasn't entirely clean but at least she wasn't wet anymore, and her clothes weren't sodden with mud. She would make do, as usual.
"What?"
"You okay?"
Posey was too infuriated to be touched that he was checking on her. "I'm fucking raging," she said in reply. "I want him dead."
"Join the club," Guarnere called out from his bunk.
She laid back on her bed in silence for a small while before she felt herself becoming irritable. Sitting up, her eyes fell to her footlocker, and she let out a slow breath. She would write. That would calm her down.
When she pushed herself up so she could walk over, her body screamed its protest. She ached all over, the cold from laying in the mud still echoing around inside of her. She threw the lid to her footlocker open mindlessly and rifled around inside with little patience.
"What the fuck have you got in there?" Tab asked as the noise of her displaced possessions filled the barracks. "Jesus, Wells."
"Is that a teddy bear?"
Posey looked Malarkey dead in the eyes as she replied, "Yes."
"What?"
"You brought a fuckin' teddy bear to boot camp?" Skip asked in disbelief.
Posey turned to him and nodded. "Yes."
"How are we only finding out about this now?" Luz questioned through a short laugh.
Posey shrugged, beginning to grin. "Because I don't share."
"Have you had that thing this whole time?" Toye asked. He was sitting up on his bed, now, hoping to catch a glimpse of Teddy.
"Since Toccoa," Posey replied. She retrieved the small, worn bear and held him up for all to see. "None of you are very observant."
"How'd you hide it from Sobel?" Lipton wondered. He didn't sound amazed or confused like the others, simply intrigued - which was understandable, really, because Sobel hadn't found the teddy bear or pulled him out when they'd had their last surprise contraband check.
"Jesus fuckin' Christ, that's what you wanna know?!" Guarnere exclaimed. "Not why the fuck he's got a fuckin' teddy bear?!"
Posey grinned. "Sobel, it appears, is also not very observant."
"Why do you have a fuckin' teddy bear?!" Guarnere demanded.
She sent him a polite smile. "Why not?"
"It's pathetic."
"You're jealous."
"Why the fuck would I be -?!"
"Hey, come on, Guarnere, cool it!" Johnny stepped in. "He ain't hurtin' anyone."
Guarnere relented, though only in the face of one of Johnny's burning glares. When he'd lain back on his bunk and the attention of the masses had turned elsewhere, Posey thanked Johnny and then locked eyes with Roe, sat on the bunk beside hers.
"One less secret," she told him with a shrug. One less lie.
Roe nodded. His eyes fell on Teddy, now sat on her bed as she continued to rifle around in her footlocker, and he chuckled a bit to himself.
"What's his name?" he asked once Posey was sat back down on her bunk again, her writing materials in her lap. He gestured with his head to the teddy bear and Posey laughed.
"Teddy," she told him. She picked the bear in question up and sat him in her lap.
"Creative name," Roe said with a low laugh.
"I was three!" Posey protested with a giggle of her own.
They fell into silence after that, and it was only when she began writing that she realised she didn't really need to anymore. Her anger was all already gone. Maybe Mrs. Daniels had known exactly what she was doing when she'd secretly packed Teddy in her bag as a stowaway.
Posey smiled to herself and told Mrs. Daniels exactly that in her letter, though in fewer words and hidden under layers of coded language so that she didn't get a reprimand for contraband and her bear taken off of her.
When she was finished writing she put the letter in her footlocker, ready to send off after dinner, but left Teddy sitting on her bed. She was confident there would be no more contraband checks and thought he could use a breather.