All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

33: Tents

The air was thick with nerves as soldiers seemed to pour out of transport vehicles in all directions. Upottery Airfield had likely never been so packed. Posey wondered briefly if this was what the German airfields might have looked like before they invaded Poland and started the war. There was a curious sort of triumph to that thought - that they would be finishing the war the same way the Germans had started it.

Upon Lipton's belted command, Posey began to help set up tents to serve as barracks along with the rest of her company. For all that nervous energy surrounded her in a million discernible ticks and jitters, for her part she was mostly stoic. Her storm of nerves brewed internally, turning her thoughts to a whirlwind and her stomach to mush. She felt sick to her stomach at the thought that the time had almost come for her to drop into occupied Europe. They still didn't even know where they'd be going. France seemed logical, though surely they'd be on the other side of London if that was the case, closer to the south-east coast?

She shook the thought from her head. It wasn't for her to worry about.

She kept her head down as she worked to put up the tents, a distraction from the anxieties which threatened to make her throw up her breakfast. True to her word, she hadn't visited John again after last time, leaving their tense final goodbye to be just that: final. Suddenly, she regretted that decision, if not in order to tell her last remaining family member that she loved him then to ask him if he'd felt the same before his first sortie, back when the Battle of Britain was brewing. She struggled to imagine him as anything but calm, collected, and courageous, but deep down she knew he must have been scared. The thought calmed her, in a way.

Once the tents were erected they all shuffled into the tent serving as a makeshift mess hall, put up before they'd arrived. Reserved only for Easy Company though it was, there seemed far too many men in there for it to be her company alone. She supposed nerves made people chatty, and they could be jumping tonight for all any of them knew, as blind to where they were going and what they were doing as they had been walking for twelve miles in the pitch black back at Toccoa. That felt like a lifetime ago now, it seemed to Posey. How much they all had complained about those night marches and running Currahee seemed laughable and so, so trivial. On the brink of invading Europe, there seemed to be an infinite number of things Posey wanted to take back and redo, and that was only considering the past two years of her life.

At least, she thought, Sobel wasn't in charge anymore. After the NCOs' mutiny, Colonel Sink had transferred him somewhere else. None of them knew where, other than it wasn't anywhere near them and that was good enough. In his stead, their new CO was First Lieutenant Meehan, who Winters seemed to like well enough so, by extension, Posey did as well. She'd only met him a few times and he seemed to have a good head on his shoulders, at least - not that Posey deemed herself a particularly suitable judge of paratrooper commanding officers, but he was better than Sobel. Anyone would have been, really.

"Alright, Duckie?" Bull asked from across table she'd slumped down at, drawing her out of her reverie. She'd been gazing down into her plate of food, pushing it around tiredly with her spoon. At the sound of her name her head shot up and she had to blink away the bleariness. Once her vision settled, she nodded.

"Yeah. You?"

"Yeah." She knew he'd been looking for a better answer than that, a seemingly instinctively paternal figure as he was, but that was all she had to give him. He didn't pry for more, either way.

"What do we reckon then, fellas? Jumping on Berlin?" Tab questioned the table at large as he slammed his tray down and squeezed into a seat on the bench beside Posey. He immediately took a large bite from the bread and chewed as he looked between the faces gathered around him.