//------------------------------// // Come on Every Soldier, Smile, Smile, Smile! // Story: Memoirs of My War // by Antiquarian //------------------------------// Interview Excerpt: Brigadier General Pinkie Pie, Equestrian Army Seriously? You want to talk about the battles? Where’s the fun in that? I mean, firing a precisely targeted shell from Big Bertha in a rainstorm on an enemy force that’s advancing up a hill three klicks south of your position and threatening to overrun an allied battalion and managing to plant a 155mm shell directly in the middle of the hostile force without getting even a single speck of dirt on your buddies just two meters beyond the blast radius is pretty fun, but the real fun of war isn’t even the war itself. It’s the stuff you do with your friends between the war stuff! See, lots and lots of soldiers were walking around with frowny faces all the time! And that’s just sad! I mean, yeah, the war is horrible and ponies are dying, and that’s awful. It really is. Even I don’t joke about that. But I did make sure that ponies could keep joking in spite of it! Laughter might not make the war go away, but it does make you able to get up and face the next day. And you hear some good jokes in the Service. Like the one about the two zebras, the mule, the unicorn, and the bottle of Konik vodka! You see, there are these two zebras and— …wait… no… Rarity made me Pinkie Promise not to tell that one in front of a reporter. Crud. Anyway, it wasn’t just jokes that I used to help ponies smile again. It was pranks, songs, campfire stories, even parties! They thought I couldn’t throw a party with canned rations and moldy bread, but I proved them wrong! Can’t throw a party in the middle of a war my left hoof! The nerve of some ponies! Can you believe some of the other officers tried to stop me? “It’s not professional,” they said. “An officer shouldn’t be fraternizing with the lower ranks,” they said. Well, I told them if they tried to stop me, they’d soon be single-hoofedly redefining the term live ammunition! Pretty good, huh? I don’t think a lot of them got the joke, though. They just sort of backed away slowly, sweating like crazy as though I’d said something strange. Anyhoo, Twilight had just made Brigadier at that point, so she up and declared me the 3rd Army’s Morale Officer and fixed that silly little technicality. And it, was, great! I organized dances, led sing-alongs, figured out how to bake cakes from mud that tasted like chocolate (I called them mud pies! Get it? Teehee!), and just had oodles of fun! Ponies told me they’d never laughed so hard in their lives. They told me that they hadn’t felt this happy since the War started. Why, one pony even told me that I reminded him how to laugh! How cool is that? I even got the prisoners in on it! Now, sure, some ponies were a liiiiiiiiiittle uncomfortable with my holding parties for the prisoners, and it was super awkward that a lot of the POWs acted like they didn’t even know what a party was… … no… scratch that… they actually didn’t know what a party was… cultural repression by the Ministry of Public Safety and all that… hurghwghathla! Sorry, I get the chills just thinking about that… But once they saw how much fun it was, they really opened up! Rarity even said something to me about how the Equalists put out a bounty on me because I was convincing so many of their soldiers to defect! Serves ‘em right for outlawing parties, I say! And that’s the really beautiful thing you see in war. Not the war itself, but the friends you make there. I made more friends in one year in the military than my whole life up to that point. And I had a lot of friends, so that’s a high bar! And they were all super-duper close friends too! It’s like, you spent one day in a foxhole with somepony and say maybe five words over all the gunfire, and by the end of it, that’s your sister; that’s your brother. Even I didn’t think it was possible to make such close friends with somepony that fast! And as for the ponies who I was already super-duper close with… well… now, it’s like we’re not even six ponies anymore. It’s just… us. No separation. We’re just… us. It’s a beautiful thing. It really is. How it brings us so close together. And so even when… even when we lose them too soon… sniff… sorry, I’m just… sniff… I’m okay, really, I don’t need, oh, well, thanks for the tissue. HONK! Anyway, even when we lose a friend too soon, we can still hold their memory forever in our hearts and pray that they’re looking down on us from a happier place. A place where everypony is that close but without all the killing. And, thinking about that… I can smile. See? I can smile and it isn’t even fake. Because life is beautiful. Other creatures are beautiful. Even in war, life is beautiful. You just can’t forget that.