//------------------------------// // A Time in the Snow // Story: A Time in the Sand // by AppleJared //------------------------------// "Macintosh Apple?" she asks the room. "Yes Ma'am." I answer back with a hoof raised. She looks at me and motions for me to follow her. "If you'll come with me please, Mr. Apple." I follow in line behind her and she takes me to a room. I sit down on the hospital bed with the wax paper on it. She goes through some paperwork then forces that hospital nurse smile at me. "How are we doing today, uh..." she looks at that folder of hers. "Mr. Macintosh?" "Doin' fine I suppose." I mumble out. She stops looking at the papers and takes the fake smile off. What replaces the smile is seemingly an actual look of concern. She starts checking my ears. "Ya know Mr. Macintosh, a stallion like you ought to be feeling better than what you're looking. You do know this is your release check-up, correct?" She moves on to the throat. With that stick in my throat I manage out "Ahch dunt ike auspitls." She gives a smile... a real smile... and continues with her part of the job. "No one really does, Lieutenant." She finishes up and leaves the room with, "The doctor will see you shortly." Twenty minutes later, in comes the doctor. He's a dark brown with thick glasses. Older than me but not too much older. He has the air of relaxed professionalism. He enters without looking at me, only at his papers. He put the papers down on the counter and looks at me. "How are we feeling today Macintosh?" "Doin' fine I suppose." "Cheer up Lieutenant, this won't take too long." He looks funny at my face. "The bags under your eyes could hold my house keys. You sleeping well? "Good enough." He gives me an eyebrow. "Your face tells a different story. Work on it." He checks blood pressure, pulse, lungs, eyes, ears (again) and reflexes. "You seem to be clear, Macintosh. I would hold you back for possible insomnia," he sprouts a smirk. "But I'll let you go if you promise to sleep as soon as you get off of the plane." Somehow against all odds, that doc got a laugh out of me. "Sure thing, doc." He gives a genuine smile and a hoofshake to me. "I guess we're done here. Thank you for your service, Lieutenant." I walk out of the small room and make my way towards the front office. "Macintosh!" the doc yells from the room. I turn around. "Smile!" he says. "You made it home!" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Apple Bloom told me that she's starting to take a liking to one of the colts in her class on the way to school today. Princess have mercy, she's grown up fast. I sure wish Maw and Paw could see her today. They'd be proud as punch, that's for sure. I have a lot of work to get done today. On the way home, I think of what to tell AJ about our little sister's crush. I want to make a joke about it, but knowin' AJ she'll just get upset and worked up about it. Which is to say she'll get overprotective of Apple Bloom again. I decide to not mention it. I'll have to add it to the list of things I won't mention to AJ. I've been back home for a couple of weeks now. I feel like I've been back for months but that's probably because of me not sleeping well. I had the displeasure to get caught up with things going on around here again. AJ said that they're wanting to raise property tax in Ponyville. For most folks it wouldn't mean much, but to the farmers here it could spell disaster. To think that I wiped the blood and body parts of my friends out of our trucks for this. Every time I get back, "home" gets a little worse. Folks start acting real funny when you're gone. They try to take advantage of you when you're too busy fighting for their freedom. I need to calm myself down. I can't lose it out here. I need to get this work done for the farm. AJ got a picture of me in the mail from some foreign newspaper a couple days ago. No one locally can read the foreign print underneath my face, which is good. Though I lived in that land for far too long, I never learned the language. I'm pretty sure the people didn't like it when we shot at them, so it's for the better that no one can read it. Praise Celestia they can't read it. AJ gives me a big smile. "I didn't know they sent ya up north! What's it like up there?" She must think it was some kind of RnR trip. A chilled breeze that doesn't belong to Ponyville sweeps down my back. "Cold." It was me in the last stretch of the second tour. My company got moved up north to take out some of the enemy supply factories. I was so used to the desert heat that the below freezing temperatures got me sick as a dog on the first week of relocation. I had seen cold weather before, but this was different. No living thing belonged here. It was the kind of cold that seeped into your bones and froze up your insides. The kind of cold that made it hard to sleep at night, even with heating. The place just felt wrong, and there's no other way of putting it. As an Earth pony I can feel the life of plants and vegetation. It's the Earth pony magic. Although there were trees, they were lifeless. It's like they grew on something other than soil. I wasn't one for superstition but none of the other boys felt any magic at all up there. There was only room for death and death always had room for one more. Once I got over being sick, it felt like more of a break from the action. We mostly just went scouting and called in fire missions. From time to time, there were pockets of resistance. There were a few rogue militants out there and there were a couple patches of regular army. A couple of them were purely citizen militias, untrained in every way. None of them stood a chance. We had artillery and they did fire missions every day. If we didn't have to go out, we didn't. When we did go out, we didn't bring back prisoners. After a few weeks up there, we had destroyed eight military factories. We had one left, and then we were done in the north. One left. I open my eyes. One of our scouts came back the day before we would go over there and gave us the coordinates for the last factory. He pulled me aside. "Mac, this one isn't like the rest." "What do ya mean?" "There's bodies outside the gate... no machinery going on inside either. It doesn't look good." Some of these scouts were greener than Granny's hooves so I got messages like that a lot. These boys didn't know what bad looked like and I hoped they never would. Still, this one wasn't as green as the other scouts and dead bodies didn't exactly spell out a Sunday morning trot. The next day, I made sure my boys had extra ammo. I told them this one might get a little hairy. Looking back, I got more worried if things didn't get hairy every so often. Truth be told, I had seen things no soul should have to carry. In the sand, I saw more death than I ever thought I would see. Blood was as commonplace as food and water. I had seen the insides of a soldier ripped completely out of his body by a sniper. I had seen things that had sent some to mental therapy. But as we walked toward the smokestack of this last building, I had a feeling maybe the scout wasn't as green as I had thought. Sometimes while up here we would get a break from the snow and get some sunshine. Today, there was no sunshine. The dark clouds above us sent a blizzard of snow and dropped the temperature even lower than usual. It was artificially dark, the like clouds blocked the sun completely. Trees were swaying from the wind and the weight of ice and snow. Sometimes they would drop the snow from their branches and we would all flinch. Extremist civilians up here would wait days in the snow in hopes to ambush us. I had already lost a few soldiers in similar ambushes. Grizz lit a smoke. It was a habit he picked up when we left the sand. Sleek brought his Celestial necklace with him. His family sent it to him for good luck, and I guess it did him pretty well. Jarrett is still with me, but he's done with this war. We all are, but he's got a family now. Marks is the new guy. I don't know his real name but he's the designated company marksman. His rifle shoots out to 800 meters. I've seen him take out targets at 1000 easy. He was born to do this type of work and he's accepted it. The road we took was the road supply trucks would take to get to this factory. If there were any coming, we had orders to take them out as well. The trees line both sides of the road, offering little visibility to the left and right. Snow is at least four inches deep and occasionally we hit deep spots on the powder that are about eight inches deep. We saw the smoke stack get bigger as we got closer to the building. Approaching the gate, I knew I was done with this fucking northern winter. I never thought I would say it but I missed the sand. I missed being able to feel my hooves and I missed the sunshine. I tell the boys that I wanted to go home. They agreed. I meant to say I wanted to go back to the desert. I'm not sure why "home" came out instead. As we got visual of the gate, we jumped into the trees and stalked our way up to surprise the enemy guards at the gate. We moved just as quiet as we could until we were within 50 meters. To my surprise, there were no enemy guards at the gate. Instead, exactly 50 dead soldiers hung lifelessly on harpoons staked to the ground. They had Equestrian uniforms on. Some were already in the process of decomp, but some looked to be fresh. One of them looked like me. Another blink. My entire company was staked. Another blink. I don't know any of the dead. Maybe a few years ago I might have been sad, but fire lit inside me as I looked at the dead faces. This deserved retribution. They deserved vengeance; I would give it to them. We opened the gates and went inside the compound. The worst part of the trip thus far was the silence. We saw no guards outside the building. The wind was the only noise we could hear, and while it was loud, the scene was far too quiet. There were no machine noises, no marching of soldiers, no vehicles running. There was only one giant factory-style, two-story building. It was painted red but covered in snow. We made a security sweep on the perimeter of the building, and still found nothing. We busted open the front door and found no troops inside. Instead there were massive amounts of bodies in all directions, and a giant fireplace in the back. The place shined the bright white of artificial light. Pools of red death lay on many spots of the floor. I look around to see several operating tables, syringes, restraint tables and chairs. IV's, medicines, bottles and other things you would see at a hospital were present. There was only one pony there on his hooves, and he had a lab coat on. He was working on something when we came in. He wore the insignia of the enemy on his sleeve, and he tried to run away but Grizz caught him and kept him in a corner. We were in a torture factory. They would send this guy POWs and he would do experiments of all kinds on them. Some of these soldiers didn't have legs or eyes or hooves, or hair... It got worse. Some of them were skinned. Others had intestines missing from their corpses. Burn marks with varying intensities on almost all of them. The fireplace was burning the bodies he was finished with. Then the moaning happened. I told my boys to stay with the doctor and I went to check it out. The doc's "patient" was laying on a restraint table. It was an orange stallion with Equestrian uniform pants on. His facial hair was greying, looked to be twice as old as I was. But... he had been worked on. The skin on his abdomen was sheered off. Much of his intestines were taken out. His hooves had been raked off completely and the muscles in his forelegs had been removed to keep him still. Much of his mouth was cut and bloody, and all of his teeth had also been removed. The skin on his right shoulder had been cut clean off, and was still bleeding profusely. That part had just been done. On the floor was the flap of skin from his shoulder. On it, was branded the old Celestial Monarch symbol. He was old guard. Only those who were officers before Luna came back were allowed to get that branding on their shoulder. His eyes were dry but below his eyes were swollen. After a closer look, I saw that his tear ducts were sewn shut. I guess that was supposed to keep him from crying. I took the gag out from his mouth and let him breathe through his mouth. He wanted to cry, but his new body wouldn't let him. His voice was very soft and fragile. Almost like he could only intake the minimal amount of oxygen per breath. He whispered something to me, but I couldn't hear it. I got down next to his mouth so I could hear him. "Please... end it..." I didn't sign up for this. I never wanted to be a part of this. I wanted to do my duty as an Equestrian stallion. I never thought this is the type of enemy I would face... I never thought I'd have to kill one of my own to save him. I took my sidearm out and considered what I had to do. He was squirming there in pain, whispering hoarsely and softly: "Please... Please..." I did what I had to. The record shows that we found the last ammunition factory, called in a fire mission and went back to base. On the record, the whole trip took two hours. Off the record, I took a nail gun the doc had handy and nailed his legs to the floor. He screamed. Then I put a couple extra in to make sure he was bolted down nice and tight. He screamed. Then I put a few more in after that for laughs. He screamed. I beat him until I was sure I had broken his facial bones, but I made sure to keep him awake. Marks spoke the language; he said the doc was begging me to stop. I had Marks find some adrenaline, then I injected it into my victim. Off the record, I wouldn't let him pass out before I was done. As the adrenaline took effect, we got some of the diesel fuel and drenched only his legs. He screamed like his vocal chords where on fire. After we were sure they were soaked, we doused the rest of the building in it. Grizz wan't on board with this. He thought we could just shoot the guy and go home. I told him he could leave if he wanted to. I looked at the psychopath. I had no words to say. No ending cliches to seal the deal. I wouldn't speak to scum, so I certainly wouldn't speak to... it. I lit his legs on fire and we watched him suffer. As the flames spread toward center mass, I knew it would still take several more minutes before he would die. After five minutes, we set the building ablaze and walked back to base. The screaming stopped sometime on our way back. It hit me a few days later, what had really happened. There was no real scientific reason to have torturous experiments on enemy POWs. They sacrificed their own sense of morality to destroy the morale of their enemy. They would pick at the threads of sanity and remove a little bit at a time. I'm told many POWs sent there were only present a few days then sent somewhere else. Forcing them to see what fate had in store for them if we lost... it's pure genius. On top of that, when their own soldiers saw that, they would feel invincible. Who could possibly topple over a giant death factory like that anyways? It's the sickest, most vile... genius... I've ever seen. That's why they will win. Maybe not this war, maybe not in the near future, but they will win. Our side is ready to sacrifice our lives in battle to save our country, but the other side freely gives their own soul. We aren't willing to break our own moral code, so we will lose. I don't see that doctor as a monster. He's just a soldier that has given up his mind for his country. Imagine what our side could do if I had 20 soldiers like that. We could win this war in three weeks. I open my eyes. I take a look at my medals. I keep them in a jewelry box on my night stand. Boys down at Quartermaster Corps made mine with apple wood. I would have preferred oak. I slowly open the box, and it reveals four medals, all of which mean something different. One for being wounded, one for bravery, one for leadership and the last one for honor. Being wounded just came with the job, I can still use the leg just fine. Bravery is when I didn’t care if I died or not, so I stood in the middle of the fire. Folks looked up to me when I stood in the fire, so I got the leadership medal. Honor… Honor is the one that hurts the most. I got honor when I carried Grizz’s body on my back to safety. The enemy got to him and cut him open like a loaf of bread. I was bathed in his body parts when the guards saw me coming toward the base. He had three more days before he would be honorably discharged. The best part to me is the fact that they think we can just go back to living normal lives after all of that. To just pretend like it never happened. They want us to hang it up in the closet like our old uniforms. I figured out that the only way to forget about all of this is to hang myself in the closet. But I can’t do that. I have my folks to look after now, but in the end I’ll be as alone as my friends who died alone in the sand and snow. I'll think of my buddies dying from time to time, and I'll think of the torture factory almost daily. I'll wonder what it means to give everything for your country and I'll know that true freedom is a lie to those who uphold it. I will clutch my last friend in hopes of comfort -- comfort from being alone. But I will be alone. My friend is my rifle. Once a soldier, always a soldier and a soldier is nothing without his rifle. On occasion, I want to cry. I miss home. I miss my folks. I miss my yolk. I dare not cry. Crying is weak and I must be strong. If I cry then I am weak, and if I am weak I die, and if I die, then I let my platoon die as well. I dare not cry. I dare not. I cannot. Applejack is knocking on the door. She asks if everything is alright. Everything is not fine. If I answer honestly, she would worry. She would worry because of the re-enlistment papers on my desk. The signed re-enlistment papers.