Oh noes!!!1!!11!!1!!11! Equestria has, through horrifying circumstances, ended up at war with a particularly pesky principality of perpetually pissed-off griffons! Ponies of all kinds have been called up to serve their remaining princesses and fight off the beaked menaces, in locales as varied as tropical beaches to, at the extreme end, parched desert. Luckily, the love of country has rendered even the softest, most insipid, most utterly ordinary ponies into a well-oiled fighting machine.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the love of country has rendered the most utterly extraordinary ponies into a complete and total liability. Oops.
Lowbrow comedy. Something of a spiritual successor to my first (bafflingly successful) story, A Cursory Background Check. Contains acts of violence, paragraphs of sex jokes, and a general level of intelligence about five standard deviations below the mean.
It's almost like champions of peace, friendship, and mutual goodwill shouldn't be asked to serve in war. Or, at the very least, shouldn't be trusted around the Willy Pete.
Wonderfully horrifying. Thank you for it.
"So, why are they manning the artillery?"
"We needed to put them somewhere."
"Why not the front lines?"
"Remember the Crystal Empire?"
"Well. Yeah. They wound up pulling out of the... oh. But isn't the Empress her...?"
"Not any more. Or at least for a loooooong time."
~Skeeter The Lurker
The best kind.
It is very much possible to still have decent hearing after 5 years of service in artillery, even without hearing protection.
Source: Me, a person who has served for 5 years as an armorer in an artillery unit.
Heh. I am somewhat reminded of Mitch's "Good Trooper Gilda", which also involves a war brought about by a Griffon assassin, although there at least the horribly traumatized Twilight and Pinkie are at least competent.
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That one has been lurking in the wings of my recommended story section for a while, but I've never actually read it. For what it's worth, I mostly just tried to keep the setting as ... I don't know, generic to these kinds of stories as possible, so in that case I would say it was a success.
Tremendous work, as usual.
It's no small feat to write cursing in such a way that it feels both natural and hilarious.
Damn, this is quality.
The Swiss don't "request" you respect their neutrality. They point many big guns at you and *then* politely inform you that further violation will be met with death. Then again, that would still be better than fighting the 9th battle of the Isonzo.
Sequel about their trial?
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I'm probably going to write up a quick little bonus chapter, yeah, but it won't be about that. I"ve got enough long-form comedy stories for that.
Was.
Was anybody home?
Ok in their defense, there's no neutral parties in a world war
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Either they are hopelessly naïve, or in a world where poor interpony relations could summon ice demons and kick off an extinction event and predators are large enough to appear on survey maps, ponies are strong enough to defend their pacifistic lifestyle
Not quite as bad as the major screw up in Spec Ops The Line, but damn close.
And my 1stSgt always told us that Willie Pete is what you call for when you don't want to just kill them...
holy shit, i was an FO back in the day... alright lets see how this goes
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They LITERALLY WPed and orphinarium through sheer incompetence. The spec ops fuckup was competently hitting a legit military target not knowing it was full of civvies.
I would argue this is substantially worse but the comedy tone of the story means it doesn't hit as hard.
Outside the slapstick context this is pretty much the second worst thing a soldier can do, #1 being deliberate warcrimes?
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Legitimate target it may have been, there usage of white phosphorus in a civilian area is against the Geneva Convention. So I suppose it depends on wether you view incompetence as worse than making a bet as to wether the area had been cleared of civilians and losing.
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It's the third, actually. Deliberate war crimes would be #1, while raiding a case of MRE's and only taking the M&Ms out is easily #2.
As someone who has studied the use of field artillery throughout history, I can definitively say that I laughed at this way too much then I had any right to. The sheer level of incompetence shown by the gun crew was hilariously staggering.
Also, nice depiction of MRSI. I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that I did not put two and two together until the end.
Fluttershy ran an ER on the outskirts of the Everfree. The only difference is that the battlefield smells worse.
Jesus christ.
~Skeeter The Lurker
"Before any of you dorks try and correct me, a "clip" is the correct parlance for what holds the boolays together for a bolt action rifle."
YES! FINALLY, SOMEONE KNOWS!!
I'm not sure if I find this chapter incredibly amusing or mildly depressing, I think I'm just going to go with incredibly amusing.
As a guy who actually failed the test on the math one with Arty I have to agree that the Math is Hard!
I did pass the test later. Luckily I never had to deal with anything bigger than a 50 cal through the years.
I know what you’re referencing, but that was a sanitized version of what WP does.
Well I was suprised by the story but I gotta say it's always the quiet ones.
Well, that got grim fast. Good story tho.
Morally, Fluttershy's the worse of them all, knowing somethings wrong and not saying a thing. Although she's not been rendered as inept as Rarity.
What does "Not a full bird" mean? At first I thought took that literally, as being a hippogriff.
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A colonel's emblem in the American armed forces is a silver eagle, hence a "full bird." A lieutenant colonel is thus not a full bird.