Princess Celestia

Do you have anything to say about the Brood Mares for Victory Program? (Celestia’s press secretary tries to interrupt, but she waves him away)

I really don’t. There isn’t anything more to be said that hasn’t already been said. It was war. It was total war. Everybody did everything that they could to win, including things that we would never consider during peace time. I’m not saying the ends always justify the means. But there were certainly worse aspects to the war.

There are still mares suffering from social stigma and psychological trauma because of the program.

And I’m sorry about that. I really am. If I could wave my hoof and change society and preconceptions, I would. In my opinion, those mares are heroes. They’re a different kind of hero that the ones that fought, but heroes none the less. They did their part in the war effort, just like everyone else.

Thunder Charge

After the training was complete, you went on your mission?

You mean THE mission? Operation Straight Flush? No, that was still years off. Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘training.’ We saw a lot of combat. But from our perspective, and from the brass, that was just more training. They weren’t going to send the whole team on the big mission without combat experience. We were already good, but the combat experience made us perfect. It must have impressed the bean-counters once they read our debriefings.

Could you give me an example of what these missions were like?

Sure. They were little missions, but tough nuts to crack. Like our first one. There was a snake outpost on a hill in the Equestrian Range. I call it a hill, but it was a steep crag actually. The Pegasus Force had been trying to clear it out for weeks, but hadn’t had any luck. They’d lost a lot of stallions. Their COs called in for reinforcements. The request bounced around HQ for awhile. The Colonel just happened to be there and read it. So they sent us in. Covert like always.

We started before dawn at “base camp.” Wasn’t even in the mountains, but some podunk logging town not even in the foothills. Distance didn’t really matter to us though. So we headed out while it was still dark, long distance teleport under combat conditions. It’s weird, and I can’t explain it to anybody who hasn’t done it. It’s a little bit like watching time-lapsed footage from the front of a train or something. The whole landscape just slides right by. Only you can feel it instead of just see it. You can smell the air. It’s surreal.

Half an hour later and we’re on that mountain. Perched on hoofholds on a cliff face is more like it. We were just below the snakes’ position. They hadn’t seen us port in, just as we had trained for. The sun was up, but there were long shadows. We were set to take them out, but then, uh... Tart, that was his name. Tart stops us. He was our team precog. He tells us there were six dragons in that nest. We were expecting maybe one or two. To make matters worse, our precog tells us that their in a real bad position. Not an ambush exactly, but close enough to be an ambush even though they weren’t expecting us. It wasn’t going to be easy.

And that’s when... (laughs) Oh god, that was when the Colonel... (laughs) He had this idea to cause a distraction. He casts a fucking flying spell... (Charge breaks down completely, then collects himself) He casts a fucking flying spell on Tails. He was the fatass I was telling you about, remember? He had these fucking flutter-wings. He looked like what you’d get if a butterfly fucked a hippo. (laughs) I’m sorry, Doc. I guess you had to be there. So Tails goes flapping up the mountain side, right in front of the dragons’ position.

Sure enough it worked. All six snakes come roaring out that cave. Tails blinked right when they breathed. They couldn’t have left themselves more open. We were on them in a second. It takes a hundred regulars to kill a dragon, on average. There were two of us per dragon, plus the Colonel. And we made short work of them. Not to disparage the regulars. Those were all good ponies. They only had two weeks of training, and then they were sent off to die, the poor bastards. We had years of training. We could port faster than the dragons could react. And we had natural horns of course.

It felt good watching their stinking carcasses falling down the mountain side. Not a scratch on us.

It sounds like you were very effective.

Yeah, too effective. It cost the Crown a fortune to train us for all those years, compared to regulars. We didn’t even know until after the war that their were a half dozen other teams and backups being simultaneously trained.

It hurt. There was combat going on where we could have shifted the tide. But they didn’t use us too much because they didn’t want the dragon intelligence to catch on to our abilities. They could have developed a countermeasure. There were whole towns that fell and we couldn’t do a thing about it. Brass couldn’t do anything but sit there and watch, holding us back.

I suppose if you look at it from today’s perspective, knowing the end, it was worth it. It was still a painful decision to make at the time though.

Peachy Pear

Instead of being discharged after the war, this earth pony soldier made a career out of the Army. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant. He says he enjoyed every new day he had in the Army. It’s easy to understand why, given that during the war he had volunteered for the infamous Divine Earth Corps.

For those readers who aren’t already familiar, could you explain in your own words the Divine Earth Corps?

Sure. Long story short, we were suicide bombers. Dragons are tough. They’ll kill dozens of ponies in combat before they can be brought down.

But just one of us DEs, we could take out a dragon by ourselves. No matter how big, no matter how old. I can remember seeing newsreels of the combat footage. Most ponies in the audience were horrified at just the concept. But watching that snake blow apart into two giant pieces, that was enough for me. I volunteered the next day. I lost a lot of family in the war, and all I could think about was revenge.

We were all volunteers, of course. We tended to be younger than the typical soldier on average, but we were all still old enough to enlist. The brass made extra sure we weren’t lying about our ages.

The way it worked was we’d show up on the battlefield and wait for a dragon to be brought down by a swarm. We’d have magic explosives in our saddlebags. There was always a unicorn charging them for us.

It’s strange. They’d never use unicorns or pegasus ponies on suicide missions. That’s not the strange part, that makes perfect sense to me. A pegasus is worth two or three earth ponies on the battlefield, and the unicorns are worth a dozen. It makes sense that you’d see earth ponies going on suicide missions, we’re more expendable. The strange thing is how stratified our society is, yet we’re all OK with it. We all get along with each other. It doesn’t lead to conflict. That’s one of the things I love about this country.

I guess it’s part of the reason I was ready to die for it.

Anyway, the unicorns would charge our packs. When the dragons were down, we’d charge after it. The goal was to get right underneath it, where the explosives would be most effective. We could either detonate them ourselves, or wait for a slam. Either way, the dragon was dead, and we’d be heroes.

It must have been terrible to await that fate.

That’s what everybody asks about, but again we were volunteers, and it wasn’t that bad. It’s really ironic when you look at the numbers. We only had something like a 40% casualty rate. It was very effective against dragons when it worked. But they caught on fast. They would see us coming, and get better at breathing on us, despite our counterpyrokinesis. Or they’d manage to flee. That was about the time they started working in teams anyway.

I went on two suicide runs myself. Never even got close to either dragon. Obviously, I’m still here. The whole program sort of petered out over the course of the war. It was the unicorns that had it the hardest. Lots of us had psychological problems ourselves, but it really hurt the unicorns the most, sending us off to die like that. The program ended, and nobody really complained about it.

I can’t imagine what it would have been like if the war hadn’t turned in our favor.

Now the pegasus ponies. Those were the guys who had it rough. Talk about bravery. We went on suicide missions and had a 40% casualty rate. The daylight swarmings had something like a 60, 70, sometimes 80% casualty rate. And those weren’t even called suicide missions. Don’t know if even I would have volunteered for that, had I the wings.

“Goldie”

Goldie, not her real name, participated in the Brood Mares for Victory breeding program. When I show up at her house, she won’t let me inside. She insists we conduct our interview at an outdoor cafe, in public. After speaking to her for a few hours, I understand why she doesn’t want strange stallions being seen entering and leaving her home. Her cutie mark underscores her role in the war. I will omit a description, both to preserve her identity, and for decency.

Could you describe the BMV program, please?

I wanted to fight. That’s what I really wanted to do. I would have if they had let me. But mares couldn’t fight. Sure, there were plenty of other things that mares were doing. There were nurses, clerks, weapons manufacturers... but none of that fit me. When I heard about the BMV program, it seemed the most extreme thing a mare could do for her country. And I loved my country. Even if its turned its back on me.

We were in a war with the dragons. They were bigger than us. They were stronger than us. But we had one advantage. We had them outnumbered. The BMV program was about ensuring it stayed that way. Dragons take centuries to reproduced. A foal can stand up and walk on the day it’s born. It only takes a few years before it can be trained for combat. And the war dragged on for years, so it all seemed so natural.

The Crown gave us a little extra money for participating. And extra food stamps. We never got rich and fat, it was just a little bit. We didn’t go hungry. Others did, went hungry that is. Times were lean and they hated us for it. Lots of mares were having foals during the war, but only those of us in the program ended up being despised for it.

What about the foals?

I could keep them while I nursed them, and once they were weened they were taken away. I never saw any of them again. It’s supposed to be easier, after the weening. Some sort of psychological reason. I don’t think that was actually true, at least not in my case. Still, I got to love each one of them, at least for a little while.

After my fifth, I was declared a “heroine mother.” They gave me a medal. I’ve never shown it to anybody. I’m not sure what the point of a medal is if you can’t show it to other ponies.

And the sires?

I’m not sure if I can talk about them...(long pause) They were soldiers, mostly. Not all of them, but most of them. See, I was a “victory filly” too. That was another program. It wasn’t official. Princess Celestia never signed her name on that. But there were thousands of us. Probably millions. All the stallions were going off to war, many of them to die. A lot of them had never even been with a mare before. So we tried to comfort them, make them happy. They all loved us for it. I kept it up throughout the whole war, even while I was pregnant. Some of those were the ones who sired my foals.

A lot of them were on the way out to the front. Some of them were coming back. Most of the ones coming back were wounded. They were always the happiest to see us. We would service them right there in the hospital. We weren’t supposed to, but we would sneak in late at night. The nurses would unlock the doors.

The nurses would actually help you? They were complicit?

Oh, sure. They did a lot more than let us in. A lot of the wounded were amputees. Some of them couldn’t even mount us on their own. The nurses had to help. Physically, I mean. Hold them up sometimes as they did their thing.

Everybody was complicit. Everybody knew what was going on and nobody stopped us. They all supported us, even though none of them would admit it then. Of course the same bastards treat us like shit now. It’s all posturing. They think they’re so much better than us. They’re a bunch of hypocrites.

Did you form emotional attachments to the sires?

Yes... but I don’t want to talk about that.

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