He got hit by a sudden flashback, from when he was just a little foal.
There was his dad on top of a ladder, hammering some nails through a plank on the archway that leads into the family barn.
"Daddy, why are you fixing the doorway? It's not broken" he asked. He was holding onto the ladder itself to keep it still while his dad was working.
"I'm not fixing it, son" his father explained patiently "I'm doing some improvements so that it stays up nice and straight for a longer time"
"But it's useless, if it'll break anyway"
"Well, take it like this: if the doorway stays up longer, you can focus on other problems in the meantime, you see" he stopped working for a moment, turning back on the ladder and sitting on the steps to catch his breath.
"We can have a little break for a moment, your mum will be back in an hour" his horn started to glow in a green magic field "How 'bout a snack?" he levitated a pair of apples from his saddlebags, one for himself, and one for his son. They both started to eat under the roof of the barn to protect themselves from the summer heat, the soft smell of hay stuffing their nostrils.
"Remember son, sometimes you gotta take action in order to prevent problems" he said, while munching a big bite off his apple "D'you remember the song?"
"Can you sing it for me?" the little foal asked, excited. His dad just chuckled, levitating a small bongo from his saddlebag. After a bit of setup, he began tapping on it, to give himself a bit of rhythm.
"Never forget, ya little guy
When ya got some doubts, due to your frights
never stop running, my little foal
your fears won't outrun ya before your goal.
Oooh-ooh, oooh-ooh..."
The sweet rhymes of his dad slowly faded away, while the sound of his bongo got louder and louder, tapping faster and faster. He pressed his hoofs against his ears and shutting his eyes, confused and afraid.
"Will ya get me that fuckin' ammo belt? What are ya, admiring the landscape?" reality hit him like a punch in the stomach, the angry shout of his mate interrupting for a second the long burst of the machine gun.
His hoofs quickly rushed to the ammunition box to get the refill for the unicorn next to him; he lifted the cover of the weapon and inserted the first bullet of the belt in the feeding mechanism. Then he slapped the cover back down, letting his mate pull back the bolt lever, before starting to fire again.
That was the most gruesome battle of the Gryphon War. The pony avant-guard managed to reach the deepest part of the Gryphon nests, and set up an ambush in a makeshift bunker. The battle had been going on for days, and pony reinforcements got struck by the whole Gryphon army, while hundreds of those flying bastards were flooding their positions between the tall rocky mountains.
"Fuck, they're getting closer!" he shouted while slaughtering a whole squad of gryphons that was flying withing the effective range of the machine gun. Their torn apart corpses fell down on the rocks, and rolled uncontrollably to the valley below.
"Listen here mate, we have to- wait, you hear that?" the two soldiers suddenly heard a loud whistle, that was getting closer and closer by the moment. They looked eachother in the eyes in confusion and terror.
"MORTAR! HIT THE DECK!" his mate shouted, before bailing to the right of the machine gun. The unicorn threw himself towards the inner part of the nest instead, right a second before the explosive shell landed next to the machine gun, making their weapon explode and filling the whole room with shrapnel and pieces of bullets.
He got hit in the right thigh, a piece of fragmentation penetrating deep into his leg from behind, and the explosion stuffed his gables with a loud hiss, stunning him lightly.
His machine gunner wasn't as lucky as him: a big chunk of his machine gun landed right below his chest and passed right through him, pinning him to the rocky wall.
"Fuck Celestia in the cunt, I was just done eating!" He sweared, stupidly hitting himself right on his bleeding wound; movement which made him shout a painful lament, making him press his own hoofs on the open cut to slow down his bleeding "Now my brunch will spill on the floor!" he complained angrily. The unicorn crawled beside him to help the wounded pony, while he was endlessly swearing against both Princess Celestia and the gryphons.
"Woah, that actually hurts though" he frowned, biting the sleeve of his uniform to avoid moaning from the pain "Listen here mate, this room is lost, and I'm not making it out of here alive. You have to warn the others, and stuff that door closed with everything you have" he struggled to pant his words out, a small pond of blood beginning to form below him.
"The fuck are you talking about? I'm taking you out of here, and we'll find someone to patch you up" he tried to bluff, activating his horn to try and stuff the wound so that it wouldn't spill any more blood.
"Enough of that bullshit, I'm pinned to the wall, and I'm pretty sure the fragmentation sliced my spine" he coughed blood "I can't feel anything below the belt"
"That's what she said" joked the unicorn to crack the tension; his mate managed to chuckle, a little drop of blood spilling from the corner of his mouth.
"Oh, fuck off, just give me a gun and a couple grenades, and I'll slow them down"
"Fine, someone here wants to die a hero" he reached for his semi-automatic carbine and a couple of his grenades, and put them in his mate's hoofs "you still have time to change your mind" he said to him.
"Shut up, before I actually change my mind and bring all the company six hoofs under with me" he panted, while more and more blood spilled in his lungs. It was getting harder and harder for him to breathe "Now bail outta here already!" he shouted with all the power his lungs could allow him, which wasn't much anymore. The earth pony barely managed to lift the iron sight of the carbine between his eyes and the open breach in the bunker wall with his trembling hoofs. The unicorn limped to the metal door, shutting it close with his shoulders.
"MEDIC!" he shouted, while trotting as quickly as possible to the rest of the company in the bunker's main room, while another rain of mortar shells quaked the tunnels carved in the rock.
Naming it the main room was just a euphemism, since it was just a little bigger than the other sub-ambients, and it served as a kitchen, general ammunitions and tools deposit and triage room.
The nurse helped him lay on a bloody cot with another comatose pony, his whole shoulder almost ripped off by some sort of frag round; after a quick diagnosis he was told that the shrapnel penetrated too deep in his leg to remove it now, as there were far worse cases than him. They just stitched the wound closed and gave him an aid tonic to help the opening in his flesh heal faster.
He never managed to return to the fight. The bunker buster bombs eventually opened a breach for the gryphons to flood in, and the ponies quickly got overnumbered.
There were dozens of casualties on both sides of the battle, and hundreds of ponies were held prisoners until the Treaty of Detrot, which banned the use of long range disease-causing spells by the ponies in exchange for the release of all the prisoners made by the siege of the Phoenix Hideout.
