The Main Enemy Milton Bearden (read full novel .txt) 📖

they accomplished in less than ten minutes. In another few minutes, the truck was righted by sheer brute force and the animals reloaded for the descent into Pakistan.

Thus began my sideline involvement in the mule trade, one of the more offbeat jobs in the prosecution of an increasingly unconventional war.

Mules, as any mule lover will tell you, are among the best of man’s improvements over nature. They combine the strength of the horse with the temperamental coolness, stamina, and low maintenance of the donkey. Put the two together and you get the ideal pack animal for mountain warfare. But you can’t just find good mules in the natural way of things. You have to work very hard at it.

Most pack mules are the offspring of a male donkey, a “jack,” and a female horse, whose union produces a “horse mule” or a “john.” It is possible to reverse the process and breed a male horse and a female donkey to produce a “hinny,” but the failure rate of such unions is high and serves to discourage commercial breeders. So most of the pack mules that ended up hauling ordnance into the Hindu Kush and the White Mountains of Afghanistan were johns, sturdy little Chinese johns.

Having been raised in Texas, I was always pretty familiar with horses, but mules were a new experience, and a complicated one, I would soon learn. Though I had long been aware of the vastly different reactions of horses and mules to gunfire and explosions, I had never understood the reason for this. Over the next few months, I would have ample opportunity to learn. The donkey is an energy conserver by nature, a careful assessor of the situation and cautious selector of an appropriate reaction. If startled, a donkey will usually jump a little, check things out, and then hunker down until he sees something that might seriously threaten him. When it comes to gunfire, a well-trained donkey won’t even flinch. A horse, on the other hand, under the same circumstances, will often bolt. Training does not always mitigate this trait. When the two animals are mated, the resulting product—the mule—is generally unflappable. Mules have a reputation for being stubborn and cantankerous, but mule aficionados are quick to point out that they may not really be stubborn at all; they just take a little longer to decide whether or not to waste their energy.

As I became embroiled in quartermastering the Afghan War, I discovered that on an annual basis we needed more mules than the world seemed prepared to breed. The weapons and other supplies the CIA was providing the Afghan resistance had grown upward of sixty thousand tons per year—all of which had to be hauled from Pakistan across zero line and over three hundred different infiltration routes to the commanders in the field. Such a daunting task required a combination of five- and ten-ton trucks, smaller pickups, and, finally, pack mules. So for the years I was involved in the Afghan resistance, we moved several thousand mules over the Kunjerab Pass from China and down into Pakistan to training camps, where we matched up mujahideen youngsters with their mules and taught both how to get along and, ultimately, how to survive.

The Chinese mules were never really enough, both in numbers or in size, so we had to turn to other sources for specialty mules. Though I was never less than amazed at the ability of the Afghan Task Force in Langley to come up with precisely what I needed when I needed it, I often thought that my cables back to headquarters on the topic of mules might have tested their patience and credulity.

For much of my time in Islamabad, I had a legend from the CIA’s paramilitary past working with me, a gnarly veteran named Dutch Snyder. Dutch was an old hand who knew whatever you needed to know about mules and mule skinners and much beyond that. He had been in and out of combat throughout Southeast Asia, ending up in the CIA’s special operations group, where he trained both CIA officers and friendly services around the world in the art of unconventional warfare. If Dutch didn’t have an answer for an offbeat problem in a guerrilla war, there probably wasn’t one.

Dutch helped me with much of the procurement needs for the war, and occasionally he and I would conspire to slip in a “nonstandard” requirement for the mules the task force was buying for our program just to see if everyone in Langley was paying attention. A typical cable might have read like this:

IMMEDIATE DIRECTOR

WNINTEL—MULE REQUIREMENTS FOR FY 88

1. TASK FORCE SHOULD SEEK ONLY MULES THAT MEET THE FOLLOWING STRINGENT REQUIREMENTS FOR PROGRAM NEEDS:

A. NO MORE THAN THREE YEARS OF AGE.

B. IN POSSESSION OF ALL THEIR TEETH.

C. NO LESS THAN 12 HANDS HIGH NOR MORE THAN 17 HANDS.

D. VETERINARY PASSED IN EXCELLENT GENERAL HEALTH.

E. FEMALES PURCHASED BY TASK FORCE SHOULD BE CERTIFIED AS STUMP BROKE.

2. PLEASE ADVISE SOURCES AND DELIVERY DATES WHEN KNOWN.

3. NO FILE.

As every Texas or Tennessee redneck knows, “stump broke” is a ribald characterization of a boy and his female mule and the things they might do with the boy standing behind his mule on a tree stump. Dutch and I thought it would take Langley a while to figure out that point E was a joke, but we were wrong. It wouldn’t take the task force long to get beyond its Ivy Leaguers and find someone who knew a little something about mules and rednecks, for soon we received a cable that read something like the following:

IMMEDIATE ISLAMABAD

WININTEL—MULE REQUIREMENTS FOR FY 88

REF: ISLAMABAD 139987

1. YOUR SPECS FORWARDED REF HAVE BEEN FOLDED INTO THE PROCUREMENT PROCESS. REGRET, HOWEVER, THAT OUR MOST RELIABLE SOURCES OF MULES DO NOT REPEAT DO NOT PROVIDE STUMP TRAINING OR STUMP BROKE CERTIFICATES. WE HAVE RUN EXHAUSTIVE IN-HOUSE REVIEW OF PERSONNEL FILES TO LOCATE OFFICERS IN THE AGENCY WHO FAMILIAR WITH COMPLEX CERTIFICATION PROCESS AND HAVE FOUND THAT ONLY TWO ARE SNYDER AND BEARDEN NOW, BY FORTUNATE HAPPENSTANCE, IN