But the nineteen-fifties marked a low point for mules. By mid-century, just two million existed in the United States. Quite simply, mechanization did them in. Trucks, jeeps, and helicopters replaced mules in the military, while tractors replaced them on the farm. Horses, which had also been made obsolete, were able to transition from utility to hobby: their numbers in the United States had dropped almost seventy-five per cent by 1950, from a high in the early part of the century, but racing and riding found their audiences, and the horse population started to grow again. Mules—not fast, not glamorous—were another matter.

When Ed Ceaser, a robust, round-faced former master sergeant in the Army who had completed multiple tours for the U.S. foreign service in Asia, arrived in Sumner County, Tennessee, in the early nineteen-eighties, the mule business was in the doldrums. This was to his advantage, since his company, American Export Group, needed to buy a lot of mules. Ceaser met with Hub Reese, Jr., a member of one of the biggest mule-trading families in Tennessee. (The family business had been founded in the nineteen-twenties by Hub’s grandfather Rufus, Sr., who started by buying and selling mules in Nashville.) Ceaser arranged to buy twelve hundred mules from Reese, which were to be sent in ten shipments by plane to Islamabad, Pakistan, and then by truck to Peshawar, and finally on to the border with Afghanistan, where they would be handed over to mujahideen forces who were fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The mules would transport supplies and equipment, and, in particular, they would thread their way up the Hindu Kush along the narrow, cragged mountain trails, carrying the cumbersome anti-aircraft missiles that were proving effective against the Soviet Air Force. The mule shipment was sanctioned by the U.S. government—the animals were going to depart from the Army base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

Every mule person in Tennessee, it seems, has a story about the Afghanistan shipments. People had either sold Reese a few of their mules or helped persuade someone to part with one—something not easily done, since Ceaser’s price, even in that depressed market, was measly. Certainly, a lot of the mule people in Sumner County observed, with pleasure, the attention it brought Reese. He was said to be a real, old-fashioned mule man, the sort of irrepressible guy who could talk you into buying a mule whether or not you had any intention of owning one. He was well liked and soon mourned; not long after fulfilling his contract with American Export Group, Reese developed lung cancer, smoked his way through chemotherapy, and died. Many people in the area also became good friends with the jovial Ceaser, who has also since died; no one knew what, exactly, American Export Group did—it was assumed to be a front for the C.I.A.—but everyone knew that Ceaser was a lot of fun.

The only specification in Ceaser’s contract was that the animals be healthy and a minimum of fourteen hands high—fifty-six inches—at the withers. That was a lot of mule for the money, so Reese saw to it that they were measured with a stainless-steel ruler sunk a few inches into the ground. “Ed told us the mules had to be fourteen hands,” George Coles, a Tennessee veterinarian who examined the mules and flew overseas with the first load, told me recently. “He didn’t tell us how we were supposed to measure them, now, did he?”

That first load, of a hundred and fourteen mules and one spotted horse—a gift for the Pakistani general who met the plane in Islamabad—left Tennessee in October of 1987. As Coles recalls, the animals were trucked to Fort Campbell, then loaded onto a Boeing 747 that had been gutted and filled with sawdust. When Coles arrived at the base, he discovered that the nine stable hands who were to accompany the animals had got drunk on rum-and-Cokes the night before and were passed out on the sawdust. At first, they were so still that Coles thought they were dead. The mules, though, were anything but still. In fact, they were absolutely kick-the-doors-down wild. “Let me tell you, these were not broke mules,” Coles told me. “No, they most definitely were not.” He said that the intractability of the mules was no surprise to him; some people had ended up using Reese’s deal as an opportunity to sell off their most unmanageable animals. At last, though, the stable hands shook themselves awake, the mules were loaded, and the plane took off. It stopped to refuel in Belgium. When customs officials stepped into the plane and got a look at the mules, the sawdust, and the dishevelled men, they skipped the inspection and waved them on.

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This was at a delicate moment for Pakistan with regard to Afghanistan; President Zia-ul-Haq was being pressured by the opposition and by the press to get out of the fray. Finally, the Pakistanis said that they would allow the flight to land in Islamabad, but, Coles says, they insisted that the plane be a civilian aircraft rather than a military one, and that it land at night and be gone by daybreak. It was a moonlight scramble to get the animals off the plane and onto the trucks. The Pakistanis became even more grudging hosts to the mules on subsequent shipments; the planes reportedly could not be mucked out in Islamabad, and the mules’ manure had to be flown back to the United States.

Coles, who has had a veterinary practice in Sumner County since 1975, is rumpled and bemused, with a thatch of gray hair and an ambling way with a tale. When I stopped in to see him, he had just finished surgery on a kitten, and was in the midst of planning a mule ride into the Tennessee hills with some friends, paying particular attention to which of the riders would be bringing the moonshine. He described getting off the plane in Islamabad and bumping along the bad roads to Peshawar and back again, and then heading home to Tennessee to help Reese prepare the next load. He said that he had always wondered what became of the mules. He shrugged and said, “You never know. They were too valuable to eat, though.” There were nine more shipments from Tennessee, the last in 1990.

The plan was at least partly logical: the mujahideen needed pack animals to carry supplies and ordnance into the mountains; the Soviets had placed a high priority on destroying the existing mujahideen caravans; and the Tennessee mules were twice the size and the strength of the little gray donkeys that are common throughout Afghanistan. What hadn’t been factored in was the mules’ unruliness or the fact that, being Tennessee natives, they were unaccustomed to Afghanistan’s altitude, food, water, and indigenous equine diseases. When Walid Majroh, a mujahideen commander, came to collect the mules, he was appalled. “I was amazed by their size,” he told me not long ago. “They were very big, very muscular animals. But just having a mule isn’t enough—you need them to be trained, and you need a handler. And you need them to be adapted to the environment. These mules? We couldn’t even put a harness on them. We couldn’t get them to walk. And we couldn’t get them to stand still.” After some time, a handful of the animals calmed down and were inducted, but Majroh assumes that most of them died within a few years, wiped out by local diseases. As for the rest, he isn’t certain. “We sent them back to Peshawar,” Majroh said, “and then, who knows?” To this day, he finds the mule shipments one of life’s great mysteries. “I sometimes wonder if it was a Reagan stimulus package for Tennessee,” he said.