A Texas Mule+
By Allen Morris
A Texas farmer had a new mule he needed to train; it would not do anything he wanted it to-not even go into its stall in the barn. In exasperation, he hired a mule skinner to come out and break the mule in. The old mule tamer arrived at the farm and had the owner explain what he wanted done. The old man looked at the mule then at the farmer, reached down and picked up a fence post that was lying on the ground, and, swinging the post like a baseball bat, he hit the mule right between the eyes. The mule shook its head, braced its two front legs just as stubbornly as before, and refused to move. The mule tamer swung the post and again hit the mule between the eyes, this time twice as hard as before. The blow knocked the mule to his knees.
As it struggled back to its feet, the old man went around to the back of the mule and hit it on the rear with a third blow. He then dropped the post onto the ground, caught the mule by its halter, and calmly led it into the barn. By this time, the farmer was furious: he threw his hat down on the ground, cursed, and yelled at the old man, “What are you doing!? I hired you to come out and tame my mule, not to kill him!”
While he ranted and raved, the old man just stood there. He looked up at the sky, then down at the ground. Finally, he just spat some tobacco juice to the side (he was chewing Red Man), and looked the farmer squarely in the eyes. “It appears to me that you’re a mighty good farmer,” said the skinner. “You got a good stand of cotton in the field out yonder, and your rice paddies down by the creek look mighty good - - - - but you don't know nothin’ about taming mules!”
“What do you mean?” asked the farmer. The old mule tamer continued, “You see, when I want to teach a mule something, the first thing I do is get his attention.”
To a great extent, that is the way I have felt the way the Lord was to get my attention in life. He was the mule tamer; I was the mule. Born and raised in Texas, I grew up in a family that was poor on the rough side of town in San Antonio. Later, we moved to Palacios a small town on the Texas Gulf coast. Despite the fact that we were poor and didn’t have a lot of things that other families had, there were good times. Sometimes I would just feel really happy inside, as if everything was “right” with the world.
Growing Up
In my senior year at Palacios High School, Clint Harris the pastor of our Methodist church, who had come to us from North Carolina, told me that if I wanted to enter the ministry he could get me a scholarship to Duke University. For some reason, he seemed pretty pleased with his offer. Thinking just like a guy raised in a small Texas town, I turned it down for three reasons. First of all, North Carolina was a long way from Texas, and anything worth knowing about was within the borders of Texas, or so I thought. Secondly, to me the name “Duke University” just sounded stupid. I mean, “Duke”. I’d never heard of Duke. Who’d ever heard of “Duke”? What would it look like to have a degree hanging on my wall from “Duke”? That didn’t have the “prestige” of, say, “Rice” or “The University of Texas”. And finally, I figured that any school named after John Wayne really couldn’t have much going for it academically. So, I went to the local junior college down the road – and drifted away from church.
I got into trouble as boys sometimes will. Fighting was a real problem in my life. The last one was when I was nineteen. “Hubert” (not his real name) got to picking on me one day at college. That evening after classes, he came by. When I saw him at the door, I knew why he was there and decided that we needed to settle this conflict. We went out into the country where some other students had met.
Hubert and I went at it: he hit me on the right side of my head as hard as he could. During the next few moments, I hit him several times and then once with an uppercut to the chin – really hard. He went down and just lay on the ground without moving. I looked down at him and said, “I didn’t ask for this fight, Hubert. You did.”
One of the other guys slapped him on each side of the face; he woke up, got up, and still wanted to fight. I was more careful with him then, working him over in the face. Finally, when he was bleeding from the mouth and nose, and I’d knocked him to his knees, the other guys who were three stopped the fight.
A friend took me back to my room; some other guys took Hubert to the hospital. I tried to study for the next day’s classes but couldn’t. The sight of Hubert’s bloodied face and his blackened eyes made me sick, and the thought that I might have killed him when I’d hit him with the uppercut really started me to thinking. Even though Hubert started it, I felt really sorry for him. As for me, I was poor. Our family didn’t even have a car. I was going to college on a scholarship. What would have happened if I had killed him? I would have gone to prison and my whole future would have gone down the drain. In my conversation with another guy years later in a similar situation, I learned that he had “done time” in prison for manslaughter because he had killed a man in a fight. That could have been me.
Drafted!
I later attended East Texas State University, became an atheist, got married, and was drafted into the Army. One day I received a letter that started with “Greetings. You have been drafted into the service….” Nine days later, I was in the Army.
Since I was in pretty good shape physically, I enjoyed Basic Training – although I never want to go through it again. It pushed me further physically than I ever thought possible. It also provided lasting memories and new perspectives. That is something about the Army during the time of the draft – you met people from all walks of life, to include some of the absolute best and some of the “not-so-best” too.
The drill sergeants would dog us unmercifully. This was during the height of the Vietnam War and I knew they were trying to get us in the best shape possible. In the morning we would be up before dawn, do P.T. (physical training), and go out on our run. We would run – and run – and run. We used to run so far and fast that I would think, “My lungs are going to burst. I’ve got to fall out.” Then I saw what the drill sergeants would do the guys who did fall out and then tell myself, “Boy, you just keep on running.” After awhile, I got in really good shape and at the end of the run when the drill sergeants would ask, “Do you think you’ve had enough?” and I knowing they had to get us into the mess hall to eat would yell back, “No, drill sergeant, let’s run some more!” That would get a rise out of the other guys – but one time the drill sergeant responded, “Okay, since Trainee Morris wants to run some more, we’ll run some more.” I never did that again. I remember one night that we were given P.T. for three hours straight – nothing but pushups, situps, and all of the other exercises they could think of – just because they wanted to have fun with us. Right. Fun for them, not for us. One of the quotes I remember is, “Get down and give me pushups until I get tired!” [Huh?]
When we graduated from Basic, they put a group of us on a chartered plane and flew us to Philadelphia, then onto a bus and up to Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. Arriving at 2:30 in the morning, we immediately went to the in-processing building where we were met by a staff sergeant. He said, “Gentlemen, please be seated.” I remained standing at attention thinking there must have been some officers behind us. He repeated what he’d said, telling us that he was talking to us. After the briefing, he took us to the barracks where we would spend the night. I was put into a top bunk – and immediately went to sleep.
In the morning I woke up and saw there was a guy who had slept on the bottom bunk. We talked and our conversation drifted around to my asking him how long he was in for. He replied, “Six years.” I then asked him what kind of a school he had gotten? He replied, “None.” Before I could think, the words rolled out of my mouth, “That was dumb.” With his back to me as he took off the shirt from his six foot, four inch frame he replied, “Well, the judge told me he would offer me either six years in the Army or six years in prison, so I chose the Army.” After that explanation, seeing a knife scar across his back and how big he was, that sounded like a good deal to me.
One of the “buddies” I met in the service was Gary Garner, a guy from the streets of Chicago – “Shy-town” as he called it. We used to get into trouble and I would always get away without any consequences. Gary would look at me, grin, point upward, and say, “Hey, Al. somebody up there likes you.” At the time, I didn’t know it but he was right: Somebody “up there” did like me. Gary was later killed – and I wasn’t.
The Vietnam War
I served a tour in Southeast Asia. Each day, we concentrated on just getting through that day alive and survive two dangers – the “bad guys” and the snakes.
One day while traveling through the countryside with two other Americans, we passed a government outpost that looked like it had been wiped out by the communists. At that time, I knew there were some of the Thai communists, Pathet Lao, Viet Cong, and the North Vietnamese Army in our sector. I became afraid. It felt as if I were completely hollow, fear poured inside, and there was an uncontrollable urge to start running – to just run anywhere and not stay there. I overcame this fear and regained control by telling myself, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You can’t run! There’s nowhere to go. In order for you to be safe, you would have to run across five hundred miles of jungle, swim eight thousand miles of ocean, and then run across a thousand miles of desert before you would be safely back in Texas. You can’t do it, Boy! You can’t do it!” Only this reasoning could overcome the fear.
The snakes. I saw more poisonous snakes in that one year: cobras, green vipers, banded kraits, and pit vipers. We caught several to include an Asiatic cobra and a python. One time when I was taking the garbage out and wearing my thong sandals, as I put my left foot down I happened to look down at the path. I froze; less than two feet from me was a female King Cobra. She slowly slithered across the path, into the grass, and out of the compound. After that, I would always look down at the ground when I walked – a habit I carried back to the States.
Another time two of our guys went into one of our bunkers at night to have a smoke. They sat down on the sand bags piled up in the middle for the machine gun, struck a match – and saw a cobra right between them looking from one to the other. They each went out opposite windows of the bunker.
Later one of our guys Amos Hicks was working on some equipment – a high voltage amplifier called a klystron. As he removed the last of seven screws and removed the plate, a cobra stuck its head out; Amos held the screwdriver by the blade and hit the snake on the head. The cobra shook its head, and then darted back inside the klystron. Later he was found dead – shorted out by 14,000 volts of radio energy.
The media were no friends. Once I saw a news truck with “CBS” painted on the side drive past our compound close to the Laotian border. An associate later told me:
One morning I was in Pakse [pronounced “Pahk’ say”] Laos watching the Royal Laotian Air Force fly missions against the communists coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This CBS news truck rolled up, set up their equipment, and waited. After flying several missions, the pilots landed about noon, took a smoke-break and had lunch. It was then the camera started rolling and the newscaster said, “Well, here we are in Pakse, Laos and, as you can see, these pilots are not too interested in fighting the war against their enemy.” He went on in that vein for awhile. After he had shut the camera off, I got in his face and asked, “Why did you broadcast that? That was a lie!” He replied, “Son, the truth doesn’t sell.”
I was so glad that I was not there at the time. If I had, I would have smashed his camera, burned his truck, and beaten the guy up. He had broadcast what would serve to convince the people back in the “world”– as we called the United States – that the Laotians didn’t care about what was happening over here, which was not true and would damage our effort to keep this part of the world free. I liked the Laotian people, admired their culture, and knew of their love for freedom. But then if I had seen the broadcast and done what I wanted to do to that news team, I could have predicted the headlines that would have read, “Battle-crazed sergeant beats up peaceful newsman” which would have been yet another distortion of the truth.
It was best that I learned about this after-the-fact. But since that time, I have never trusted the news media – a fact that was born out later in other operations in Grenada and Operation Desert Shield/Storm.
Back in the Army Now
I got through the year safely, returned to the United States, got out of the Army, and went to the University of Texas at Arlington. It seemed that as I filled my head with book knowledge, my life was filled with a growing sense of emptiness. I received my degree and an Army Commission as a Second Lieutenant, went back into the Army, and was divorced from my wife.
Assigned to Germany on a first tour, I did well professionally even serving as a liaison officer to both a German battalion and a French regiment. Since I spoke German, communication with the battalion was easy. Working with the French unit was more of a problem, but made easier by the English-speaking French lieutenant-colonel Roland Herve, and Lieutenant Michael Crouzet, who had grown up north of the Pyrenees Mountains and with whom I spoke Spanish.
Suicide
My personal life was a mess. I went through a roller coaster ride of emotions caused by the divorce, and the empty feeling I continued to have inside. Living had become so painful that it was tough to just get through each day. I had to find some way to get out of the “black depressions” I was experiencing. One day, while I was on Christmas vacation in Houston, the solution came to me – I would kill myself. I would get on the plane, fly back to Germany, load the pistol I kept in my room, put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. After I had made the decision to commit suicide, I felt happy. There was an actual feeling of joy inside, because I had found my “solution”