Working The Trapline — Wild Horses, Old FP Thrillers & Weird Scenes In Khartoum

Wild horses are a symbol of the freedom of the American West. There’s something exhilarating about seeing them out in the sage, as Craig Rullman and I did on our recent run to Elko. They’re also an invasive species that has a big impact on the ecosystems where they roam, as they multiply beyond the carrying capacity of the land. So, what do you do with an icon that is a bit of a problem? Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the Dakota Badlands is facing a dilemma. From AP:

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The beloved wild horses that roam freely in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park could be removed under a National Park Service proposal that worries advocates who say the horses are a cultural link to the past.

Visitors who drive the scenic park road can often see bands of horses, a symbol of the West and sight that delights tourists. Advocates want to see the horses continue to roam the Badlands, and disagree with park officials who have branded the horses as “livestock.”

The Park Service is revising its livestock plans and writing an environmental assessment to examine the impacts of taking no new action — or to remove the horses altogether.

Removal would entail capturing horses and giving some of them first to tribes, and later auctioning the animals or giving them to other entities. Another approach would include techniques to prevent future reproduction and would allow those horses to live out the rest of their lives in the park.

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Delving into the Mau Mau Emergency and the top secret work of MACV-SOG in Vietnam got me thinking about a couple of books I read many decades ago that I really want to revisit. So I ordered up used copies of Nicholas Proffitt’s Edge of Eden and The Embassy House.

Edge of Eden is set in post-colonial Kenya.

One-time white hunter Adrian Glenton is asked by an African police inspector to select a handful of men to track down “The Hyena,” a ruthless and well-organized poacher claiming supernatural powers. It is a well-nigh impossible task, given The Hyena’s connections and the size of the national park in which he operates. 

I read it when it came out in 1990, when I was on one of my periodic binges on African safari lore. I think Glenton’s take on Bror Blixen — that he was among the top tier of white hunters — was the first time I’d seen a strong counter-narrative to the negative Out of Africa movie depiction of Blixen. I recall devouring the book and loving it, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it holds up more than 30 years on.

Proffitt covered the Vietnam War for Newsweek, and that informed his most famous work, Gardens of Stone, and The Embassy House. Never read Gardens of Stone, but saw the movie based upon it. The Embassy House grapples with the highly controversial Phoenix Program, which went after Viet Cong political infrastructure, especially in the Mekong Delta. Phoenix was a targeted killing program, not unlike some others that we have explored of late.

From Publisher’s Weekly.

Less often portrayed than the horrors of the soldiers’ war in Vietnam are those of the covert war conducted by the CIA. Proffitt, who worked in Vietnam as a journalist and wrote the highly praised Gardens of Stone, recreates them here in a story that’s hard-hitting, tense, often horrifying and utterly convincing. Captain Gulliver, nicknamed Sandman for his legendary skills as a killer, is a Green Beret who, in 1970, is “shanghaied” by the CIA to oversee the weeding out of Viet Cong from the villages of a Mekong Delta province. Gulliver hates both his job and his cold-blooded CIA superior, an arranger of “terminations” that he gets others to carry out. He finds friendship with his Vietnamese counterpart, the mysterious Captain Dang, and solace for his torn conscience in the arms of a Vietnamese actress. The entry on the scene of a naive and pretty CIA case worker and the torture-murder of an innocent man force Gulliver to make his grimmest choice yet between conscience and duty. This is not a story of communism versus democracy, but of civilized values sacrificed to political cause.

The Phoenix Program offers the classic “dirty war” contradictions. The nature of its operations opened the door to some pretty nasty human rights violations — torture, the killing of neutral innocents, etc. It was also highly effective. There’s evidence from the VC themselves that Phoenix was existentially threatening to the insurgency. William Colby, who ran the program for CIA, recalled that:

…[In] the years since the 1975, I have heard several references to North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese communists who account, who state that in their mind the most, the toughest period that they faced in the whole period of the war from 1960 to 1975 was the period from 1968 to ’72 when the Phoenix Program was at work.

Now, Colby is obviously an interested party, and he downplayed the dark side and its negative effects  — but nobody is disputing that VC veterans actually said those things.

The Embassy House is another book I recall devouring.

Nicholas Proffitt died too young, at 63, from kidney cancer. His work is worthy and I’m quite stoked to be revisiting it. Chase Eden and Embassy down on the used book market — they’re really good. I look forward to revisiting them for nighttime reading that lines up nicely with my current work.

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Another outstanding episode of the American Revolution podcast Worlds Turned Upside Down has dropped. It made my Tuesday newspaper delivery fly by. You can access it here or on all the podcasting platforms. Episode 5 is titled The Uprising, and it takes on Pontiac’s War.

That’s right, we’re five episodes in to a Revolution podcast and haven’t even got to the Stamp Act yet. That’s a damn fine thing, because this is one of the few takes on this history that really lays out how the French & Indian War and Pontiac’s War set the imperial conditions that would lead to the Revolution. The American Revolution may have touched off in Boston, but the powder train was laid on the frontier.

This episode makes a great companion to the Frontier Partisan Podcast  series on Pontiac’s War. Worlds covers the Cherokee War of 1761, which I don’t, and offers a very good overview of the diplomatic and political aspects of teh conflict, while mine has more detail on the military operations.

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The name “Khartoum” conjures images of violence and intrigue. The city in Sudan was the site of British General Charles Gordon’s fall in 1885, when the forces of the Mahdi rose up in the desert like Natohk’s horde, and laid siege to the city. Ace American operator Billy Waugh helped capture Carlos the Jackal there in 1994, and stalked a then-obscure terrorist eminence grise named Osama bin Laden through its mean streets.

Khartoum has been the scene of fighting between the Sudanese Armed and the paramilitary Rapid Suport Forces (RSF, an evolution of Janjaweed militias). AND, it’s become a special operations battleground in the Ukraine/Russia War. Hat tip to Craig Rullman for scouting up this weird borderland theater of a European war.

Kyiv Post sources in Ukraine’s special services provided an exclusive video that shows elements of Ukrainian special forces interrogating captured Wagner mercenaries in the Republic of Sudan.

In one part of the video special forces operators from the combat group Timur, part of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Directorate (HUR), are seen examining military vehicles, one truck shows signs of intense weapon strikes through the windshield and the body of a soldier, sporting the Wagner PMC badge, in the passenger seat.

Later footage shows a Ukrainian operator interrogating a Russian-speaking prisoner. He confesses to being part of a group of Wagner PMC mercenaries that were sent to Sudan to overthrow the local government, in the video.

Combat between Ukrainian Special Forces and Wagner Group mercs has been going on for several months. CNN reported on it back in September:

Ukrainian special services were likely behind a series of drone strikes and a ground operation directed against a Wagner-backed militia near Sudan’s capital, a CNN investigation has found, raising the prospect that the fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spread far from the frontlines.

Speaking to CNN, a Ukrainian military source described the operation as the work of a “non-Sudanese military.” Pressed on whether Kyiv was behind the attacks, the source would only say that “Ukrainian special services were likely responsible.”

The operation involved a series of attacks on the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is believed to be receiving assistance from Wagner, the Russian mercenary group, in its fight against the Sudanese army for control of the country.

Kiev Post posted a couple of videos purporting to show Ukrainian forces taking out Wagner Group personnel in Khartoum.

Why are they fighting in Sudan? Kiev Post offers this explanation:

In May 2023 HUR Chief Kyrylo Budanov vowed to “destroy Russian war criminals anywhere in the world, wherever they are.” An ongoing, state-sponsored campaign by Ukrainian overseas special operators to hunt down Wagner employees deployed to Sudan would be consistent with Budanov’s promise.

Russia, along with the Wagner Group, was directly involved in the coup in Sudan in 2019, supporting Hemedti and his fighters in the conflict and supplying weapons. Wagner also delivered surface-to-air missiles to the Sudanese Rapid Reaction Force (RSF).

So, basically, a blood feud and you kill ’em where you find ’em.

“Five crimson nails for the black pillar!”