The Drifters (66 page)

Well, anyway, it was in these outposts that I first met the tech reps, and when I saw how they were throwing away their money, I became a specialist in selling them common sense. World Mutual published a lot of pretty fancy manuals on salesmanship but none included the kind of pitch I used.

‘Listen, you stupid ass! You threw away twenty thousand dollars last year on booze and Singapore whores—and what did it get you? A bad dose of clap. So I’m not arguing any more. I’m signing you up for fifteen thousand dollars.’

‘Who says?’

‘I already said. Sign here.’

As a result, every Christmas I get a dozen letters from remote places, and every one thanks me for having made some tech rep save his money.

One of the first of this group to invest with me was the especially difficult man I found working in Turkey—Harvey Holt. I was forty-six at the time and he was twenty-eight, a former marine captain whose wife was in the process of taking him to the cleaner’s. Bitter, tough, capable, he was then serving his first overseas stint as a tech rep for United Communications of New York, which had recently installed an airport communications system for Turkey. Other members of the original team had returned to the States, leaving Holt in charge of all the installations
in the country. He was required to keep an apartment at headquarters in Ankara but spent most of his time at Yesilkoy airport near Constantinople, where the big four-engined planes flew in to refuel for the Asia run.

Holt was not an easy man to know, for he found it difficult to speak, and when he did he said little about himself. It was only when it became necessary for him to designate a beneficiary for his World Mutual shares that I discovered he had been divorced, for he said gravely, ‘Make it to Lora Kate. Where the kid is concerned, she’s great.’ I could have helped him save more of his money except that he insisted upon sending his young son a larger check each month than the court had ordered. He saw the boy once every five or six years, and once he told me, ‘I’d like him to spend a year with me, but where’s the school?’

Holt himself had known good schooling and had profited from it. At Laramie High, in eastern Wyoming, he had run into an excellent physics teacher who had taught him advanced electronics in an after-school club, so that when at seventeen Holt had lied about his age in order to join the marines, they grabbed at him and made him a communications specialist. At Iwo Jima he had hugged the beach, running the radio which controlled the landing; and at Okinawa, had picked up several decorations for bravery.

When World War II ended he was nineteen, preparing to land in the first assault wave on Japan. His character was already formed and would change little in later years: taciturn, fearless, competent. The last word was the key: ‘I respect people who can do things.’ As might have been expected, when the Korean War broke out he volunteered to rejoin the marines, even though his unit was not scheduled for call-up, and it was while serving north of Seoul that he learned of his divorce. A week later he made captain, so the two incidents seemed to balance out.

After Turkey, I met up with Holt in a variety of exotic places: Sumatra, Thailand, the western desert of Australia, and most memorable of all, Afghanistan, where I had last seen him in his meticulous house, the tiger rug upon the floor, a fantastic hi-fi set playing ‘A String of Pearls,’ in the kitchen a pretty secretary from the Iraqi embassy helping to prepare the evening meal, and facing you as you entered the door, a sign which visitors never forgot:

Harvey Holt insisted upon knowing where he was.

I have heard the fanciful argument that it is the tech rep who enables the United States to live well. That is, there are literally thousands of American businesses which do no better than break even on their sales to customers in the United States. Their degree of profit is determined by how much they sell abroad. And they cannot sell abroad unless they provide technically trained experts who will keep the product in working condition.

Let’s take these ideas one at a time. A refrigerator company I know—or it could be an automobile manufacturer or a firm making communications devices—has a market in the United States for a hundred thousand units. But because of competition, cost of materials and wage scales, this company cannot make a penny on a production this small. Therefore, at very little extra cost in overhead planning, and at reduced costs for raw materials and labor, it makes up a second hundred thousand and disposes of them abroad. Suddenly the operation becomes profitable and everyone is better off—the American consumer, the American workingman, the American shipping company, the American investor and the foreign consumer, who gets a good product for one tenth of what he would have to pay if someone tried to provide it locally.

Forget the fact that in order to enable the foreigner to buy the refrigerator, we give him the money through foreign aid. A man or a nation must do something with its
money. And besides, ninety cents out of every dollar comes right back to us—so who’s losing? I think you might be astonished if you knew how many things you buy are made possible because the profit in their manufacture has been insured by sales abroad.

Where does the tech rep come in? I remember back in the 1950s when we had this foreign field pretty much to ourselves … well, we and the British. Then the smart Japanese began to cut in, but frankly, in those years their product wasn’t very substantial—machines didn’t stand up; parts were hard to get … and how many workmen in Pakistan spoke Japanese?

It was the Germans—the West Germans, that is—and the Swedes and especially the Swiss who changed all this. First of all they made good machines—no better than what we and the British were making, but very good. Where was the difference? They assured any buyer in a backward country, ‘If this machine breaks down on Monday—and machines do break down, as you know from your experience with the Americans—you cable us and we will put one of our men on an airplane within two hours and he will be with you Tuesday night to solve your problems.’ And they did it. They showed us a completely new approach to industrial relations. They must have spent a million dollars on air travel, but they made ten million from it, because word got around, ‘You buy from the Germans and they keep the stuff running.’

The Americans? Well, in those years our boys were pretty high-handed. They had sold a good product, and if it broke down, it was because the gooks didn’t know how to handle it. In our own time we’d send somebody out with further explanations. We were very arrogant.

The British? This was sad. They knew that the workmanship in their factories was the best in the world, their business ethics the highest, their field men the most honorable in their representations—so if some bloody idiot in Burma or Pakistan had fouled the works, they could jolly well unfoul them or wait till somebody happened to be coming out from London on a P. and O. steamer. I well remember one English technician with whom I worked on a project in Hyderabad. An Indian workman had found that he could not coax a screw into place with a proper screwdriver, so he was tapping it lightly with a hammer. ‘My God!’ the Englishman cried in disgust as
he grabbed the hammer, then brandished it before the startled workman’s eyes. ‘Don’t you know what they call this?’ he demanded with icy sarcasm. ‘An American screwdriver.’ He then gave the workman a short lecture on the decline of responsible craftsmanship in the world and warned him never again to drive a screw into an English machine with a hammer. Only Americans did that. At the hotel, later, he told me with real sorrow of the pain he felt as he watched the steady decline of responsible workmanship. ‘No wonder the bloody machine breaks down. Driving a screw with a hammer!’

Meanwhile, the Germans, the Swedes and the Swiss were flying in to keep their machinery functioning, and if they found an Indian driving home a screw with a hammer, they suggested to their home offices that perhaps this particular screw ought to be replaced with something better, that a man could fasten with a hammer.

Any idea I ever had that American products had to be superior because of some divine right of American industry vanished when I watched those Germans. They not only made excellent products, they also knew how to keep their customers happy, and after we had begun to lose markets all over the world, we devised our own peculiar solution to the problem. We would not fly experts out from New York. We would have our experts living on the scene. If Germany could provide help within two days, we’d provide it within two hours.

It was in this way that our tough, lonely tech reps became a functioning part of the American system. If a household in Des Moines, Iowa, sleeps securely because some American soldier is standing guard along the DEW line, that same household buys many of its goods at bargain prices because some American technician in Sumatra or Peru is helping to keep his company viable. The frontier is never where we think it is, but able men had better be guarding that frontier.

Take the time Harvey Holt was left in central Sumatra to maintain the communications system UniCom had installed for the Indonesian government. He was stationed temporarily at Simpang Tiga, the airfield near Pakanbaru, trying to clear up some trouble that had shown up in a
relay station perched on a small hill that lifted its head above the jungle. Temperature 100°, humidity 100 per cent. Normal gear had rusted in the first two months and had to be replaced with stainless steel.

When Holt organized a safari to take him from Pakanbaru into the hill station, some of the old Sumatra hands warned him, ‘Better take along a professional hunter.’ He said, ‘I have my guns,’ so they shrugged their shoulders and watched apprehensively as he set off.

At dusk on the first day the gang heard a terrifying scream, and turned in time to see the last man in line having his face torn off by a tiger that must have measured ten feet from nose to hind paws. You see, most people who watch a tiger in a zoo see only the enormous teeth, and say, ‘He could bite a man in half.’ That isn’t it. What the tiger does is creep up on its prey from behind. You simply cannot hear a tiger approaching. Then, with an overwhelming leap, the tiger throws its right paw forward and around its victim’s face, while the left paw digs into the left shoulder and the throat. With the first enormous swipe the tiger rips away the target’s face and eyes, simply wipes them out. With the second, he cuts the windpipe and the big blood vessels in the shoulder. With his teeth, of course, he bites into the neck, but that isn’t necessary, for it is the mighty sweep of the claws that kills. Within thirty seconds after the claws hit, the target is dead, and this night the tiger had dragged the workman into the jungle before Holt could get back with his rifle.

It was dusk, since tigers prefer hunting as darkness falls. So on the spur of the moment Holt decided what must be done. He gathered the workers into camp and told them to keep a fire burning. He would go after the tiger. They warned him that no man could track a tiger at night, and he said, ‘I’m not going to track him.’

He lit off by himself, picked up the trail of blood in the fading light, and followed the rough path along which the tiger had dragged the dead workman. When the bloody trail disappeared into thick jungle, Holt ignored it and kept to the path he had been on. Finally he came to a small clearing where jungle grass replaced the heavy trees. Here, in the last remaining moments of light, he surveyed the area and chose a tree whose branches formed twin forks about twelve feet above the ground.

Sweating like a pig, his hands cut by the rough bark of
the tree, he climbed into this crude platform, braced himself, and took the precaution of using his belt to lash his knees to one of the limbs, so that even if he fell asleep he could not topple. Then he waited.

He kept his gun in his right hand, a strong flashlight in his left, and in the hours before midnight he listened to the wild night sounds that welled up from the Sumatran jungle. He heard pigs and night birds and insects. He judged that one almost silent movement in a tree close to his must have been a snake, but there were no poisonous ones in this region, so he paid no attention.

The sound he wanted to hear, the contented growl of a well-fed tiger picking its way home after a satisfactory feast, he did not hear that night, so at dawn he unfastened his knees, climbed down from the tree and slept for several hours in its shade, satisfied that the tiger would be sleeping too. The bad time came in the afternoon, when he became aware of the insects that were exploring him. The heat was unbearable. Sweat ran in alleyways down his back like a flood leaving a city. He had no water and could not risk searching for any, because aloft he saw vultures wheeling in for their share of the dead man, and this proved that the tiger had left that scene and was wandering somewhere in the jungle.

Holt was convinced that the tiger, having eaten his fill, would not again attack the work party but would leave the jungle depths and come along this trail to the opening and cross it to follow the trail on the other side. He judged that it would make its journey across the open space shortly after midnight.

How did Holt know this? Wherever he was stationed, he made it a point to learn as much about the terrain and the people as possible. He had an insatiable curiosity, plus the capacity to absorb and digest evidence. From his first days in Sumatra, when the various communication centers and relays were being built, he had been fascinated by tigers, and although he had never shot one, he appreciated what would be required to do so. He was as certain of his opinions on tigers as he was on his judgment of radio tubes: ‘If you have your hideout higher than twelve feet, branches get in your line of sight. Lower, and the tiger can catch you when he leaps at the light.’