The Drifters (65 page)

But when I thought of Afghanistan on that first of July, it was for none of these reasons. I saw not mountains and caravans, but a man, a ruggedly built man, forty-five years old, black hair, quiet gray eyes, five feet ten, with a slight cleft to his chin and a somber, determined manner. I saw him not on the desert, where he had spent much of his time these past two years, but in a rented house in Kabul near the slap-dash airport. The house was unforgettable in that every item within it was in place. In the bathroom, for example, the two toothbrushes—green for morning, red for night-time—hung precisely by the mirrored cabinet, inside of which stood a row of bottles, each in its designated position: one for aftershave
lotion, one for mouthwash, one for dysentery pills, et cetera. His bathrobe hung from a special hook, his towels were piled neatly in three sizes, his Sears, Roebuck scales stood in polished chrome by the door, his backscratcher by the tub.

It was the same throughout the rest of the house. His dressing room contained neat piles of handkerchiefs, white shirts, jockey shorts; his closet displayed rows of suits and tan shoes. It was by no means the house of a fastidious or effeminate man; it was the house of a meticulous one, who wanted things just so, with a minimum of confusion. His rack of guns, well used, was conspicuous in the hallway, and spread on the floor of his study lay an enormous tiger skin, the head snarling with immense white teeth.

This was the home of Harvey Holt, legal citizen of Wyoming, divorced, graduate of the Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical College, and field expert on radar, on loan to the government of Afghanistan from the Union Communications Company of New York. More briefly, Harvey Holt was a tech rep.

Whatever financial good luck I’ve had in my later years has sprung primarily from the fact that I’ve worked with tech reps, those tough, difficult men who serve at the frontiers of modern industry. If I were required to operate in a dangerous terrain, I would rather have as my companion a good tech rep than any other type of man. I could depend on him.

What is a tech rep? Look at it this way. Pan American Airways has a handful of outmoded propeller planes it can no longer use on long hauls in competition with jets. So it unloads them cheap to some small country which is just beginning its own airline and needs short-haul planes … say, Burma. To sweeten the deal, Pan American arranges with Lockheed, who made the prop plane, to send along a team of six technical representatives to explain to the Burmese how to operate the old planes.

This team works in Burma for seven months, penetrating to every airfield at which the planes land. When necessary, the men live in grass huts, ford rivers, fight off jungle animals, raise hell in Rangoon when they are lucky enough to be stationed at the capital, and very shortly
know more about Burma than the experts, for there is no part of the Burma experience in which they do not involve themselves. Usually they even learn to speak a rough Burmese. But their principal job remains the same: ‘Keep those planes flying!’ If they have to make a needed spare part in a local machine shop, they make it. And at the same time they are teaching the Burmese to take over.

At the end of the seven months, five of the tech reps return to the United States for their next assignment. The sixth man stays on in Burma, caring for all the Lockheeds in the country. Alone, he settles into a strange and sometimes wonderful life, with an apartment in Rangoon, a hangout in Mandalay, a bar in Myitkyina where he leaves a change of clothing, and a hut up in the mountains at the far end of the line. He often takes a Burmese mistress, or two or three at different airfields, and after he’s been in Rangoon for any length of time he is apt to argue bitterly against our State Department men, or the Foreign Office types from London, for he has become Burmese and defends their interests. He is much more sympathetic to their problems than to those of his own country.

The years pass, and he remains in Burma, servicing Lockheeds. He can handle not only the flying problems which develop, but also the maintenance, the servicing of brakes, the overhaul of radios and the replacement of the hydraulic system. His technical knowledge is formidable. At times he keeps the whole Burmese fleet of aircraft operable; without him the planes could not fly. And he functions in any weather, at any altitude, in any emergency. If one word were used to describe him, it would have to be ‘competent.’ He can do things. He can keep aircraft flying, and if a pilot were to conk out, he could fly the plane himself.

In the remote areas of the world, I have known hundreds of tech reps—aviation, heavy tractors, communications, x-ray technicians, Coca-Cola bottlers, General Motors maintenance—and they always have four characteristics.

First, they are intelligent. Most of them quit education before acquiring their college degrees, but they know much more than the average college graduate. And they continue their education throughout their lives. If Lockheed discovers a better way to do something, the tech rep in Burma will study the report in his jungle hut until he knows
every nuance of the innovation, knows it perhaps better than the man who dreamed it up. Or if Lockheed overlooks something it should have been attending to, some tech rep in Burma or Pakistan will invent a device that will do the trick. Their knowledge is pragmatic, but profound.

Second, they are difficult to manage. Left alone in the Burmese jungle, they operate beautifully. Bring them back to California, where they have to attend parties given by the head of engineering, and they fall apart. In civilization they tend to be drunks, lechers, malcontents and irresponsibles. On the frontier they are powerfully organized. Putting it another way, they are the darlings of the technical staff, the despair of the personnel men. Within two weeks of bringing a tech rep back to headquarters, the man in charge of the home office can be depended upon to shout, ‘Get that miserable son-of-a-bitch out of here.’ But if you send a man to Burma who is not psychologically suited to be a tech rep, even worse trouble develops, and the same boss, reading the reports from the Burmese government, will growl, ‘Get that poor jerk out of there and send them a real man.’ So the difficult, untamed, competent tech rep is flown out on the next plane, and there is no more trouble in Burma. Thus the tech rep is a continuation of a fundamental strain in American life. He is the lineal descendant of the gifted wagon maker who could not get along in the settled civilization of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but who was invaluable on the frontier at Santa Fe.

Third, practically every tech rep I have known has had trouble with women. He loves them … invariably he loves them in a tough, manly sort of way. But he cannot live with them. They baffle him, confuse him, tear him to shreds with their feminine inconsistencies. If you summoned one hundred tech reps to a convention in Bombay, you would find that at least eighty of them were divorced some more than once. But in the bars, when the convention meetings were over, you would not find them complaining about their former wives. They would speak most often from deep confusion: ‘I don’t know what happened. She couldn’t stand life away from home, I guess.’ You would hear no recriminations: ‘After all, I was scheduled to be in Formosa for seventeen months. There was no place for her, so I left her in Amarillo and never saw her again.’ But you would also hear some hilarious stories: ‘I met this cute
chick in Kowloon and set her up with a millinery shop in Hong Kong. A business partnership. I put twelve thousand dollars into the deal, and I had been in Hokkaido for exactly two months, when she sold the place and ran off with the twelve thousand … and a newspaperman from the
Chicago Tribune.
’

But no amount of disillusion or ill treatment is sufficient to turn a tech rep away from women. I have never known a misogynist among them. They bounce from one disaster to the next with a kind of animal joy, and the man whose former Chinese mistress runs off with twelve thousand dollars one day, is lending his new Japanese mistress fourteen thousand the next. The scars of love these men bear are not all psychological; many have been cut with knives or broken bottles. Two that I knew had been shot at by their unstable wives. One had been fed ever-increasing doses of poison until he protested, ‘This oatmeal is either sour or poisoned, and I bought the goddamned stuff yesterday.’ But at the trial he refused to testify against his wife. When it developed that three of her earlier husbands had died mysteriously—all having been partial to oatmeal—he said simply, ‘Sometimes a guy gets out just in time.’ He told me this in a hut in northern Thailand, where his Siamese mistress had learned how to make oatmeal from boxes of the cereal he scrounged from the United States army base outside Bangkok.

Fourth, every tech rep I have ever known was a nut about high-fidelity music systems and spent much money on equipment. No matter where they pitched their tents, no matter how far into the jungle or how remote from the capital city of the nation they served, the tech reps insisted upon having good sound, and to get it, they went to extraordinary lengths. Because the supply of electricity varied so much from country to country, any tech rep who had to depend upon the local system had to provide his own voltage regulators, transformers, capacitors and safety switches. To bring a fluctuating 220 Burmese volts down to the smooth 110 which American equipment required, the tech rep would often need half a Jeep-load of gear, and this he would gladly lug from one base to the next, content to spend time and money on the project just so long as the end result was sound of high quality. In his assembling of units he was most catholic, for he used
Leak speakers from England, Tandberg recorders from Sweden, Sony amplifiers from Japan, Dual turntables from Germany, and McIntosh preamplifiers from the United States. To collect this complicated gear from so many different sources required an ingenuity of its own, and one of the first things a tech rep did on reporting to a new country was to ascertain how he could promote the various components he needed. Pilots from Scandinavian Airlines System could be relied upon to bring the Tandbergs, German technicians working in the country usually could get hold of the fine turntables produced in the Ruhr, and sooner or later each tech rep established relations with someone in the United States embassy who would import McIntosh or Fisher gear. It was not unusual for older tech reps to spend two or three thousand dollars for an assembly.

What kind of music did they play on their super-machines? A surprising number played only classical music, with Vivaldi and Mozart the favorites. Others preferred ultra-sweet waltzes from the period when they were first courting, and these men would often sit staring into space as they recalled the love affairs and marriages that had begun so marvelously only to end in such hell. The majority, however, had large collections of those anonymous records which fill the catalogues:
Music for a Rainy Day, Music for Lovers, Music for the Hours before Dawn.
I remember one man in Greece who had
Bing Crosby’s Greatest Hits
, Volume I. He also had
Greatest Hits
by twenty-nine other singers, most of whom I had never heard of.

Regardless of what style of music the individual tech rep preferred, you could be certain that he would have in his collection of records a healthy sampling of those made by Enoch Light. I understand that Light is not too well known in the United States, but overseas he is a hero, for he has made a series of records intended for men like the tech reps. These records feature the best popular songs, some from way back, like ‘What Is This Thing Called Love?’ and ‘Tea for Two,’ played so that you can hear the melody, but with the instruments of the orchestra separated to an exaggerated degree. I have sat for hours in remote outposts in Sumatra or Turkey as some tech rep played his Enoch Light records: ‘I want you to listen to the way that rasp comes in a half a note higher on
the left channel.’ If I were writing an opera about the tech reps, I would ask Enoch Light to score the music, and I would provide for things like kettle drums, bongos and flutes, some on the extreme left-hand side of the orchestra, others on the extreme right, and never would any sound come from the middle. That would be true tech-rep music.

After I had been working with the tech reps for some years, one of them showed me an article by a German psychiatrist who argued that men turn to the reassurance of high-fidelity systems only when they find they cannot control the society about them, especially the women. This head-shrinker claimed that a man who has made a mess of his association with a wife or mistress finds spiritual consolation in being able to turn a little dial and thus make a great, intricate system respond. Even the slightest turn produces results. Even the dreariest man can feel himself a master of his fate when he can reduce Beethoven to a whisper or increase Bing Crosby to a greater-than-human roar. Imagine! He does all this with the twist of a wrist, so obviously he cannot be a complete jerk. The German psychologist concluded that no man who was truly normal would need to bother with such mechanical feeding of his ego. Then, lest his meaning be obscure, he added, ‘No man whose relations with women are satisfactory would need to construct a high-fidelity music system which he could dominate!’ I had a copy of the essay made and showed it to several tech reps who had intricate systems, and they laughed at the analysis, but I noticed that each of them was divorced.

I have a splendid system in Geneva.

I have said that the tech reps were responsible for my financial security. It happened this way. When I got out of the navy in 1945 I kicked around for a while in various jobs—Texas, Connecticut, California—but like a lot of other guys I found that routine work tasted like ashes after the significance of war, so I finally drifted into selling mutual funds for an outfit in Minneapolis, and this gave me some freedom to move about. I became moderately good at the job because I truly believed in saving, and this helped me to convince others. I simply showed them my own account and signed them up.

Word of my hard work reached other companies and I got several flattering offers, but stood pat. Then in 1954 World Mutual was formed and our Minneapolis outfit was among the first to join. Now I found myself with a world-wide market, and after my first trip overseas I knew this type of work was for me. I volunteered for all the out-of-the-way countries that no other salesmen wanted because I knew things they didn’t know. Americans on the frontier in Indonesia, Cambodia or Afghanistan earn good money, so there is lots around if you can get to it. And whereas a busy man in Brussels won’t give you time to make a sales pitch, men in remote outposts are eager to hear what you want to say. And when the Germans, Belgians, Yugoslavs and Swedes see their American counterparts saving all this money and making a profit on it, they want to get aboard too, so that sometimes you can sit in a fly-specked office and simply fill in the forms; they do the selling themselves.