The second problem was competition. It was coming to his attention that he wasn’t unique. Rare, but not unique. Other guys were getting in the game. A free market was developing. His deals were occasionally rejected. People walked away, claiming a better trade was available elsewhere. It shocked him.
Change and adapt. He thought it through. He spent an evening on his own, lying in his narrow cot in his hooch, thinking hard. He made the breakthrough. Why chase down specific physical things that were already hard to find, and could only get harder? Why trek on out to some medic and ask what he wanted in exchange for a boiled and stripped Charlie skull? Why then go out and barter for whatever damn thing it was and bring it back in and pick up the skull? Why deal in all that stuff? Why not just deal in the commonest and most freely available commodity in the whole of Vietnam?
American dollars. He became a moneylender. He smiled about it later, ruefully, when he was convalescing and had time to read. It was an absolutely classic
progression. Primitive societies start out with barter, and then they progress to a cash economy. The American presence in Vietnam had started out as a primitive society. That was for damn sure. Primitive, improvised, disorganized, just crouching there on the muddy surface of that awful country. Then as time passed it became bigger, more settled, more mature. It grew up, and he was the first of his kind to grow up with it. The first, and for a very long time the only. It was a source of huge pride to him. It proved he was better than the rest. Smarter, more imaginative, better able to change and adapt and prosper.
Cash money was the key to everything. Somebody wanted boots or heroin or a girl some lying gook swore was twelve and a virgin, he could go buy it with money borrowed from Hobie. He could gratify his desire today, and pay for it next week, plus a few per cent in interest. Hobie could just sit there, like a fat lazy spider in the centre of a web. No legwork. No hassle. He put a lot of thought into it. Realized early the psychological power of numbers. Little numbers like nine sounded small and friendly. Nine per cent was his favourite rate. It sounded like nothing at all. Nine, just a little squiggle on a piece of paper. A single figure. Less than ten. Really nothing at all. That’s how the other grunts looked at it. But 9 per cent a week was 468 per cent a year. Somebody let the debt slip for a week, and compound interest kicked in. That 468 per cent ramped up to 1,000 per cent pretty damn quickly. But nobody looked at that. Nobody except Hobie. They all saw the number nine, single figure, small and friendly.
The first defaulter was a big guy, savage, ferocious, pretty much subnormal in the head. Hobie smiled.
Forgave him his debt and wrote it off. Suggested that he might repay this generosity by getting alongside him and taking on the role of enforcer. There were no more defaulters after that. The exact method of deterrence was tricky to establish. A broken arm or leg just sent the guy way back behind the lines to the field hospital, where he was safe and surrounded by white nurses who would probably put out if he came up with some kind of heroic description about how he got the injury. A bad break might even get him invalided out of the service altogether and returned Stateside. No kind of deterrence in that. No kind of deterrence at all. So Hobie had his enforcer use punji spikes. They were a VC invention, a small sharp wooden spike like a meat skewer, coated with buffalo dung, which is poisonous. The VC concealed them in shallow holes, so GIs would step on them and get septic crippling wounds in the feet. Hobie’s enforcer aimed to use them through the defaulter’s testicles. The feeling among Hobie’s clientele was the long-term medical consequences were not worth risking, even in exchange for escaping the debt and getting out of uniform.