A few weeks after his gift subscription to TIME began, a Marine sergeant stationed at the U.S. consulate in Rabat, French Morocco, got a phone call. At first he thought it was a practical joke. Said the voice on the wire: "My name is Paul Perret. I'm from TIME. and I'd like to know whether your magazine has been getting to you when it should."

The phone call was no practical joke. Paul Ferret's job is to see that the sergeant in Rabat--and all other TIME readers in the U.S. armed forces in England, Europe and North Africa--get their copies regularly. A journalism graduate of Tulane University, Paul Perret is military circulation representative for TIME-LIFE International, and his assignment, which began last October, has already taken him some 25,000 miles by car, plane, train (and, in emergency, by thumb) all over England, the NATO countries of Europe, down through Austria and Italy to French Morocco.

To get the magazine to military readers. TIME uses the established distribution facilities of Air Force Times, and also Stars and Stripes. It is Perret's job to unsnarl the ever occurring transportation snags, and to solve the multitude of snafus that occur in the complicated business of distributing promptly each week thousands of copies of TIME to 550 military newsstands.

Last June, for example, there were complaints of delivery delays in the Metz area. Investigation showed that the magazines were arriving in Metz on schedule but were being sidetracked by faulty freight handling. With the help of the local Stars and Stripes men, this problem was soon ironed out. In another case, faster delivery to Germany was solved in Paris. Previously the magazines were shipped in bulk to Frankfurt, where mail is sorted for the U.S. zone. Perret arranged to have issues of TIME sacked and addressed in Paris for individual APO designations, thereby saving further handling and delay in Frankfurt.

Perret also works closely with the Army and Fleet Postal Officers on military subscription problems. When he visited Naples recently, the Fleet Postal Officer commented on the speed with which TIME keeps up with the movement of Navy ships from one FPO to another. Ferret explained that TIME'S worldwide publication of five editions makes it logistically easy to keep up with a wandering Navy vessel. For example, if a sailor's ship is in the Mediterranean or the North Sea, he would get the Atlantic edition. If he moved into the Pacific, he would get either the Pacific edition printed in Honolulu or the one from Tokyo.

In short, the object of our circulation department is to make TIME just as available to the men serving over seas as it is to civilians at home. Says Perret: "We've been lucky enough to get delivery service in most places to the point where it's so much like home that we get quick gripes on the rare occasions when the magazine does arrive late." Perret, who makes the Paris office of TIME-LIFE International his home operating base, does most of his traveling now in a small French Simca and has had his share of minor crises. He once had to hitchhike for miles on a snowy German highway after two tires blew out. Another time, he spent the night cuddling three hot-water bottles in a Lancashire barn when there was no room in the local inn. He has lost his share of shirts to hotel laundries, suffered his moments of confusion in dealing with six different currencies, but wherever he goes, Perret reports, he finds that TIME has made friends for him before his arrival.

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