SOURCE: Shelton, Frank W. “Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers: Vietnam Comes Home to America.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (winter 1983): 74-81.

Dog Soldiers (1974), the National Book Award winning novel by Robert Stone, remains arguably the best novelistic treatment of American involvement in Vietnam. Unlike such other recent novels as Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato (1978) and James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978) (both by former soldiers in Vietnam), Dog Soldiers does not concern the fighting or the political and moral issue of American involvement in Asia. It assumes the war as a given and traces its effects on the noncombatants both in Vietnam and the United States.

In a sense, the novel is a very conventional chase story, for which some reviewers have criticized it. Yet beneath the exciting surface story is a layer of philosophy or contemplation, often only obliquely alluded to in a cool and ironic tone, which gives the novel its subtext of meaning. Dog Soldiers conveys a feeling of paranoia, an emphasis carried over from Stone's first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, which described what was called the “Big Store” and gave the sense that people somewhere higher up are manipulating others and even reality for their own purposes. To this end the most corrupt people in Dog Soldiers represent the law, which is the supposed seat of order and authority in society. The feeling of paranoia gives the reader, even though the scenes of action are very spacious, a sense of claustrophobia. While not at all pleasant and without characters who are conventionally sympathetic, Dog Soldiers is compelling and sheds a great deal of light on the effect on the United States of the Vietnam War.

Dog Soldiers satirizes the left wing and the counterculture in the same way that A Hall of Mirrors deals with the right wing. Almost all the characters either have or have had some connection with the counterculture. Some of the minor characters are almost parody figures. See, for example, Eddie Peace, the Los Angeles hustler who could have stepped out of The Day of the Locust, or Dansker and Smitty, the two bohemian narcotics agents who are crazier in both a humorous and a threatening way than anyone outside the law. Anthiel, the Federal officer with a law degree who ultimately is in charge of the smuggling operation, certainly functions as more than a parody, but, looking “rather like a sympathetic young dean at an eastern liberal arts college,”¹ he evokes in Converse a feeling of complete awe.

The motif of the novel is announced when Hicks says, comparing Vietnam and the United States, “Here everything's simple. It's funnier there” (57). Actually things are not simple in Vietnam, or rather things are simple only in the sense that existence has been reduced to the basic struggle between life and death. Converse has a revelation while being fragmentation-bombed on the Red Field by the South Vietnamese Air Force: “the ordinary physical world through which one shuffled heedless and half-assed toward nonentity was capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death. Existence was a trap” (185). The same sort of situation exists back home; the only difference is that a façade of civilization covers the murderousness. In such a world morality has no place; it is mere excess baggage. Without reference to or dependence on morality, the issue is who among the characters can best adapt to the Darwinian world of the novel.

The plot concerns the smuggling of high-grade heroin from Vietnam to the United States. The heroin becomes the symbol of the corruption of American life and the human need to escape the world as it is. Converse, the journalist who went to Vietnam to gather material for a novel, sets the plot in motion. Though he frequently considers the morality of drug smuggling, he has disposed of the issue to his satisfaction. A detached, articulate, intellectual, he observes that Vietnam is “the place where everybody finds out who they are” (56). In this view Vietnam does not change people; rather it is the crucible in which their natures are revealed. What Converse learns about himself is his own emptiness: he realizes that there will be no novel. In addition he has never really embraced any moral principles upon which he was willing to act.² In the journalistic pieces he writes, “he was always careful to assume a standpoint from which moral objections could be inferred” (40), but apparently he feels no reservations about the war itself. So when Converse disposes of the moral objections to heroin by reference to the Great Elephant Zap: “if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high” (42), Stone accomplishes two things. He reveals the absurdity of the war and how such absurdity may lead people to desire an escape from reality, yet he also shows Converse rationalizing his own involvement in illegal activities.

The bankruptcy of his life is also indicated when he tells Hicks, “I feel like this [the smuggling] is the first real thing I ever did in my life. I don't know what the other stuff was about” (56). Thus the focus of his life has been drastically reduced; out of frustration and impotence he has willfully rejected the ethical, moral considerations which were a part of his past life, but he is not able to forget them entirely, as his constant self-contempt indicates. He assents to June's calling him a “funny little fucker” and thinks: “What a feckless and disorderly person he was. How much at the mercy of events” (182). While being bombed in the Red Fields he also learns fear, which becomes the touchstone of his being: “I am afraid, Converse reasoned, therefore I am” (42). With fear he feels a desperate desire to live: “He was the celebrated living dog, preferred over dead lions. … Living dogs lived. It was all they knew” (186). In essence he confronts and tries to neutralize his fear by deciding to smuggle the drug, but after setting the plot in motion he merely drifts through the rest of the book, passively awaiting events. Periodically he attempts to “preserve what remained of the fiction of volition” (212), but after he is captured by the narcotics agents he actually luxuriates in his feelings of helplessness. He embraces a fatalism which precludes the obligation to act or think—all he needs to do is fear. Thus Converse, a cynical dilettante intellectual, tries to engage the world but is completely defeated.

Although without his intellectual pretentions, his wife Marge is quite similar to him. Why she agrees to participate in the smuggling scheme is not really clear—perhaps it is not clear to her either. Yet Stone provides clues: he mentions offhandedly that she “loved all that was fateful” (24), suggesting a fatalism in her similar to her husband's, a reluctance even to attempt to direct her life. She lacks will and drifts through the entire novel. When first introduced, she is addicted to pills and so is already in retreat from reality, a retreat which becomes more extreme as the novel progresses. She seems to have an affinity for corruption, preferring to work at a pornographic movie theater rather than at the University of California. Perhaps she feels this kind of life is more “real,” or she has a desire for degradation, self-destruction. At any rate, after agreeing to act as go-between in the smuggling scheme, she, like Converse, is at the mercy of events.

Hicks, who brings the heroin from Vietnam to the United States, does make some attempt to shape his life. A Hemingway-like character in his concern with acting well under pressure, he is a definite contrast to Converse and Marge, yet he is a Hemingway character without Hemingway's romanticized treatment and with all the imperfections showing. Stone's attitude toward him is complex. For example, Hicks decides to smuggle the heroin with these thoughts: “Why not, he thought. There was nothing else going down. He felt the necessity of changing levels, a little adrenalin to clean the blood. It was interesting and kind of scary” (55). Stone suggests that Hicks really has little choice, that Converse has already mentioned him to the other smugglers and if he does not do the job, he will be arrested. Paradoxically, even as a drug smuggler or dealer, “he endeavored to maintain a spiritual life” (75), and in his unique fashion he is honorable, concerned with right ways of acting. To him, unlike Converse, the morality of drug smuggling is irrelevant, but in a strange way he is ethical. A devotee of Japanese culture and Zen, he is proud of being “at home in the world of objects” (76) and being able to control objects. He feels that heroin is simply another object which “belongs to whoever controls it” (111). The way that one controls himself and the world defines his spiritual life.

At a crucial moment in the novel, when he at least feels that he can still abandon Marge and the heroin, he thinks:

In the end there were not many things worth wanting—for the serious man, the samurai. But there were some. In the end, if the serious man is still bound to illusion, he selects the worthiest illusion and takes a stand. The illusion might be of waiting for one woman to come under his hands. … If I walk away from this, he thought, I'll be an old man—all ghosts and hangovers and mellow recollections. Fuck it, he thought, follow the blood. This is the one. This is the one to ride till it crashes.

(168)

Thus he consciously makes a choice, knowing that it may be illusion but feeling in the blood it is the right thing to do. Henceforth, he attempts to act in a coherent way upon that choice. In his action, his engagement with the world of objects, his selfhood is tested.

Stone very clearly shows the underside of Hicks's concern with self as it is defined through such tests. At its worst, it becomes antisocial macho, a person lashing out at others for very little reason. On his first night back in this country, Hicks gets drunk and feels an aimless, generalized rage wash over him. More especially, when anger at Eddie's treatment of him causes him to give Gerald a possibly fatal overdose of heroin, Hicks, who so much reveres control, is dangerously out of control. Converse had called him a psychopath; while Marge does not assent, saying it is “a very imprecise term” (104), Hicks does seem to be subject to barely controllable and potentially destructive rages.

What gradually becomes clear is that to one who sees the world as an arena of combat where he must prove himself (and Stone surely depicts the world that way), the central consideration is power and control. Human relations for any purpose other than manipulation are a nuisance and, in fact, dangerous. Hicks, then, for all his admirable qualities as a man of action, is a stunted human being, which is especially clear in his relationship with Marge and, by extension, with women in general. When she first sees him, she thinks: “He had a hungry face. … Deprivation—of love, of mother's milk, of calcium, of God knows what. This one was sunburned, usually they were pale. They always had cold eyes. They hated women” (95). Initially their relationship seems purely sexual, but Hicks finds himself falling in love (or at least what passes for love with him) with her. The way he expresses his love is revealing: he gets her addicted to heroin. Before he first gives her the drug, he thinks:

The pain in her eyes gave him pleasure. If he could make the pain leave her, he thought, and bring her edge and her life back, that would give him pleasure too. The notion came to him that he had been waiting years and years for her to come under his power.

(167)

After she takes the drug, “The glow had come back to her skin, the grace and suppleness of her body flowed again. The light came back, her eyes' fire. Hicks marveled. It made him happy” (171). Subsequently, their relationship seems wholly based on her dependence and his power as the dispenser of heroin, for Marge desires further and further retreat from reality. Drugs, to her, are “simpler than life” (173), while Hicks, who knows drugs and life better than she, says they are life. This woman, with whom he has sex once and whom he gets addicted to heroin, he calls, when she leaves him near the end to try and surrender the heroin, “the love of my life” (291). As far as the reader can tell, nothing remotely resembling love has been present in their relationship, thus revealing that indeed his life has been deprived of love, so deprived that he is incapable of it. Love, as is true of almost all relationships in his life, is translated into power.

Something similar happens in his relationship with Dieter, the failed guru on the mountaintop. Once very close to him, now Hicks only wants him to buy the heroin. When Dieter refuses and in an attempt to return to the simpler, more peaceful, nongrasping way of life they had in the past, tries to throw the heroin over a cliff, Hicks misunderstands, thinking Dieter wants the heroin for himself, and kills him. Hicks explains his actions to himself:

It was one he had to win. He was trying to get it on again. He was being stronger. Damn it, if you're going to make a gesture you have to have some grace, some style, some force. You have to have some Zen. If you act like a drunken thief, and people haven't seen you in a while, they're likely to think that's what you are. He [Dieter] had certainly fucked his gesture.

(315)

In this manner Hicks rationalizes killing a man who was almost a father to him. When grace, style, and gesture become more important than other human beings' lives, then something human has been irrevocably lost. In effect, people become simply other objects to be manipulated and controlled. Dieter correctly characterizes Hicks when he says: “He's trapped in a samurai fantasy—an American one. He has to be the Lone Ranger, the great desperado—he has to win all the epic battles single-handed” (272). Having lost the capacity to feel a connection with others, Hicks sees all life in terms of conflict.

Yet the novel suggests that, reality being as bleak and brutal as it is, the only choice one has may be among fantasies. Converse has his fatalism, Marge her drugs, and Hicks his self-chosen role. Dieter's guru-like wisdom and his commune are another alternative. In his treatment of the commune, Stone most specifically links his novel to the counterculture movement of the 1960's. Founded on ideals of peace, love, and the contemplative life, the commune after a time was corrupted. The primary reason for its failure was what Dieter calls his succumbing to the American dream. Seeing that the commune was good, Dieter explains,

Then it occurred to me that if I applied the American style—which I didn't really understand—if I pushed a little, speeded things up a little, we might break into something really cosmic. … So I thought, a little push, a little shove, a little something extra to shake it loose. And I ended up as Doctor Dope.

(272)

Part of his plan was to allow others to think he was God, so he too is not immune to egotism and the drive for power. The American go-getter way of pursuing the ideal led to its inevitable corruption. “Those Who Are” (who prided themselves on knowing what is real) retreated into illusion through drugs. Now, however, Dieter wants to revitalize the commune and begs Hicks to stay. Hicks feels the mountaintop, on which in the past the commune members were able at least physically to isolate themselves from the world, is no longer a sanctuary. According to Hicks, that time has passed; besides he will not renounce the heroin or his self-created role. He is committed to the drug, which Dieter calls “all allusion and false necessity. It's suffering human ignorance. It's hell” (312). Whether Stone wants the reader to believe that the commune ideal is really dead is ambiguous; certainly, it is dead for Hicks, who has already given his allegiance to the world. Whatever else is said of him, he remains faithful to his commitments and attempts to act upon them to the end.

Near the conclusion of the novel, Stone portrays three alternative reactions to the experiences the novel recounts. The Converses have survived and are together again. In keeping their promise to meet Hicks, they remain faithful to their friend, even though in so doing they risk their lives again and have no coherent idea of why they do it. All of Marge's experience takes place on the level of inchoate need, while Converse, more verbal, expresses what some have taken to be the point of the novel: “I don't know what I'm doing or why I do it or what it's like. … Nobody knows. That's the principle we were defending over there. That's why we fought the war” (307). Certainly, it is a principle the Converses embrace. At the end of the novel they seem hopelessly and fatalistically bound together in their ignorance.

Hicks, however, is different. A case can be made that he too is ignorant and does not know why he acts as he does. He decided to take the heroin but never had any ultimate goal in mind. Yet he has strength the other characters lack, and the end of the novel reveals him to be more caring about his friends than we might have believed. He could have escaped but receives his fatal wound in an attempt to rescue Marge and Converse. In a sense then, he is not hard enough to survive; loyalty to others leads to his death. Further, in Stone's compelling description of his walk down the mountain and through the desert is presented perhaps the most positive statement of the novel. Delirious, Hicks visualizes his childhood self, an orphan, and gives him advice:

You better do something about the way you cringe and whine. I don't want to see you do it. … For one thing it makes you weaker. For another nobody gives a shit. Who are you whining to? People? They don't care. … You know what's out there? Every goddamn race of shit jerking each other off. Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis, two hundred million rat-hearted cocksuckers in enormous cars. Rabbits and fish. They're mean and stupid and greedy, they'll fuck you for laughs, they want you dead. If you're no better than them you might as well take gas. If you can't get your own off them then don't stand there and let them spit on you, don't give them the satisfaction.

(325-26)

At this point the reader understands why Hicks is as he is and the nature of the paranoid vision of the novel. Certainly, one can appreciate the sheer courage and endurance of his walk. In an impersonal, even malevolent world strength consists of not complaining, of enduring. Human emotion leads to vulnerability, which leads to weakness. In his delirium Hicks becomes almost messianic, wanting to take on the pain of everyone in the world, feeling he can relieve them by shouldering their burdens.

Hicks, however, is not allowed the last word in the novel—that is given to Anthiel, the corrupt Federal agent who has finally recovered the heroin. He thinks back with satisfaction on the operation:

In many ways, he thought, the adventure had been instructive. His heart filled with native optimism. If you stuck with something, the adventure demonstrated, faced down every kind of pressure, refused to fold when the going got tough, outplayed all adversaries, and relied on your own determination and fortitude, then the bag of beans at the end of the rainbow might be yours after all.

(340)

By concluding the novel with this parody of the American dream, put in the mouth of the most corrupt character in the novel, Stone emphasizes that the American dream of peace, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness is dead.

Stone has created, then, a world in which brutality and illegality are the norm and not the exception and has implicitly linked that condition to the Vietnam War. However, Vietnam has not caused this situation; it simply reveals that violence and corruption are endemic to American life. In such a world, no moral perspective is possible; in fact, moral and ethical concerns have become dangerous and can be lethal. Humanity is a diminished thing in Dog Soldiers. Close personal relationships are not possible, and hence everyone is alone. No one learns anything in the course of the novel. The Converses helplessly fall back on fatality as an explanation of their experience. Only Hicks attempts to take any control of his life, but he is a stunted human being whose actions are finally aimless and fruitless. Stone presents a mirror for our times: a time when corruption seems omnipresent, action is futile, human fellow feeling is dead—when peace or happiness can only come through either drugs or death.

Notes

1. Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), p. 206. Subsequent references are to this edition.

2. See the description of the play he wrote ten years earlier. It concerns a Marine who objects to the military system but who does not act in any way upon his convictions.