The ironic tension in Robert Stone's second novel is powerful, but its sources are difficult to isolate, as one reviewer has pointed out, citing examples of statements that, excerpted from the text, “sound exceedingly flat.”¹ What is basic to Stone's irony is that the plot of Dog Soldiers (1974) parallels America's involvement in Vietnam; once this is clear, the novel becomes impossible to read solely at face value. Moreover, Stone compounds his irony by literary allusion: using Hemingway's world as backlight to call up ideals against which the Vietnam era may be measured, he makes clear, at the same time, that those earlier ideals are inadequate. In Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975, Stone uses irony to look beyond the Hemingway ethic and also beyond the extreme pessimism of his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967).

John Converse, with whom Stone's novel begins, is a newspaperman who has collapsed in terror during a fragmentation bombing in Cambodia. Upon returning to Vietnam, he acquires three kilos of heroin which he sends to the United States with his old Marine buddy, Raymond Hicks. While Hicks and Converse's wife Marge are fleeing brutal, corrupt narcotics agents, she also becomes dependent on the drug. Marge and Hicks save Converse's life, but Hicks is killed and Converse surrenders the heroin.

Stone makes it plain that Dog Soldiers is far more than the thriller these events may suggest, first by his dedication to the Committee of Responsibility, the organization that brought wounded Vietnamese children to the United States for medical care, then by referring, with his epigram from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to “a flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.”² The heroin is thus a figure of corruption and John Converse, as his name suggests, representative of the war that so many Americans found counter to their nation's ideals. “We didn't know who we were till we got here,” Converse explains to Hicks in Vietnam. “We thought we were something else” (57). The name of Converse's carrier is also significant. Representing that group of Americans, frequently uneducated, usually without any other involvement, who were willing to do the actual fighting in Vietnam, Hicks has trouble with the work “piquant” and, before he met Converse, had never finished reading anything but The Martian Chronicles and I, the Jury. After an initial objection to smuggling the heroin, “Why not,” he thinks, “There was nothing else going down. … It was interesting and kind of scary” (55).

Converse and Hicks are doubles: ex-Marines, former drinking companions, moviegoers, and readers of Nietzsche—by the end of the novel they have slept with the same woman. Converse has written a play whose hero has difficulties with the ideals of the Marine Corps; when, in the opening scenes of Dog Soldiers, he obtains the heroin from an American woman who lives in one-half of a villa occupied by a French family in colonial days, he is apparently following the same path as the liberal American president who involved his country in one section of Vietnam. The woman “liked Saigon,” Stone writes. “It was a bit like Washington. People were nice” (12). Furthermore, the structure of Dog Soldiers parallels that of American society in relation to the war—one segment lacking total commitment, another doing the fighting—as the scene switches back and forth from Converse to Hicks, with the latter taking responsibility for both the heroin and his friend's wife. The parallel with Vietnam is complete at the conclusion of the novel, when Converse surrenders the drug, leaving it for the narcotics agents marked with a white flag of Kleenex.

The devastation of the war is underlined throughout Dog Soldiers, as this parallel is maintained. Having given an overdose of heroin to a Los Angeles writer who is taking it for the experience, rather than to alleviate pain, Hicks gropes for meaning: “Hue City,” he says. “We had guys who were dead the day they hit that place. In the morning they were in Hawaii, in the afternoon they were dead” (203). Going out into the darkness high, carrying the heroin, he recalls people in Vietnam “who claimed to have gone into the line on acid but he had never believed them” (294). Even Converse hears “to his astonishment a sound which he was certain might be heard in Vietnam and nowhere else. … an M-70 grenade launcher firing its cartridge. In a moment a monstrous ball of fire swelled up under the trees down the hill” (298). “Chieu hoi” he shouts later, and Hicks responds. Finally, as that carrier courageously meets his death, still carrying the heroin, in a canyon whose “tortured rock spires [are] like the towers of … pagodas” (316), he becomes a Christ-figure, envisioning himself as the bearer of pain: “Pain, man. Everybody's. Yours too, if you only knew it” (329). Here, too, is Vietnam: “That kid—some joker shot him off his water buffalo—I'll take care of that for you, junior.” Or, “Napalm burns, no problem—just put it on here” (328).

Stone focuses, of course, on what the war has done to America. “It's gone funny in the states,” Hicks cautions Converse in Vietnam (57). What was formerly an Italian restaurant in Oakland is now a bar, complete with caged go-go girls Hicks finds “an affront to sex” and its former bartender, now manager, talking around sadomasochism and drugs. In Los Angeles, people who are said to be “the Spock generation,—I wannit, I wannit”—are covered, in varying degrees, with a green fungus. Outside the city in the canyons, no one is safe. Converse's wife, who looks like a schoolteacher but works as a cashier at a porno movie, believes in the right to take drugs, as a matter of principle. Complementing Hicks and Converse, she represents another segment of American society during the war, all those children of the middle class who rejected the standards and lifestyle of their parents. Even Janie, Marge and Converse's five-year-old, sometimes bounces on her red plastic horse “for over an hour in an unvarying rhythm with a blankness in her eyes” that her mother finds alarming (92).

The hippy Dieter, Hicks's old roshi, who lives at the top of the hills in what was formerly a Jesuit monastery, urges Hicks to destroy the heroin, and explains to Marge what went wrong: “it occurred to me that if I applied the American style … if I pushed a little, speeded things up a little, we might break into something really cosmic. The secular world was falling apart. Nobody knew what they were doing or what they wanted. … I knew! 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).

The wastefulness of this situation, for Stone's characters and also for America, becomes even more apparent when viewed in the light of Hemingway's world. One of the clichés of literary history is that The Sun Also Rises shattered our romantic illusions about war and love. Indeed, generations of educated Americans were to pattern themselves after Hemingway's characters, freed—in some measure by his nihilism—to work out their own standards. Dog Soldiers describes what has been done with that freedom: the United States is at war, fighting on the “wrong” side, and the kind of excitement that was once reserved for sex has been transferred to drugs.

Allusions to Hemingway illuminate this Vietnam novel: a cosmic figure who has outlived the earlier period, echoes in Saigon of the situation and tone of the expatriates, scenes that have parallels in The Sun Also Rises compound the irony with which Stone looks at his own generation.

The ideals of Hemingway's era are put into context in Dog Soldiers with Douglas Dalton, a San Franciscan who has survived into the modern period. Dalton's pale complexion reflects the dying illusions of the older generation; his references to his “crowd” are a degradation of the expatriates' term “one of us,” which referred to the courage of Jake Barnes and his friends, distinguishing them from their contemporaries. Dalton's alcoholism, impotence, and ideas about being “in love” also caricature the traits of Hemingway's hero. In the same vein, the older man, a veteran of the Lincoln Brigade, sings to the tune of “Red River Valley,” “There's a valley in Spain called Jarama” (132). Stone's telescoping the two wars in this scene, of course, imposes the “rightness” of the Spanish Civil War on World War I, for an increase in contrast with the new generation's immoral war in Vietnam.

In the era of that conflict, Dalton's ideas are ludicrous. What he says about his generation's disenchantment with war is no more than the disappointment of an adolescent who refuses to give up his romantic expectations. “They were Moors,” he explains. “I thought—being very young—this is like the Chanson de Roland. Moors. They would come up to the wire and pretend to surrender. … Some of the fellas would let them come over and get a dagger in the gut for it.” Dalton ignores Converse's explanation that in Spain and Vietnam “essentially we were on different sides.” Insisting on respect for one's enemy, he tells Converse: “You shouldn't call them gooks. … We didn't” (132).

Dalton's view of sex is also ridiculous. He is trying to be modern, allowing only an occasional protest or reminiscence to interrupt that compromise. Survivor of a generation brought up to believe in romantic love, he quotes The Rubyiat but writes for a tabloid that emphasizes sex. When Converse attributes his own difficulties to the American woman Charmian, Dalton is quick to respond in old-fashioned tones, “Lovely. … A lovely old Southern name,” concluding, “So … you're in love.” Converse responds, “No. Not at all.” The scene ends on a comic note as he refers to his impotence: “‘That's all over for me,’ he said merrily. ‘Since the Jarama’” (133).

Although Dalton's position is ludicrous in the era of Vietnam and the ideals of his generation are shown up as adolescent and unrealistic, they nevertheless provide a strong contrast with those of the modern period. Poorly prepared for decisions, Stone's characters are clearly, sadly in error. Dog Soldiers underscores the modern dilemma of how to live well in a situation of almost unlimited freedom, without an established system of values.

John Converse is Jake Barnes's heir: impotent newspapermen of different generations, they approach life with the same ironic acceptance. Alone in his hotel room toward the end of Hemingway's novel, Barnes, with an ironic “That was it,” admitted his part in Brett's affairs with other men and began to renounce the illusion she represented. At the beginning of Stone's novel John Converse displays a similar irony but, true to his name, moves in a different direction from Hemingway's hero. His restaurant merriment interrupted by a bomb, Converse is alone in a Saigon hotel room. “There it is,” he thinks. “That was what everyone said—GIs, reporters, even Arvins and bar girls. There it is. It would have been good not to have had a bomb that night. To get stoned … and then sleep” (38). Confronting the moral objections to dealing heroin in this scene, Converse concludes that in a world like his, “people are just naturally going to want to get high” (42).

Echoes of Hemingway's world emerge even earlier in Dog Soldiers as Converse and his Australian friends, the Percys, in a situation reminiscent of The Sun Also Rises, move from bar to restaurant in Saigon, which has far more sterility and corruption than the expatriates' Paris. Ian Percy is said to be fond of children, but the Percys have none. “They met in Vietnam,” Stone writes with characteristic understatement, “and it was not a place in which people felt encouraged” to become parents (27). After the bombing in Cambodia, moreover, Converse is impotent. Impotent Jake Barnes in Hemingway's novel enjoyed good food and at least passable wine, but in Vietnam relaxation depends on beer said to be made with formaldehyde, marijuana said to be rolled by lepers, and peanuts from which—as a matter of course one must dislodge “tiny, spiderlike insects.”

Not only the situation of Converse and his friends recalls Hemingway's expatriates but also their ironic tone as they view their own lives in terms of past ideals and find both wanting. The following exchange, for instance, looks ironically at the missionary's belief in Satan and the reporter's search for news and, at another level, refers to the war and Converse's secret corruption: “I met a lady today,” Converse said, “who told me that Satan was very powerful here.” Ian replies, “Check it out. … Don't dismiss anything you hear out of hand” (32). Party to the traffic of heroin, Converse had responded to the missionary's comment about Satan's being powerful in Vietnam with “Yes. … He would be” (9).

Echoes of Hemingway are also clear as Converse and Jill parody exotic romance in an exchange that originates in the question of what the American woman Charmian has to gain from the Vietnamese Colonel Tho. As Converse and Jill discuss “fancy fucking east of Suez,” Stone's reader is aware of facts that lace their conversation with irony: Converse has found himself impotent with Charmian; and Tho, owner of heroin refinery, has provided the three kilos she has given Converse.

Hemingway's expatriates also joked about sex as they made the rounds, and that past rises in the background for Stone's reader, compounding the irony of this scene, for the assumptions of Converse and Jill are rooted in a freedom that the earlier generation evolved out of great pain. Even more important is the fact that Stone's characters' view of what-might-have-been except for the war is far more realistic than that of the expatriates. Lady Brett Ashley and sometimes even Jake Barnes envisioned a blissful happiness in love that the war had made impossible; a freer generation, making camp of romance, envisions happiness as an ordinary state of parenthood that Ian Percy would enjoy. While Jake Barnes attempted to be hardboiled about Brett's promiscuity, Converse has no ideals about sexual fidelity. “No spicy stories for you this time,” his wife writes, “because I didn't make it with anybody” (3). The irony of the sexual situation in Dog Soldiers mounts as Hicks, the only one of Stone's characters who is tough and disciplined enough to succeed in the era of Vietnam, eventually dies because of his love for Marge. In that world, such fidelity has no place.

Vietnam has made its mark on the new generation, and they have misused their freedom. In loneliness for a husband who has been gone two years, Marge buys dilaudid from her employer. “It was a seduction,” she thinks. The drug “would seal some chaste clammy intimacy; there would be long loving talks while their noses ran and their light bulbs popped out silently in the skull's darkness” (66). The heroin in Dog Soldiers has erotic significance, it is true: Charmian, with whom Converse has been intimate, has led him to its traffic; and, as Hicks explains to Marge, “People use it instead of sex” (171). What Stone makes primary, though, is the choice between good and evil that the drug involves. “I'd like to give it back,” Marge shivers. “To wherever the hell it emanates from.” Hicks tells her firmly, “It doesn't emanate. People make it” (110).

In Dog Soldiers the dealing of heroin—that is, the Vietnam war—is placed in perspective by means of scenes that have parallels in The Sun Also Rises. The first of these scenes involves a prostitute. Hemingway's hero picked up a woman with the “sentimental” idea of having company at dinner, introduced her as his fiancée, and then went off with Brett, leaving the prostitute dancing with a group of homosexuals in turn. Yet the woman had been sympathetic, telling him that she too was “sick,” and he had been careful to leave money at the bar in case she left alone. The memory of these superficial kindnesses in a generation known as “lost” accents the discrepancy between Converse's ideals and sensibilities and the drug traffic in which he is involved. Waiting to turn the heroin over to Hicks, Converse notes that the beautiful young Vietnamese girl who solicits him has been coarsened by American style; but he touches her, only to be put off by seeing, in the next cubicle, a price tag on the sole of someone's shoe. After a gesture that makes the guilt-ridden Converse think she is going to blow her nose on him, the girl argues about the amount of money he has given her, asking if he likes little boys. “Diddy mao,” Converse tells her, “‘Fuck off!’ He had never said diddy mao to a Vietnamese person before” (48).

In these scenes, Stone uses the backlight of Hemingway to compound his own irony. He takes another glance at Converse, again in the light of Hemingway's hero, in a scene that takes place in a Catholic church. Barnes, visiting a church in Spain, knelt and prayed for everyone he knew, regretting that he was such a “rotten” Catholic. Converse, a Catholic who no longer believes, goes into church to rest and enjoys a facile irony in the thought that “other young men on the wrong side of the law—perhaps other importers of heroin waiting to see their lawyers—might at the same moment be sitting at the feet of St. Anthony and thinking of their mothers” (150).

Now firmly established, the backlight of Hemingway's 1926 novel further compounds Stone's irony as a new generation, in its freedom, becomes “lost” as a result of war in a way more terrible than anything Hemingway ever imagined. Undercut as they are by what has come before in Dog Soldiers, these scenes also make clear that the Hemingway ideal is no longer, perhaps never was, functional. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes found relief from his hectic, wasted life on a five-day fishing trip. As Marge, in need of a similar escape, turns to heroin, she and Hicks are seen in the motel bungalow with an ocean view from the perspective of Barnes' escape into nature: rendered free of pain and guilt by the drug, she agrees that it is “better than a week in the country.” Similarly illuminated by Jake Barnes who, temporarily free of Brett, sat under a tree before lunch reading a “wonderful” story of true love, Hicks, having joined Marge in the heroin out of loneliness, brushes his teeth after vomiting and sits alone in front of a TV set that is not working properly, watching some “nice color bands.”

At the very center of Stone's novel, the ironies involved in Hicks's fidelity and Marge's addiction are also compounded by the backlight of Hemingway. In parody of a religious service, Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton picknicked on hard-boiled eggs, chicken, and wine, light-heartedly rejoicing at their blessings.” Their carefree attitude is in the background for Stone's reader as Marge refers to her heroin high in words originally used to describe a nun's view of the perfect, cloistered life for which she is leaving the world: “where springs fail not.”³ Stone lingers at the scene, and his relentless irony culminates as Hicks places his hands between Marge's breasts in a gesture of prayer.

The weakness of the Hemingway ethic, Stone suggests, leads to situations like Converse's and like Vietnam. John Converse has obviously failed to extract from his experiences a coherent set of principles by which to live. Telling him that Colonel Tho is going to find out what all the best things in the world are in order to get one of each, Charmian asks Converse what he will do with the money he makes on the heroin; unlike Jake Barnes, who decided to limit himself to areas of life in which he could get his “money's worth,” Converse cannot answer the question. He finally tells his wife, “I don't know what I'm doing or why I do it or what it's like.” “Nobody knows,” he continues confidently. “That's the principle we were defending over there. That's why we fought the war” (307).

Even more important is that Converse lacks an awareness of man's potential for evil, a fault Stone attributes to the older generation's failure to educate its young. As Converse has told Marge repeatedly—and, once again the reference is to Vietnam—his father kept from him the facts about Hiroshima. “He never told me about it,” Converse insists. “He thought it would upset me” (332). Especially if one arrives independently at the values that make life worthwhile and especially if physical sensation is to be primary—freedoms that Jake Barnes's generation struggled toward—is it necessary to have a clear idea of what constitutes good and evil. Converse and Marge's decision to enter the heroin traffic, after all, violates one of the few dicta in Hemingway's world, Lady Brett's not wanting to be “one of those bitches that ruins children.” Asked to deliver the heroin to the United States, Hicks responds to Converse: “You and your old lady—I thought you were world-savers. How about all these teenyboppers OD-ing on the roof?” (54).

Two minor characters in Stone's novel suggest the choice that does not emerge clearly for Converse, who sees only that the two men are physically similar. Smitty, a brutal ex-convict, sometime user of heroin, works with the narcotics agent, hoping to get ahead in “the system.” Grimes, in contrast, dead at the time the novel takes place, was a young medic who went through the jungle handing out morphine to men dying in pain. The latter provides Converse's “solitary link with an attitude which he publicly pretended to share—but which he had not experienced for years and never thoroughly understood. It was the attitude in which people acted on coherent ethical apprehensions that seemed real to them” (261).

Also important in this connection is the phrase “God in the whirlwind,” which is repeated during the conversation between Converse and the American missionary. That image from the Book of Job, which subsumes all the evil and pain of this world, appears again at the end of Dog Soldiers as Marge and Converse, having left the heroin for the crooked narcotics agent, look back over the flats at the dust raised by his vehicle: “The column rose, a whirling white tower with a dark core, spewing gauzy eddies from its spout, its funnel curving to the shifting of the wind” (338). That the agent is accompanied by a Mexican who may rob him of the heroin at any moment, as Stone indicates, suggests that evil is always a possibility, that it may erupt anywhere, at any time.

As critics have pointed out, such a recognition was beyond Hemingway's ken, and in this sense the idyllic natural world that was the province of Jake Barnes is unreal, as Hicks well knows. In the mountains, he says to his old roshi, “I could put myself to sleep fishing that stream in my head. Pool by pool. Like Hemingway” (226).

That Dog Soldiers parallels America's involvement in Vietnam and also describes the effects of that war give it significance: “Stone brings the war home, and leaves it here.”⁴ At the same time, Stone's allusions to Hemingway compound his irony and place Dog Soldiers in the context of American literature, where strictly on its own merits, it belongs.

Notes

1. Jeffery Klein, The American Scholar, 44, (1975), 686.

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

3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Heaven Haven,” Poems, ed., W. H. Gardner, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 40.

4. Klein, p. 688.