Dog Soldiers
by Robert Stone
Summary
Saigon, near the end. John Converse, a failed playwright working as a war correspondent, has seen enough of Vietnam to conclude that in a world where elephants are bombed from the air, anything is permitted, and he acts on the insight: he arranges to smuggle three kilos of heroin back to California, using Ray Hicks, a merchant sailor he half knows, an autodidact samurai who reads Nietzsche on watch and trusts codes more than people.
Hicks delivers the package to Converse's wife Marge in Berkeley, a ticket taker quietly strung out on prescription downers, and the deal goes instantly wrong: the men who arrive are not buyers but takers, connected to something that may be the law and may merely employ it. Hicks, reverting to training, takes Marge and the heroin and runs, and the novel becomes a chase down the spine of California, through Hollywood dealers and burned out gurus, to a mountaintop commune gone dark, where Hicks makes a stand out of pure, obsolete warrior ethic. Converse follows, is used by everyone, and survives the way he has always survived, by being nobody.
Stone writes it as a thriller and means it as an autopsy: the book is the counterculture's obituary, the exact point where the sixties' liberations curdled into product. The talk is the pleasure, everyone speaking the period's fried, oracular hip, transcribed without a gram of affection.
Around three hundred and forty pages, fast, bleak and quotable.
Best for readers who want the Vietnam war brought home in a crime novel, written with a moralist's anger and a screenwriter's pace.
Historical Context & Significance
Dog Soldiers shared the 1975 National Book Award for Fiction with Thomas Williams's The Hair of Harold Roux, the third split in three years, and Time later placed it among the hundred best English language novels of the century. Robert Stone had been a Merry Prankster acquaintance, a Kesey circle survivor with none of the circle's optimism, and had reported briefly from Vietnam; the novel fused the two experiences into the definitive account of how the war metastasised back into American life.
The 1978 film Who'll Stop the Rain, with Nick Nolte as Hicks and a screenplay Stone co wrote, took its title from the Creedence song and kept the book's fatalism largely intact.
Stone spent the rest of his career on the same beat, Americans undone abroad by their own mythologies, A Flag for Sunrise and Damascus Gate the other peaks, and by his death in 2015 he was settled in the line of political novelists descending from Conrad, the writer this book most resembles and openly salutes.