Dog Soldiers

by Robert Stone

Three people caught in the world of drug dealing, attempt to realize their idle dreams

Genres: Fiction, War, Historical Fiction, Crime, Classics, Novels, Literature

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

ROBERT STONE was the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls. His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.
His work was typically characterized by psychological complexity, political concerns, and dark humor.

A lifelong adventurer who in his 20s befriended Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and what he called ‘‘all those crazies’’ of the counterculture, Mr. Stone had a fateful affinity for outsiders, especially those who brought hard times on themselves. Starting with the 1966 novel ‘‘A Hall of Mirrors,’’ Mr. Stone set his stories everywhere from the American South to the Far East. He was a master of making art out of his character’s follies, whether the adulterous teacher in ‘‘Death of the Black-Haired Girl,’’ the fraudulent seafarer in ‘‘Outerbridge Reach,’’ or the besieged journalist in ‘‘Dog Soldiers,’’ winner of the National Book Award in 1975.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The time was rough and the time was wild…

If you think someone’s doing you wrong, it’s not for you to judge. Kill them first and then God can do the judging.

The counterculture was on the rise and then it was in decline…

The bearded man carried a loaded Walther automatic with a spare clip; Walthers had become the counterculture’s weapon of choice. His pockets contained a billfold with a dozen credit cards in different names, a key ring with a great many keys on it, a Mexican switchblade and chain manacle known to the police as a “come along.” Hicks used it to secure Broadway Joe’s hands to the drainage pipe of the kitchen sink. Broadway Joe’s pockets had only his works – a dropper and a spike, still in its little box, straight from the doctor’s sample bag.

Reaction and decadence were settling in…

If you haven't fought for your life for something you want, you don't know what's life all about.

In the tumultuous times many are sucked in by the dangerous undercurrents and the price of survival grows high.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

*****NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 1975*****

“I’ve been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this.”

The Summer of Love has withered away into the Autumn of Paranoia and the Spring of Delusions. John Converse, a journalist, whose claim to fame is his ability to produce compelling headlines (stories to go with the headlines, well that is where things go haywire), is in Vietnam, but he isn’t really sure why he is still there. His room has been tainted by some maniac American who chased lizards along the walls, crushed them, and left the stain of their residual fluids on the paint.

”There were moral objections to house lizards being senselessly butchered by madmen. Everyone felt these things. Everyone must, or the value of human life would decline. It was important that the value of human life not decline.”

Heavy things are going down.

He comes up with this rather insane idea to smuggle heroin into the states. With the counter culture dying, LSD and Marijuana are out and heroin is the new beast to chase. ”The pellet with the poison’s in the chalice from the palace, but the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true.”

Converse hires this guy named Ray Hicks, a merchant marine with a penchant for Nietzsche, martial arts, and Zen, to smuggle the heroin into Southern California. Once there Hicks is supposed to hook up with Converse’s wife Marge. Marge is then supposed to turn the heroin over to the distributors.

Marge works in an Adult Theater. ”She flashed the mooches’ fingers laboring over their damp half-erections, burrowing in the moldy subsoil of their trousers like arachnids on a decomposing log.” **SHUDDER**

She has developed a drug habit while John has been gone. It starts out as a monkey, but grows into an gorilla. ”Diluted. Deluded. Dilaudid.

Ray is naturally paranoid and believes someone is following him. He is sure that Converse has doubled crossed him. After all he knows that Converse thinks he is...odd. Marge is gliding on the wings of befuddlement and between the two of them they hatch a plan to escape and sell the drugs through other sources.

Bad, bad, bad idea.

”The serpent tempting Eve bore a set of carefully rendered rattles.”

And everyone involved is having more and more trouble distinguishing reality especially after Marge and Ray start sampling the product. Dilaudid is out. Heroin is in. The gorilla starts doing pushups.

Converse is trying to explain what has happened to his drug contacts. They are not very happy with him, but what keeps him alive is that they still don’t have the product. As John was leaving Vietnam he could tell that the situation there was about to explode in all new ways. It was becoming a different war, but when he gets back to the States he can tell that things have changed there as well. Crooked cops, crooked lawyers are all getting into the drug pipeline business. He exchanges one war for another war.

The new American dream is being able to make one big drug deal.

Converse meets the type of client that heroin is tailor made for. “He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray.”

To follow the line of reason of any one of the characters will take corkscrew dexterity. It is a sordid novel. Readers don’t like these characters and they aren’t supposed to. What you recognize in them that is also in yourself are the very things you like least about yourself. They are weak, greedy, self-centered, and lacking in compassion. They continue to allow themselves to be swept along by events simply because that is easier than swimming for shore. This novel is a time capsule of a period when the last bits of naivety and innocence in America are being exchanged for cynicism and skepticism. It is the dawning of the age of HERE WE ARE NOW, ENTERTAIN US*.


* It took until 1991 for Kurt Cobain to explain to us what was going on.

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[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una buena novela, fácil de leer, con una estructura lineal y donde se retrata con humor, cinismo y hasta con sarcasmo la dura resaca posterior a los años del hippysmo. La derrota moral que supuso la guerra del Vietnam para todo un país es plasmada en el desengaño, el miedo y el derrotismo de los personajes de la novela: todo vale... pero nada funciona... con la excepción quizás de la droga... pero no dura mucho. Es un retrato de la violencia, del sinsentido, de la falta de alternativas, de los pocos argumentos que existen contra quien no entiende de argumentos, de lo poco que puede hacer el bien cuando el mal entra en juego, de lo difícil que es ser malo cuando no te han dibujado para serlo y de lo difícil que es vivir cuando no tienes ninguna razón para seguir.

Un relato cuyo estilo tiene mucho de novela negra: sobrio, no abundan las descripciones, apenas sabemos nada de las características físicas de los personajes, y únicamente a través de los excelentes diálogos que llenan la novela y de los hechos podemos deducir las personalidades y los sentimientos de los personajes, unos perdedores que juegan a ser malos hasta que se tropiezan con malos de verdad.

A pesar de que no es una novela bélica (muy pronto el escenario principal va a ser California) las referencias a la película Apocalypse Now o a su hermano literario, El corazón de las tinieblas, son inevitables; de hecho, la novela empieza con una significativa cita de este libro:

“He visto el demonio de la violencia, el demonio de la avaricia y el demonio del deseo ardiente; pero, ¡por todos los cielos!, eran demonios fuertes, vigorosos, con ojos rojos, que tenían a su merced a hombres; a hombres os digo. Pero de pie en aquella ladera, presentí que, bajo la cegadora luz del sol de aquella tierra iba a conocer un demonio fláccido, pretencioso y con ojos apagados, de una locura voraz y despiadada.”

Aunque no sea del tipo de novela que me suele atraer me ha parecido que su calidad literaria es innegable. Recomendable.

[Blaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

These people are so f*cked up it devastates the mind. They’re utterly unpredictable, absolute mental basket cases. You have no idea what associating with them could do to you.

So, that’s a quotation from the final pages of Dog Soldiers and, I have to say, I completely agree. The plot here, such as it is, is pretty simple. John Converse, a low-rent American journalist in Vietnam near the end of the War, does what most bored Americans did back then (sarcasm alert!): become an amateur, intercontinental heroin trafficker. But when his friend Ray Hicks arrives in California with the smuggled heroin, he fears a set-up, and he goes on the run with the drugs and John’s wife, Marge. The remainder of the book shifts back and forth between their journey, and John’s attempt to find them before getting killed by some shadowy pursuers, culminating in a mountaintop confrontation and the longest death scene I’ve ever read.

Dog Soldiers is a gritty portrayal of American life after the end of the 1960s counterculture, during the peak of disillusion and loss of faith in our institutions due to the Vietnam War and Watergate. It’s full of casual drug use, casual sex, gratuitous violence, and references to cults and hippies and “long hairs.” But I feel that the negatives far outweigh the positives here. To say the three main characters are unlikeable is a gross understatement. Marge is weak beyond measure. Ray, a self-styled spiritual Samurai (whatever that means), is so reckless and amoral it’s a wonder he survived in Vietnam. And John Converse is so dumb that it bears repeating: out of boredom and with no experience whatsoever he decided to attempt—and involved his wife—to become an amateur, intercontinental heroin trafficker. I don’t even know how a reader is supposed to take that seriously. Another negative is that, as noted above, it’s just full of 1970s clichés and ridiculous slang, like casual drug use, casual sex, gratuitous violence, and references to cults and hippies and “long hairs.”

Dog Soldiers is considered a classic, and it won the National Book Award in 1975. I had not heard of it, but read it as part of my ongoing plan to work through the Pop Chart 100 Essential Novels list. On one level, if I squint, I can sort of understand its inclusion in such lofty company. But not really, or at least not any more. What’s here—Vietnam, drug trafficking, unlikeable characters, crooked cops—has been done so much better by other writers. I felt like I was reading a poor man’s Cormac McCarthy. It’s a drag, man, not at all groovy. 😜

Update: the good people at Pop Chart recently updated their 100 Essential Novels list, adding five new novels and removing five old ones. Dog Soldiers is one of the five novels that got replaced. Well done, Pop Chart!

[Francesc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Me ha gustado, sobre todo, la primera mitad del libro, aunque esperaba, en general, mucho más.
Las descripciones de la acción son difusas y no acabas de entenderlas. Le sobran los delirios post-chute, en los que no entiendes nada, excepto que los personajes van drogados y no saben qué están diciendo.
La trama es entretenida, pero va dando tumbos de un lado a otro sin mucha conexión.
Al final, surgen nuevos personajes que se mezclan en la trama y la lectura no me ha resultado ágil.
Hay una crítica al sinsentido de la guerra de Vietnam y a la corrupción que generó con el contrabando indiscriminado de drogas.

I especially liked the first half of the book, although in general I expected much more.
The descriptions of the action are fuzzy and you just don't understand them. He has plenty of post-drug delusions, in which you do not understand anything, except that the characters are drugged and do not know what they are saying.
The plot is entertaining, but it stumbles from one side to the other without much connection.
In the end, new characters emerge that are mixed in the plot and the reading has not been agile for me.
There is a criticism of the nonsense of the Vietnam War and the corruption it generated with indiscriminate drug smuggling.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recently I read a fantastic new biography of the author Robert Stone, written by Madison Smartt Bell.

Naturally, it inspired me to pick up a book by Stone, and so I chose his 1975 National Book Award winning novel, Dog Soldiers.

Wowza. Well, it's fast paced, it's engaging. It's also super testosterone-y... war themed (though most of the action has to do with a heroin drug deal gone terribly wrong) and tough and full of hard edges.

The plot is pretty simple - John Converse, a mediocre war reporter in Vietnam, agrees to smuggle a huge amount of heroin back to the U.S., where his wife Marge will receive it, and then with the help of army vet friend Hicks, sell for profit. Of course, it all goes downhill from the get-go.

I didn't like any of the characters. Converse isn't particularly endearing. Neither is Marge - she works in an adult film theatre and likes getting blitzed out on Dilaudid, while (very questionably) caring for their daughter. As for Hicks, he's a callous guy, who knows his way around an automatic weapon.

Converse is always asking "why me?" while everything goes to shit. Great question! Why him? Why did he, a fairly straight-laced playwright and journalist, agree to become a drug dealer anyway? It's never clear. I don't know what I'm doing or why I do it or what it's like, he says. It's a decision made more out of malaise than anything else. In reaction to the Vietnam war, which is supported by a specific morality, he employs an alternative. But this alternative is something dangerous, something chaotic, something... evil, senseless, and destructive. So without intending to, by bringing the heroin home, Converse and his wife bring the war to America. While he doesn't know why he does what he does, Nobody knows. That's the principle we were defending over there. That's why we fought the war.

And that's how a book that's all about a drug heist ends up being about the Vietnam War. How it affected those who lived through it, witnessed it, were abandoned because of it, felt the hopelessness of it, the pain. All these characters want to avoid pain - and what better numbing agent than heroin?

I gained extra insight into this book having read the Stone biography Child of Light. It's there that I learned how Stone went to Vietnam with a press pass and witnessed plenty - and in all likelihood partook of opiates, too. This is how he captured a time, place and mindset with accuracy and understanding.

[Lyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Relentless and dirty.

First published in 1973, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers is a hip and groovy but graphic and ugly depiction of a time and a place when our culture, our world was at a crossroads and Stone embraces the suck with the fervor of a Marine at Parris Island.

First, Stone describes the scene in language contextually correct for the time. This has the feel and sound of a Dirty Harry film and behind the early 70s prose a reader can almost hear a Lalo Schifrin score grooving out in stacked heels and jiving with a denim jacket and a thick leather belt. We get to know the protagonist, an ostensible journalist in Vietnam who gets involved in a maladroit heroin deal that eventually and inevitably encompasses his family.

Secondly, I could not help but compare this fine work, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1975, with Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men. Both avoid sympathetic euphemisms and instead boldly and simply illustrate a Boschian landscape of hellish design and consequence. No doubt McCarthy’s work is the more brutal, but Stone’s stark realism and objective sensibility is the more timely chronicle.

Finally, in his heavy use of drug depiction and counterculture language, Stone’s voice sounds Hunter Thompson like in its eulogy of the lost optimism of the 60s, looking back as they both do and wistfully long for the “high-water mark” that is past. Stone never quite lets his narration devolve into the drug induced stream of conscious meanderings of Thompson or of Burroughs, but his style is reminiscent of Beat generation dope mindedness.

An important work, certainly, but difficult in many respects, like a regrettable memory as in the words of Galway Kinnell “we can never be rid of”.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few weeks ago I happened to catch the 1978 adaptation of this novel, Who'll Stop the Rain, starring Nick Nolte when he was only, like, 36 instead of 902. The movie made me nostalgic for Robert Stone's original novel, so I found a first edition online for amazingly cheap and re-devoured it in a day. It's a great glimpse into scuzzy America c. 1970---the death of the 60s' cultural revolution, when druggie enlightenment turned into junk dealing and free love degenerated into a trip to the titty bar.

We tend to look back on that period now either with sentimental moralizing (American Pastoral) or wacky absurdism (Inherent Vice). But Dog Soliders captures what must have felt like the plunge into the abyss of amorality that the so-called counterculture degenerated into in those scary post-Manson days when some revolutionaries argued with a straight face that the original Chuckie doll was right to slaughter the bourgeoisie (excuse me, "the pigs") because---dig, baby---American corruption and hypocrisy was way past redemption. What's perhaps most terrifying about this book is the lack of a moral center. The two main characters, Converse and Hicks, are both corrupt in their own ways, the former a writer scrambling to recapture his gonads by running "scag" into the States after a terrifying breakdown on a Nam battlefield, and the latter a self-fashioned zen/samurai merchant marine who in trying moments reaches for his submachine gun to get to nirvana. When Converse asks Hicks to sneak the H to Converse's wife, Marge, all hell breaks loose, and we're introduced to a variety of frightening simulacra of American capitalism. First and foremost, there's Antheil---which on name alone gets Stone massive points for cool. (George Antheil being a 1920s composer). He's a (maybe) narc who deals, dig, and he has two viscious thugs who do his evil bidding. Then there's the phony Hollywood sorts who wanna ride the dragon because it's hip, the drug hustler with the last name "Peace" who gets off watching other people getting off (so he can rip em off), and the unfortunate roshi who gets a lead sandwich for believing in transcendence. Take that, zen motherfucker!

In the hands of a thriller writer, these would be cartoon characters, but for Stone they become opportunities to plumb philosophical reactions to the problem of "engage" (the French noun, not the verb). First and foremost is nihilism, the state of the American soul post-1960s, but also Christian sacrifice and Buddhist poise. If you like your characters well-read and quote-dropping when they beat the shit out of each other (as I do), the dialogue works really well. Plus Hicks is a fairly obvious attempt to assess the legacy of that Holy Fool Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty of Kerouac fame), whom Stone knew from hanging with the Kesey crowd c. 63-64. If you know how Cassady met his unfortunate demise in 1968, Hick's final march out of the desert of American emptiness (wooshy with smack) will ring excitingly familiar. I would say this is definitely a 70s classic, and probably my fave attempt at a postmortem on the 60s.

Which makes the movie all the more frustrating. For contemporary viewers it's probably most interesting for the familiar faces. There's Michael Moriarity, soon of the original Law and Order, as Converse. And the GREAT Anthony Zerbe, previously seen wearing a black hood while taunting Charlton Heston in The Omega Man, as Antheil. Ray Sharkey, a great actor now more famous for denying he had AIDS in the eary 90s, along with Richard Masur, who usually plays the judge or the wussy ex-husband. Unfortunately, the script guts the book, despite the use of a lot of the original dialogue. This is especially unfortuante for Moriarty, who usually goes full metal hambone when he acts (see the cult classic Q, or Quetzalcoatl!). Plus the movie is full of those irritating zooms that no director in the 70s could do without when they had to UNDERSCORE A DRAMATIC MOMENT. Then there's Nolte, who was a gorgeous hunk of raw beef in the day. Too bad he has to go proto-Rambo at the movie's end; he's more fun when he's bitch-sapping Charles Haid (shortly of Hill Street Blues!). So watch the movie only if you're into an endless soundtrack of Creedence Clearweater Revival, which no Vietnam flick can resist, just as no baseball movie can do without "Centerfield." Yea, Fogerty!

But if you like tough, uncompromising books about fallen people you wouldn't step within ten feet of, these dogs do hunt.

[Kemper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the early '70's as the Vietnam War was winding down, Converse (a guy, not a shoe)is supposedly a journalist, but in reality has gone to Vietnam mostly as a tourist. As he gets ready to return home, he gets involved with a deal to smuggle a large quantity of almost pure heroin back into the states, and he has reason to think that the CIA is covertly sponsoring the plan.

Converse recruits a former soldier, Hicks, to get the dope back into the States and hand it off to his wife, Marge. Marge is supposed to hand it off to others per arrangments Converse has made. However, once the drugs are in the states, things go wrong, and Hicks and Marge end up on the run from a couple of thugs and a government agent. Converse returns home to find the deal is blown and is soon in desperate trouble himself.

Even though most of this book is set in the U.S., it's really about the effect that Vietnam had on America. Once your government has unleashed large scale death and destruction on another country for murky reasons, keeping your own moral compass seems naive. Get what you can, do what you want, and don't worry about the consequences. It explains most of the 1970s.

But the book is a cautionary tale about this view. It says that if you go this route, beware. You've bought into the law of the jungle, and there are a lot of predators out there. Just because you think you're ready to live outside the law because you saw some bad shit and think you've jettisoned the conscience that comes with your place in society, that doesn't mean you're ready to deal with the people who never had one to begin with.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who knows what Time Magazine was thinking when they published their Top 100 Novels list. Written by Magicians author Lev Grossman and some art critic guy, it's almost insolently perverse. It's got maybe 20 women on it, and fewer people of color. It includes The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Lord of the Rings, Portnoy's Complaint and all its spawn, twice any reasonable allotment of Beats, and Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.

It's the Top 100 Nerd Guy Books, in other words, and it's sortof a blast. I learned about Deliverance from it, that book whips. Every once in a while I look it up and pick a book at random from it. You never know what you'll get! (Yes you do, you'll get some testosterone-oozing book about butts by a white guy.)


If nothing else, Dog Soldiers introduced me to this sick-ass portrait of Mussorgsky mid-drinking-himself-to-death, by Ilya Repin (1881)

This time I got this batshit Vietnam noir about the worst drug deal ever. Failing Vietnam journalist Converse decides to smuggle a butt ton of heroin back to the States, with the help of his wife Marge and a PTSD-addled vet named Hicks. It instantly goes bad and then spends the rest of the book going worse.

The whole time everyone keeps asking each other: “You seem just like an ordinary guy. Why’d you try it?” The answer: “We’re all just ordinary guys.”...."What a feckless and disorderly person he was. How much at the mercy of events. 'It was just a kick.'"


Nick Nolte in the 1978 adaptation, "Who'll Stop The Rain"

It's about stripping the veneer of civilization away to feel life, immediate and feral. The pulling off of the safety blanket that society tries to give us. Everyone's tempted by this - it's how you end up buying acid from a guy in the park or voting Republican. As always, the minute it happens we're like oh fuck, no, I don't like this at all. JG Ballard has the definitive exploration of this in Empire of the Sun; it's what happens to Buck in Call of the Wild, too.

One insight was that 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; the testy patience of things as they are might be exhausted at any moment.

Which, I mean, yes, but maybe also don't deal heroin? I don't know about you but I'll keep the safety blanket.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always wrote Stone off as a post-Hemingway tough guy writer (which on some levels he is), and really wish someone had slapped me and forced one of his books into my hand. He uses the stark storytelling of Hemingway with the dark forebodings of Conrad and the apocalyptic humor of Nathaniel West. This novel travels through the same anxieties of Pynchon’s Gravity;s Rainbow( with a bag of heroin replacing phallic rocket technology) but with more naturalistic prose, on the edge borderline demented characters in a society seemingly on the edge of exploding into total savagery (whether in Vietnam or California). Lots of allusions to government corruption and the Manson family, this is the novel of the dark heart of early 70’s America, but its concerns seem if not more so, at least as pressing in our new "merciless age"(to quote Bowles).

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I began this book thinking it would be about the Vietnam War told from the perspective of an in-country reporter named John Converse. I came to find that, while a few early scenes were set in Vietnam and Converse did occasionally reflect on his time spent there, the focus of the book is a drug deal that goes wrong--horribly, horribly wrong. However, I still loved the book. It has a bit of a Pulp Fiction or Guy Ritchie film feel to it. None of the characters are likable people and they have the moral sensibilities of a gnat, but they're entertaining and a reflection of the shifting values embodied by the time period (when asked why he tried to move heroin from Vietnam to the U.S., Converse replies, "You hear stories over there. They say everybody does it. Being there fucks up your perspective"). Like most Vietnam novels, Dog Soldiers is liberally sprinkled with black humor for those who can find and appreciate it. I would read the novel all over again just for Converse's remembrance of being fragmentation-bombed in Cambodia--a particularly harrowing and well-written scene of self-realization.

Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I spy a cop car in my rearview mirror I feel like they might be coming after me. If I step out of line they'll pull me over and that'll be it. (That I've been ticketed twice for bullshit reasons - driving through a one road town with shiny new cop cars for all with out of county plates type of reasons - is neither here nor there. "It's all over. The game is up!" What game? Beats me. I'm probably fucking crazy. ) I slow down to the absolute speed limit, turn my music off, grip the steering wheels and total panic in my brain. I don't breathe until they pass me. (Yeah, I have um anxiety problems. I could probably worry about anything if I put my mind to it.) (That it isn't impossible and bad shit happens all of the time is not a mind rester.)

I felt something like that reading Dog Soldiers. The game is up and they are coming for me. But I don't know how to play the game!

Converse is a former soldier cum writer cum tourist in Vietnam. He feels the fear of the horizon in the back mirrors and the front windows. Cop cars? What the hell humanity can and will do to each other? It's the long view of things. If you look at history books as dates and events it's not about one life, or two, or millions. Who pays for what (anything good anyone has someone paid for it. I like to play history games with myself. Like reading about the suffragettes? I don't think if I was face to face with those women who were beaten and starved in prison for women's right to vote I'd ASK for them to do it. What's worth it for personal reasons, what's not about me)?

The fear is also a heat. Heat on your skin to feel alive and consuming all to keep it burning. I've heard this cliche about self mutilation to be about feeling alive. It isn't, exactly. It's letting yourself off the hook and getting feeling bad over with a punishment. It's a kind of freedom, the worst that can happen, the getting over with. I said a kind of freedom! It's the giving in to the worst kind of... yeah, giving up. It sure doesn't feel free. It feels fucking sick. If you can't beat 'em join 'em? That. Drug yourself, give in to the soul numbing horrors of killing fields and bombs. Cry for... what? That's the problem with the long views. It's all burned up. The short views of joining? Fuck. It wasn't hard at all to make it all about me and life in the world now and all the joining them and hoping there is going to be a long view at all.

Dog Soldiers is a matter of heart killing of country killing and looking in your window for the cop car 'cause it COULD happen. The big picture is so far beyond my paranoid grasping mental claws. It sure isn't a heat on my skin of feeling alive. Dog Soldiers might've been a big picture book when it came out about America after the Vietnam war. The war on drugs. It might've been one drug bust. Nihilism. Cops came. It could still be now. I read about the fear and sick long and short view of no hope in the world and I recognized THAT as now and future now. It's something to run from? Now. It kinda IS about all of us. It's about us to point the trigger in the mirror like we're taxi driver and cool bravado and sly dialogue and tough outside and soft inside and soft outside and hard inside exterior. Pretending smoke and mirrors, right? Dog Soldiers is a movie. Long view pretend. Paranoia pretend and forgetting what's worth it for who in what you can see in your face as dates and facts. I wish I wasn't so afraid. I wish I wasn't so good at the laughing either. Dog Soldiers made me smirk as well as it made me squirm. I couldn't even think of what else they could have done than to do crack and smuggle drugs and give up. I can see how it could happen (it's not always like that. Just the fearful times). It is tough to be like Converse and the distraction doesn't work. It deadens you enough to not get out.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Stone, let's all remember, joined his Stanford classmate Ken Kesey & the rest of the Merry Pranksters aboard the LSD-fueled bus "Further," back at the onset of the High Sixties. The experience brought in its richest harvest, however, not in any memoir (though Stone's recent PRIME GREEN makes an admirable effort) but in this piercing & scarifying *noir.* Though first published just as the '60s hallucinations were petering out, DOG SOLDIERS remains the essential depiction of how the dream soured & collapsed, in a swill of broken lives. Certainly Denis Johnson needed this novel to clear the way for the tragic yearning of JESUS' SON, but DOG SOLDIERS has the better imagination & the more full-bodied personalities. Its first episodes play out as a kind of Vietnam dinner-drama, in which the gunfire's offstage & the former Marines Converse & Hicks cast their lots w/ the fallen; they take up smuggling heroin. Converse presents perhaps the most destructive artist figure in a generation of American novels; he says of bringing the scag to San Francisco: "I feel like this is the first real thing I ever did in my life." Yet it's Hicks who's the greater creation, an American samurai saddled w/ a serious love of booze & an inborn commitment to the principles of Zen. Soon after coming ashore in the States, Hicks is spurred to running for his life w/Converse's wife Marge, a woman w/ rich conflicts of her own, on the one hand a marvelously free & smart definition of marriage -- & motherhood -- on the other an abject determination to get as high as she can. The bad guys come across w/ a matching vividness, in particular the crooked SF detective Antheil (indeed, his Fuhrer is an insect), who w/ his two "pet rats" swiftly collar Converse & force him to help w/ tracking & catching Hicks, Marge, & the smack. The scenes of Converse's torture are the most directly presented violence in the book, but the latter half of DOG SOLDIERS puts us through a number of perfectly shocking outbursts, each one a blow between the eyes & yet each rendered the more intense by their moments of indirection, the things the characters can't see. Then too, the worst that happens here all seems necessary, & so they're touched w/ humor (some of the grim one-liners have stayed w/ me for decades now), & enlivened as well w/ an undeniable nobility. The blood & depravity incubate buds of fresh possibility. Stone may demonstrate a broader political vision in the later books, Conradian panoramas like the Central American FLAG FOR SUNRISE or the Jerusalem novel DAMASCUS GATE, but it's this more personal vision that risks most & matters most. After reading, you're never free of its chilling shadow of American overreach.

[Scott Rhee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book, "Dog Soldiers" by Robert Stone in college. I made the mistake of watching the film adaptation, a 1978 film called "Who'll Stop the Rain?" starring Nick Nolte, before reading the book. The movie was okay---in fact, a pretty decent '70s crime thriller (https://www.google.com/search?q=who%2...) but it kind of shaped my impression of the book in a negative way.

Stone's novel, by the way, is extremely well-written. It's about Vietnam, although the majority of the novel is set in the states, after the protagonist returns home from his tour of duty. He's smuggled in a shit-load of heroin, which he plans to sell in San Francisco with his wife, who is a drug addict. He is on the run from a corrupt DEA agent. He has a lot of things working against him, the least of which is his junkie wife and the corrupt Federal agent. An astute reader will recognize that he is probably suffering from severe PTSD.

It's been a while, but I remember the book being depressing as hell with a fatalistic sense of impending doom. In that sense, it's probably a really good metaphor for the Vietnam War, which is what Stone was going for.

[Jon Zelazny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning, hypnotic blend of social-realist Watergate-era California anomie and gritty noir, Stone only blunders in his uber-convoluted final cat-and-mouse gunfight across a rural commune that somehow includes hills, woods, cliffs, buildings, tunnels, ditches, secret passages, and trails. Stone strains mightily to paint you the full picture, but bogs down for thirty+ pages that would be pulse-pounding if you had any idea where anybody is in relation to anything else. Guess I need to see the movie again. Too bad he couldn't get Altman to do it.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Herr wrote, in Dispatches, "I couldn't tell the Vietnam veterans from the rock and roll veterans." This could apply to Robert Stone's characters in general, all of whom seem haunted by the 60s in one way or the other. On one hand, Dog Soldiers is not really about Vietnam- we only spend 50-60 pages there- but Vietnam is always in the background, as it was in A Flag for Sunrise, the other novel of Stone's I've read. The experience of being there changes his characters forever. As one of them thinks after watching US pilots mow down elephants that were ostensibly being used by the North Vietnamese to carry supplies, a variety of the dissonance that I think just about all of us uneasily live with these days, "if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high."

This character is John Converse, a journalist who goes to Vietnam with the aspiration of writing something about the war, but ends up agreeing to help "move" three kilos of heroin after they've been smuggled back to the US by an old military buddy/acquaintance/Nietzsche and Buddhism enthusiast/psychopath (?) named Ray Hicks. Stone demonstrates that at the moment of decision, and in the presence of an attractive woman, John's psychological need to act boldly seems more significant than moral or legal questions. Such things happen in life. John's wife, Marge, samples the product, develops a habit, and disappears with Ray. When John gets back to the US, a couple of unsavory 'regulatory agents' pick up John's trail and torture him (kitchens can be extremely dangerous places) into helping them. That's the plot, basically, and it's a pretty suspenseful one. John and Marge both seem archetypal, representative of a passage from idealism to nihilism; John at first believes that he can write something meaningful about the madness of the war, and Marge seems representative of people who tried LSD or mushrooms for the purpose of self-discovery or -improvement. But it turns out that war and hard drugs are things that cannot simply be utilized, channeled, and walked away from. In this novel, both roads end in the escapism of heroin.

Stone writes convincingly about drugs, but not like someone who is heavily into them. I doubt there's any causal relationship, but his name is appropriate to his writing style- realistic, very much of the physical world and true to the way people speak. His characters tend to be stoic about their desperate lives. They take drugs, but we don't go on their trips with them- unlike, say, Burroughs or Pynchon, Stone doesn't try to mimic the experience. His writing is not out-of-this-world, not on the level of, say, Michael Herr, but...solid, like a stone.

One of the minor characters in Dog Soldiers, an older journalist, asks Converse about Vietnam, and tells him, "but you went, that's the important thing", before reminiscing about his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. But why is it the important thing? Part of what makes Stone's characters' relationship with Vietnam so complicated and interesting is the nature of their ambivalence towards it. They're not naive, and they generally don't get off on killing. And while they can never really get away from Vietnam, they also feel a strange nostalgia for it- as if they miss the most meaningful years of their lives, and they know that whatever comes next will never be able to match them. A tempting response might be to find a powerful enough form of escape and ride with it until the end, but the irony is that the existence of Stone's novel belies the tragic viewpoint he expresses so well- or it at least demonstrates that certain forms of escape are less harmful than others.

[Enrique · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pues no me ha parecido para tanto...

Página 99 y abandono sin remordimientos.
Conversaciones ágiles, buen ritmo, se intuye un fondo con cuestiones éticas de calado...pero no me veo con fuerzas como para leerme 430 páginas de este libro.

Creo también que la traducción no puede ser muy buena, varias veces he tenido que releer para encontrar sentido a un párrafo, o para saber quién dice qué en cada momento.

¡A otra cosa!

[F.E. Beyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one grew on me as it went along, I can give it 3.5 stars. In “Dog Soldiers”, published 1974, Robert Stone shows the 60s dream turned into a nightmare: the hippie weed smoker is now into heavier drugs; the violence from the war in Vietnam has leaked back home and society is, well - morally corrupt. The characters are unlikable but they keep fighting; what they want is unclear, even to themselves. Having irrational actors allows Stone to put together an action movie plot not without interesting philosophical asides; he is skilled, perhaps a little too much so, at detailing the tortured thoughts of his troubled creations. The novel not a bad thriller, a sort of cowboy chase across the wilderness not without a decent shootout. That the Mexican border is not far off near the end is inevitable, Mexico exists as an escape route for the American outlaw. He hardly ever makes it across though, maybe because he knows that once out of the States he ceases to matter.

The book's opening scene throws you off guard: Converse, a thirty-five year old American journalist in Vietnam, tries to pick up a older woman on a park bench. He might have had a chance if she wasn't a missionary, but he tries anyway. Converse is going to run heroin back to the States. He'll use his merchant marine buddy Ray Hicks. The 'scag' is to be delivered to Marge, Converse's drug-addled wife. She’s into Dilaudid bought from the Samoan usher at the adult movie theatre where she works selling tickets. Once the heroin arrives she quickly gets hooked on that.

Thugs tipped off by Converse's Vietnam supplier jump Hicks when he delivers the drugs to Marge. Hicks fights them off and takes Marge and the scag to a former hippie colony in the forest. The thugs, the violent and unbalanced Smitty and Daskin, with Converse as hostage set out in hot pursuit. They are working for a crooked cop of some kind and they’ll have their work cut out with Hicks, who was allegedly based on the famous beatnik Neal Cassady. I can’t imagine Cassady having the parts of a M16 in a safe place all greased up and ready to be assembled, Hicks even has a M70 grenade launcher attachment.

Some of the background about the hippie colony at the site of an old Spanish mission in the hills of Southern California doesn’t really come off. The spiritual leader, a German named Dieter, has put more security into his chill-pad than Castle Grayskull. Converse's past as a journalist with a flare for catchy headlines is mapped well enough, but I would have liked to get a clearer picture of Hicks.

Dog soldiers reminded me of Conrad’s "Victory" and Cormac McCarthy’s "No Country for Old Men". "Victory" has the same chase narrative and Stone was a fan of Conrad. "Dog Soldiers" has the evil of "No Country For Old Men" but more humour and less self-conscious preciseness. The female characters are all junkies in this book, but the men are messed up too, so it doesn’t feel too sexist. Here is an idea of Stone’s prose:

“He sat desiring the girl - a speed-hardened straw-colored junkie stewardess, a spoiled Augustana Lutheran, compounded of airport Muzak and beauty parlor school. Her eyes were fouled with smog and propane spray.”

I haven’t seen the movie with Nick Nolte, but I can imagine this novel would make a good film. A few years later Nolte starred in a movie of Steinbeck’s "Cannery Road", a much more positive take on the human condition - but not a book to make a movie out of.

[Checkman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was born in 1968. My memories of the early 1970's are that of a child. My parents worked. They provided a nice safe house and I was never cold or hungry. What memories I have of the first part of that decade (outside of my family) are associated with television shows ( The Rookies, Adam-12, Emergency, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and a few movies. So when I am curious about what was going on in America's soul during that time period I turn to works of fiction - books and movies. Everything from The Stand to Marathon Man to The Candidate and Taxi Driver .

Dog Soldiers is one of those touchstones. A look into the drug culture in (almost) Post-Vietnam/Post-Counterculture America. The war was almost over and everyone knew that we had lost. Billions of dollars, 57,000 dead American soldiers, hundreds of thousands Vietnamese dead and injured and a startling realization that America could be kicked in the teeth. Pretty shattering stuff.

Meanwhile the idealism of the Flower Era was withering. Drugs had taken over and hard nosed criminals had moved in. The Flower Children wanted their fix and to hell with the flowers.

There's more, but that synopsis is enough. Almost everybody was cynical and many had decided that it was time to look out for Number One and maybe make a buck at the same time. The Me Generation was starting to take form.

Robert Stone was one of the first writers to see what was going on and to use this dynamic as the background for his novel. It was potent stuff in 1974. A drug fueled, violent, paranoid, cynical story populated by addicts, burned out hippies, corrupt cops, world weary veterans and so on. Everybody was either bought and paid for or was for sell. Because it was the first of it's kind (or one of the first) it was a sensation. The counter-culture novel meets James M. Cain.

In 2011 the story has lost some of it's bite. We've seen it done since on bigger stages with bigger budgets. Filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino have taken this genre and ran with it. Movies like Pulp Fiction , Thursday , Savages and even Smokin Aces are influenced by Stone's work - if not outright copies. So to a younger reader the story might feel dated and smaller than life.

I don't see it that way. This is a strange and vivid novel. The off kilter feeling is correct. Drugs alter one's senses. The world of the criminal is a dysfunctional one at best. I like the mix of drug haze, violence and burned out cynical America. It might not seem that fresh and cutting edge nowadays, but it still gives you a strong feeling for what was going on in America in the first half of the 1970's.

[Ubik 2.0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Declino e caduta dell’Impero Americano

Sebbene “Dog Soldiers” sia presentato come un romanzo sulla Guerra del Vietnam (anzi, uno fra i primi romanzi del genere, una sorta di capostipite), in realtà l’evento e l’iniziale ambientazione indocinese non occupano che un quinto della narrazione; malgrado questo e sebbene la cesura fra la porzione vietnamita del racconto e quella americana non sia netta, sembra opportuno analizzarle separatamente.

La prima parte giustifica la fama del romanzo di Stone, soprattutto se lo si inquadra nell’epoca della sua pubblicazione (1974), quando cioè film come “Platoon, Il cacciatore, Apocalypse Now” erano di là da venire e l’unico, o quanto meno il principale contributo all’immaginario americano in materia era fornito dalla retorica di “Berretti verdi”, interpretato e diretto da John Wayne come una riproposizione del conflitto fra gli eroi Usa e i “musi gialli” giapponesi.

Si comprende quindi che l’evidenza delle implicazioni più occulte dell’intervento militare (la prostituzione giovanile vietnamita, l’alcoolismo e l’abuso e traffico di stupefacenti fra i marines), vergogne non relegate sullo sfondo ma rappresentate anche dai cinici protagonisti del romanzo, cinquant’anni fa deve aver prodotto un bel botto, così come la parallela assenza di qualunque ideale di soccorso ad un popolo sudvietnamita a sua volta corrotto, anche e soprattutto nella sua classe dirigente.

Dall’arrivo del carico di eroina in California, con un piano maldestro gestito da dilettanti improvvisatisi trafficanti dopo il fallimento dei rispettivi progetti professionali ed esistenziali, mutano completamente il panorama, il genere e lo stile del romanzo che pare rifarsi, in questa estenuante e abbastanza monotona seconda parte, ai canoni narrativi degli interminabili viaggi on the road della Beat Generation, tra divagazioni filosofiche e trip allucinogeni di seconda mano. Non a caso, come riporta la prefazione, Stone era stato introdotto da Ken Kesey, guru dell’LSD, nel circolo letterario di Kerouac e compagnia.

A questo punto, nell’economia del romanzo il Vietnam è diventato nulla più che la stazione di partenza di un traffico di droga come tanti altri, ad opera di un terzetto di avidi corrotti alla deriva (il trauma del Watergate, quello sì che nel ’74 era già entrato nella coscienza americana…!): un giornalista disilluso, una moglie tossica e un ex eroe di guerra che si assume la maggior parte del rischio e che nella trasposizione cinematografica (“I guerrieri dell’inferno”) avrà il ghigno appropriato di un Nick Nolte formato Rambo; tre antieroi a loro volta inseguiti da agenti della DEA non meno corrotti ma più violenti.

“Dog Soldiers” risente pesantemente, a mio parere, degli anni trascorsi, delle innumerevoli versioni che si sono accavallate sulla fallimentare e velenosa esperienza americana nel Sud-est asiatico e sul disagio esistenziale del clima hippy che Stone cerca di cogliere, in una fuga senza fine verso il lungo e malinconico tramonto del sogno americano.

[J · Rating 2 out of 5]

The conventional wisdom goes that this book is a scathing examination of how far the ideals of the flower power generation had fallen by the mid 1970s. A would-be heroin smuggler returns from Vietnam to find that his real war is in America, amidst a revolving cast of of dissipated junkies, sleazy hustlers, violent thugs and burnt out old hippies.

Maybe as a millenial reading this in 2015, I'm just generationally too far removed from the social fabric of this age to really 'get it,' but I thought 'Dog Soliders' kind of sucked. Stone's prose is tight and focused, but a lot of the times it descends into cheap thriller territory; the characters are just blandly symbolic stereotypes, and the only thing that really has much energy or drive is the plot as it pushes forward to a bizarre, climactic shootout in the woods of California (Get it? America IS Vietnam, man.)

Maybe at some point in the past it was considered brilliant to have your characters more or less look into the camera and start riffing on the decline of the U.S. in the post-war era; I doubt it impressed a lot of readers in the 70s, it sure made me roll my eyes at several points. This is fundamentally a thriller that I think Stone tried to make 'literary' just by adding some pungent social commentary to. Instead he ends up with a sort-of-thriller where the characters just seem to do an awful lot of shallow whining about obliquely hinted at social changes while getting shunted from one plot-point to the next.

This was published a year after Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' and a year before William Gaddis's 'JR' (both of which, along with Dog Soliders, won the national book award in their respective years), both of those books are massive, massively rich stylistic fugues which helped push our idea of what the the novel is and can do into extreme, new directions. I like plot driven books, and I enjoy social realism, and its not really fair to compare what Stone does to what Pynchon and Gaddis do. But my point is that even by the standards of other big-name works of its age, Dog Soldiers is a pretty bland mediocrity.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel tells the story of an American journalist in Vietnam who schemes to smuggle heroin into the United States aided by his wife in California and an ex-Marine accomplice. As the plan goes askew, Stone creates a harrowing struggle for possession of the drug while investigating the psychological motivation and interrelationships of the major characters.

Having experienced the American involvement in Vietnam firsthand, Stone is seemingly more concerned with analyzing the aftermath of the conflict rather than raising a moral objection to war itself. However, Stone is certainly communicating that there exists an inherent attraction or propensity in the American psyche toward violence and that the horrors of the war unfold as a logical extension of illogical fascination.

Ironically, the heroin takes possession of the novel in much the same way as it does the lives of those who either possess or desire it. Heroin is used by Stone as a vehicle to explore the depth of man's indifference or baseness toward the destruction of self or others. However, the novel is also concerned with the prevailing environment capable of producing such disregard for human dignity and continuance.
Source: http://www.enotes.com/topics/dog-sold...

From the book:

The last moral objection that Converse experienced in the traditional manner had been his reaction to the Great Elephant Zap of the previous year. That winter, the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, had decided that elephants were enemy agents because the NVA used them to carry things, and there had ensued a scene worthy of the Ramayana. Many-armed, hundred -headed MACV had sent forth steel-bodied flying insects to destroy his enemies, the elephants. All over the country, whooping sweating gunners descended from the cloud cover to stampede the herds and mow them down with 7.62-millimeter machine guns.

The Great Elephant Zap had been too much and had disgusted everyone. Even the chopper crews who remembered the day as one of insane exhilaration had been somewhat appalled. There was a feeling that there were limits.

And as for dope, Converse thought, and addicts— if the world is going to contain elephants pursued by flying men, people are just naturally going to want to get high.

About the author:

Robert Stone (born August 21, 1937) is an American novelist. He won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 for his novel Dog Soldiers and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Awards. Dog Soldiers was adapted as a film, Who'll Stop the Rain in 1978 starring Nick Nolte, and Time magazine included it in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S...

More from the book:

“This is a very strange war,” he told the marines.
“Yeah, it’s weird, man. We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

There are no battle scenes in this war story.

Despite its initial scenes in Vietnam, however, Dog Soldiers concentrates not on combat but on the impact of the war on the moral certainties, loyalties, and conscience of the civilian United States, where, as Stone later said, “all sorts of little bills were coming up due for payment.” The novel argues that the Vietnam War most affected values back home, infecting the survivors with greed and corruption summed up in the heroin underworld. Stone calls the 1970’s “a creepy, evil time” and Dog Soldiers his reaction to it.
Source: http://www.enotes.com/topics/dog-sold...

Is this book deep? You bet! I could not always manage to plumb the depths and am not sure if it is due to my philosophical limitations or that the book is ancient. The section at the end of the book when Hicks is walking to his death is particularly incomprehensible to me. And it goes on for pages. I am lost in the wilderness Stone creates. Is it this incomprehensibility that earns awards, I wonder?

Both Converse and Hicks are plagued with existential dilemmas throughout the novel. Converse is a selfish, corrupt, and weak man, who is ruled by fear and who is frankly indifferent to the suffering of others. He lacks a moral center and is therefore without compassion. Hicks is Converse’s foil: They are equally callous, but Hicks acts out of a strong conviction rather than apathy, so he is the more sympathetic or likeable character. In following Zen Buddhism, Nietzschean philosophy, and the Bushido code of the samurai, Hicks knowingly detaches himself from theistic ideals of crime and punishment. Walking to his death, Hicks philosophizes about nature, power, suffering, and death and comes to believe that he has the ability to absorb his pain and that of others into himself, making him symbolic of Christ. He fights and dies so that Marge and Converse, although not necessarily deserving of his sacrifice, can live.
Source: http://www.enotes.com/topics/dog-sold...

One thing that made Stone famous, I think, is his familiarity with and ability to write about the drug scene. While not one that I am familiar with, his words seem like magic. Like pure heroin to an addict. The book even has a character, Gerald, who is a novice writer with a rich wife who is paying to get some experience in the real drug world. I wonder who Stone is in the book and how he got his drug experience. He is probably not Gerald since that character is very brief, but, who knows?

He made a second little mound for her.

“Go ahead. Hit the other one.”

She hit the other one, and then sat stock-still; tears ran from her closed eyes. Slowly, she bent forward and rested her forehead against the desk. Hicks moved the phone book out of her way.

In a few minutes, she sat up again and turned to him. She was smiling. She put her arms around his waist; her tears and runny nose wet his shirt. He bent down to her; she rested her head on his shoulder. The tension drained from her in small sobs.

“Better than a week in the country, right?”

Holding to him, she stood up and he helped her to the bed . She lay across it, arching her back, stretching her arms and legs toward its four corners.

“It’s a lot better than a week in the country,” she said. She began to laugh. “It’s better than dilaudid. It’s good.”

She rolled over and hugged herself.

“Right in the head!” She made her hand into a pistol and fired into her temple. “Right in the head.”

He sat down on the bed with her. 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.

“It does funny little things inside you. It floats inside you. It’s incredible.”

Dog Soldiers was published in 1974 and received a National Book Award for Fiction in 1975. Forty years later I am not sure what the book has to tell us about our current era. It is a vastly disturbing vision of what was then contemporary America. Is it just history these days or are we still immersed in the Vietnam syndrome? Of course, we do like to keep our wars circulating but Vietnam still seems pretty powerful to me.

For an out of date book, I will still award this three easy stars. If I was more tuned into the drug world, it might rate higher depending on how it has maintained its credibility over the years. I just don’t know. But it does say much about the afterlife of our war of that era and that still has some currency to me.
Why did we fight the war, you wonder?

“He came down for you,” she said. “That’s why he came down. We could have gotten out.” …

“That can’t be true.”

“He’s not a sane person,” Marge said. “And he’s not very bright. Sometimes,” she told him, “people do simple-minded things like that. They take a chance to help their friends. Can’t you respond to that?”

“Yes, I can respond to it,” Converse said. “I’m responding to it. He won’t be there.”

“Haven’t you ever done anything like that?”

“Yes and no,” Converse said. When he turned to her, she moved her back to him pressing her forehead against the hard metal seatback. “Like what?” he demanded. “I don’t know what that guy did or why he did it. I don’t know what I’m doing or why I do it or what it’s like.”

“It’s something simple,” Marge said. She twisted in the seat, bringing her head to rest against the plastic window. …

“Nobody knows,” Converse told her confidently. “That’s the principle we were defending over there. That’s why we fought the war.”

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books from the 70s where every conversation they have you know that they're really talking about something else, something much deeper and more profound than what they're saying on the surface, but you have no idea what it is. Or maybe that's just me. I want to like this book, I want to be hip to the cool, 60/70s druggie counterculture. I want to be in on the joke and get what the cool kids get. But I just don't seem to. It's the same for me with Naked Lunch or On the Road, although those books were much earlier, before the fall of said counterculture. I just don't totally get the appeal.

Dog Soldiers tells the story of a heroin deal gone wrong. Converse, a journalist living in Vietnam, agrees to take part in a drug deal after deciding that the world is basically corrupted. He employs his friend Hicks to smuggle the Heroin into America and hand it off to his wife, Marge. Unfortunately someone is already on to them. When Hicks tries to hand the drugs off to Marge they are intercepted by two henchman, but escape. The rest of the novel follows them while they're on the run from these somewhat unexplained assailants. Meanwhile, these same men find Converse, who has returned to the US, and force him to try to make Hicks and Marge turn over the drugs by threat of death.

All these characters are flawed, they all have problems and most are depressed and/or junkies. Their motives are unclear and hard to understand as is their message. It is barely explained until the end who these men that are chasing Hicks and Marge are until the end. This book was highly praised at the time of its release, but since then seems to have faded away. It was pretty hard to find, in the entire LA public library system there is only one available copy. After reading it, this doesn't surprise me that much. Even though I'm not a huge fan of the beat writers, I can still tell that this book is lacking the energy and spirit of Kesey, Kerouac, Wolfe and Ginsburg.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Were Americans ever really naive or is that just something common myth tries to convince us of. Personally, I don't think so. The 60's is a duplicitous reflection of history that depends on where it was one stood at the time. Were you in the back of the bus, in Stanford or Harvard, at Woodstock, or in a POW camp? I was a child of the 70's and I'll be the first to admit that my mind used to go into "shutdown" mode whenever some older suburbanite started waxing poetic about what a free spirit they were in the sixties, especially when I know they voted for Ronald Reagan and George Bush while bopping their head to the umpteenth playing of "Summer in the City" by the Lovin' Spoonful on KOOL FM. So we have this novel that is deemed by critics to be an allegory for the waning sixties. Or really, was that Robert Stone's intention? Clearly it's a product of experiences in the USA as he knew them. My recollection of the 70's is television, skateboards and school. Oh yeah, and sports and part-time work at Winn Dixie and girls and pot and going to movies. I was sheltered from the ugliness of the world mostly, given that ugliness still seeped into the 'burbs in spite of our parents' best and failed efforts. So this book is a look at a time and place involving a couple of young wasted lives pursuing a fool's dream involving heroin. The deck is stacked against them, as it is for most of us in this crazy country of movies, and music and jingoism. You want to read a good and sordid book about drugs and dreams, then this is one for you. I liked it. I probably read it at the right time in life. Had I read it in my twenties I might have not really cared.

[Sub_zero · Rating 3 out of 5]

«En cuanto a la droga, pensó Converse, y a los adictos..., si en el mundo va a seguir habiendo elefantes perseguidos por hombres que vuelan, la gente naturalmente va a querer colocarse».

El protagonista de Dog Soldiers es un escritor de medio pelo llamado John Converse que se desplaza hasta Saigón con el objetivo de documentarse para su próxima novela, pero que ha terminado inmerso en el mundo del hampa vietnamita. Converse, que transporta de un lado para otro un maletín cargado de heroína, describe la degradación y el infierno provocado por la guerra con sorprendente sobriedad, sin recrearse de manera exhibicionista en las atrocidades del conflicto, pero haciendo muchísimo hincapié en las devastadoras consecuencias que se derivan de presenciarlas.

Tras una serie de peripecias que involucran casas de prostitución y un atentado contra las oficinas de Hacienda que le podría haber costado la vida, Converse se pone en contacto con un exmarine y antiguo compañero llamado Ray Hicks, nihilista acérrimo y lector incondicional de Nietzsche, al que delega su mercancía para que la custodie durante el tiempo que tarde Converse en regresar a casa. Ya de vuelta en América, Converse descubre que su mujer, Marge, y su amigo Hicks, perseguidos por un grupo de federales corruptos, se han dado a la fuga con el paquete, dando el pistoletazo de salida a un frenético recorrido por California en el que Robert Stone ofrece su visión sin paliativos del escenario alucinógeno en el que Estados Unidos se hallaba inmerso tras su desastrosa gestión del conflicto bélico.

A lo largo de Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone refleja de manera perfecta el impacto que supuso para la sociedad estadounidense la guerra de Vietnam y estructura su novela como una suerte de road movie cuyos protagonistas afrontan la misma ordalía lisérgica que los soldados en el frente. La paranoia y la angustia existencial que consumen a los personajes no son tanto producto de sus adicciones (que también), sino consecuencia lógica del dinamitado sueño americano. En Dog Soldiers, Estados Unidos aparece magníficamente representado como una extensión mental de la jungla vietnamita, un territorio demencial y despojado de toda moral que parece puntuar como campo de batalla mucho más alto que el propio país asiático.

La propuesta de Robert Stone es sólida y tremendamente amena. Los personajes, desorientados y sin rumbo, siempre al límite de la desesperación y la derrota, entierran su preocupación por el futuro incierto bajo sublimes chutes de ácido que les mantienen solo un paso por delante de la muerte. «Si pudiera rezar», confiesa Marge en cierto momento de la novela, «le pediría a Dios que dejara caer la bomba encima de todos nosotros, de nosotros y de nuestros hijos, y nos aniquilara por completo. Así dejaríamos de necesitar esto y de necesitar lo otro. De necesitar droga y de necesitar amor y de necesitar las gilipolleces de los demás y sus putos rollos, joder». Por medio de una prosa hierática y a la vez mordaz, Stone deja entrever momentos de auténtico pánico al contemplar el deslucido rostro de la Norteamérica perdedora y manifiesta esa evidencia ante la que Converse, Hicks y Marge se niegan continuamente a rendirse: que el verdadero enemigo está más cerca de lo que creen.

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the cover of Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers" a blurb from Washington Post Book World screams "The Most Important Novel of the Year". Had this been indeed true, then 1973 would have been a terrible year for books. "Dog Soldiers" is just a complex and competent thriller, with some nuggets of social observation thrown in to make it appear wise and deep.

1973, Saigon. Vietnam war is winding down. The main characters are John Converse, a low-level journalist and an aspiring writer, his wife, Marge, and an American soldier, Ray Hicks, who is a sort of Converse's friend. Converse has Hicks smuggle a large package of heroin from Vietnam into California. The bulk of the plot describes attempts of numerous bad characters to get that package in various California locations. The action-filled plot is interesting, yet, especially towards the end, totally implausible.

I have serious reservations as to Mr. Stone's writing. The dialogues in the first part of the novel are jarringly unnatural. One can eventually get accustomed to less than stellar dialogues and towards the end they read almost fine. Only Marge and Ray feel like real people, Converse is close but does not quite make it, and the bad guys and some women characters are just caricatures. There are some nicely drawn minor players, though. It has taken me such a long time to get through the book as I had to force myself to continue reading.

Most characters, while being drunk to the gills, are constantly high on heroin, dilaudid, and other drugs, including hallucinogenic mushrooms. They talk in a rather highbrow language ("Let smiles cease, let laughter flee") and conduct bombastic philosophical discussions on the deeper issues of the nature of being, even while being tortured or while dying. All this is rather silly. Maybe it was considered innovative in 1973, but I read deeper books that involved addiction, which had been written much earlier (as an example, Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano", published in 1947).

The greatest sin of the novel is its pretentiousness. Mr. Stone uses Big Words to write about Big Issues. More talented writers can write about big issues using small words.

What saves "Dog Soldiers" from a two-star rating is an adept portrayal of the insanity and horrors of war and of the societal breakdown caused by the war. The slow death of the hippie era is shown well. Also, while the bulk of the plot in the last third of the book is preposterous, the very last four of five pages provide a wonderfully nasty closing to the plot.

Two and three quarter stars.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the toughest, liveliest, most biting things I have ever read - real, funny, and sharp. Stone writes in the Hemingway style - short, clear sentences, terse and direct. But he is no Hemingway as far as his concerns go, althou the macho content of his writing is reasonably high. He is interested in moral and emotional ambiguity, greed, toughness, and some of the stranger conflicts that can occur between men and men, and men and women.

The story follows a small-time journalist named Converse who attempts to smuggle a big load of heroin out of Vietnam and into California during the Vietnam War era. The descriptions of life in Vietnam at the beginning of the book give a vivid sense of what things must have been like in that war-whipped land. Converse enlists the help of an old friend named Ray Hicks, a naval officer who does the actual smuggling. But when Hicks reaches San Francisco, things start going very wrong.

SPOILER ALERT

A couple of scumbag hustlers, claiming to be narcotics cops, accost Hicks and try to get his dope away from him. He and Converse's wife Marge end up on the lam and in the sack together, trying to get rid of a big bag of heroin. They go to L.A. where they meet Eddie Peace, a slick operator who introduces them to some dilettante preppies who want to dabble in drugs. Things go very wrong again and they set out for the desert, Marge now fully hooked on smack.

Converse meanwhile comes back, and despite a little help from his left wing father-in-law, is accosted and tortured by the same creeps Hicks had to deal with. They turn out to be affiliated with some sort of federal agent named Antheil. These guys force Converse to accompany them to a showdown with Hicks and Marge at the mountain top retreat of an alcoholic, and rather ineffective holy man named Dieter. In the end, Converse and Marge are left standing, Hicks is dead, and the dope is in the hands of the crooked federal agent and his accomplice, the woman who set up the dope deal in the first place.

This is good, red-blooded adventure, but it is also full of trenchant satire on various aspects of the 1965-1973 counterculture era: the supercool behavior, the drug scene, the spiritual side of it, the criminal elements, and the guiltless, unattached sex. I could not put it down, and found myself savoring every scene and picturing them in my mind.

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Druggy, draggy, doomy, dreamy, shaggy, baggy: DOG SOLDIERS checks every box on the Seventies Literature list. It performs the enviable task of working equally well a literary novel of big themes, big ideas and big masculine bulls**t and a chase-fueled crime novel. Mostly it works best as a story of its time and its place, an American reckoning with the Vietnam War and the tectonic cultural shifts it forced into place before most of us, and most of DOG SOLDIERS' characters, were ready for it. I love it best in that light.

As such, I read, and re-read DOG SOLDIERS mostly for how I see myself in it, and I find that John Converse, rather than Ray Hicks — its heroic figure, as opposed to its hero — is my portal into this world. Passive to the point that almost nothing can sandblast him out of his complacency, smart and dumb and cynical and naive in equal measure, the Marine-turned-war correspondent-turned failed heroin trafficker skates along in his life on a placid but thin layer of pseudo-philosophical ice, better able to feel the pain of torture than the pain of being misaligned with his time and his place. I find him fascinating, and I find a lot of myself in him, a lot more than Hicks, the Nietzsche-reading ex-Marine misanthrope who runs off with Converse's drug-addicted wife. Your mileage may vary. I hope Converse found his way someday. I hope I do too.

[Rita · Rating 5 out of 5]

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Robert Stone nos presenta una obra que en muchos momentos recuerda a las grandes películas americanas. Pausada al principio, cuando debía ser trepidante, y veloz en su segunda parte, cuando una supuesta calma tendría que encargarse de frenar el ritmo.
Pero Stone, con un enorme acierto narrativo, uno de mucho, lo hace al revés. Situar la calma en Vietnam y el desenfreno y la decadencia en el EEUU de los 70 tiene su mérito.