Dog Soldiers and the Corruption of the American Soul

*Spoilers lie ahead like heroin dust in a junkie’s home.  Read on with caution.*

Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone, is yet another fantastic novel, smart and engaging.  At the center of the story is a bag of three kilograms of heroin that John Converse, a war correspondent in Vietnam, has smuggled into San Francisco near the end of the war.  The smuggler, Ray Hicks, is an old friend of Converse’s in the Merchant Marines.  From the moment Hicks arrives in the States, a group of men know what he is carrying and are trying their level best to get it from him even as he tries to deliver the package to Marge, Converse’s wife, who is supposed to pay Hicks for his labors.  Hicks and Marge go on the lam in order to find a profitable way to offload the drugs, while Antheil, an “agent,” and his two thugs, Danskin and Smitty, pursue them.  Converse returns home, is seized by Antheil’s men, and is brought along as a bargaining chip in retrieving the heroin.  The novel culminates in the wilds of southeastern California in the home of Dieter Bechstein, an old friend of Hicks’s and an erstwhile cult leader who no longer has a following.

The theme behind all this action is corruption.  Everyone in the novel is corrupted.  Converse and Marge have become drug dealers.  Marge’s father deals in “news” items that are entirely fictitious.  Converse’s correspondences from Vietnam are designed to invoke feelings that are antithetical to those Converse actually felt.  Antheil is a federal agent who has gone rogue.  Danskin is a psychopath full of rage and destruction.  And of course, all the mistakes and errors surround a large stash of heroin, an easy enough symbol for corruption.  But the corruption with which Stone is concerned is not a moral corruption.  This is not a book that holds up drug use for scorn—Stone is absolutely neutral when discussing Marge’s habit.  While he is clearly critical of Converse, it is not his attempt to become a drug dealer that is disappointing.  The corruption that Stone has fixed his eye on is a spiritual corruption.

For a headnote to the novel, Stone chose this passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:   

I’ve seen the devil of violence and the devil of greed and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils that swayed and drove men—men, I tell you.  But as I stood on that hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land, I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly.

It is hard to re-read this quote after finishing the novel and not see the hillside of the climax as the subject of the quote.  What is disgusting to Stone  is not the “strong, lusty, red-eyed devils” but the “flabby pretending weak-eyed devil.”  The characters in the novel are not fighting over anything of real substance, of meaning; they are fighting instead over heroin, or worse yet, the money that the heroin can be cashed in for.  What a sad motivator for all the violence and bloodshed.  The shame is not that so much blood has been spilt, but that so much blood has been spilt for something so meaningless.  Instead of searching for the dope, these characters should have been on a spiritual journey,

Drug use in the 1970s had a very different cultural meaning than drug use in the 1960s.  In the ‘60s, there was a feeling of experimentation and a belief that mind-altering drugs might give the user access to new levels of perception and understanding.  All such idealism was dead or at least twitching in the corner by the mid ‘70s.  Marge is stoned for most of the novel, but her reason for shooting up is always to dull the pain and panic.  She is always running away from something through her drugs, not searching for something meaningful.  But the real character to pay attention to where drugs are concerned is Dieter.  When Dieter originally setup his commune on the hill, everything was good:  “Innocence.  Energy.  I believed it so much that for a while it came true for me.  . . . Marvelous things happened to us.  We were levitating, we were delirious.”  He says that it all went south when he “succumbed to the American dream”:  “Then it occurred to me that if I applied the American style—which I didn’t really understand—if I pushed a little, speeded things up a little, we might break into something really cosmic. . . . So I thought, a little push, a little shove, a little something extra to shake it loose.  And I ended up as Doctor Dope.”  In his desire to get to the truly transcendental plain, Dieter turned to drugs, nothing new in the ‘60s.  The outcome, however, was not the cosmic shift he hoped for, but the destruction of the commune and everyone in it.  Drugs prove to be a detour away from self-discovery, not a path towards it, and Dieter loses everything that is important.  That, for Stone, is the true problem with heroin and other drugs.

Dieter’s final moments are used up trying to convince Hicks to throw the dope away, to convince him that dope is a distraction.  Instead, Hicks is obsessed with the heroin, even though we never see him use it.  He’s certainly an addict, but not to the drug in his veins.  Something else in him cares so deeply about the heroin that he returns to fetch it at the end instead of escaping while he can with Converse and Marge.  Nor is it a convincing argument to say that he cares about the money that it will fetch since we never see Hicks think about money at all.  It’s almost as if he wants the drugs as a thing unto itself, which is exactly what Hicks thinks to himself while in his delirious state at the end of the novel: “without the pack, things would be much easier.  He recalled that the pack was what he wanted so he would have to carry it.  Serious people existed in order to want things, and to carry them.”  While Hicks reads philosophy and dabbles in Eastern religions, whatever self examination Hicks once engaged in is long gone.  He has defined himself as a type of samurai, a serious survivor with an honorable code, but the hollowness of that image is exposed in his definition of “serious people.”  That is the very picture of spiritual dryness, as dry as the desert through which Hicks finally meets his death.

It is a solid novel with fantastic characters and some wonderful scenes.  The scenes with Danskin and Smitty are really gripping, especially once they are traveling with Converse.  I was surprised by the depth of these characters, especially given how unpleasant they were.  In fact, it seems to me that Stone much prefers the characters who are thoroughly rotten to those who come closest to being “good.”  Hicks and Marge, while interesting in their way, especially before they meet, are rather flat characters. 

For being a quick read, Dog Soldiers is also a meaty book with as much to think about as you care to find.  It can be a simple chase with drugs and guns, or it can be an exploration of spiritual dryness in America in the 1970s.  I’m sure there is still more to pull from the novel, so don’t hesitate to add your thoughts below!