The Needle and the Damage Done: The Genius of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers

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In 2015, American writer Robert Stone passed away in Key West at the age of 77, and the world lost a literary lion. Stone was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, once for the PEN/Faulkner Award and five times for the National Book Award for Fiction. He always let his books do his talking and he rarely sought the spotlight. His passing was noticed by aficionados—Bruce Weber’s obituary in the New York Times was especially good—but, in general, the event made few ripples on the world stage. As a devotee who had read, and re-read, all of Stone’s eight novels, including one that I believe is among the very best American crime novels, I wondered if the great writer’s legacy would quietly fade away.

In the past year, my concerns have been swept away by a surge of renewed interest in the writer and his work. This renaissance is due to the herculean efforts of Madison Smartt Bell, Stone’s close friend and confidant, and an acclaimed novelist in his own right. In the past year, the indefatigable Smartt Bell published Child of Light, an authorized biography of Stone, curated a collection of Stone’s non-fiction writing entitled The Eye You See With and edited The Library of America’s new package of three of Stone’s best novels: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise and Outerbridge Reach.   

Collectively, there is much to like in all of these books. The biography is a spirited read on its own, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Smartt Bell traces Stone from his early days in the U.S. Navy to stopovers in New York, New Orleans, Vietnam and London as he searched for material for his fiction and meaning in his life. Child of Light strikes a nice balance between narrating the writer’s life and examining his work and I finished the book with a greater appreciation for both. The non-fiction collection offers an thought provoking selection of nuggets from Stone’s early work as a journalist, including his outstanding dispatches from Saigon written in the maelstrom of the Vietnam War, and his later, more philosophical, essays about his craft. 

As good as both of these books are, the Library of America collection is the place to start and the one novel I want to bring to the attention of the CrimeReads’ audience is Stone’s 1974 masterpiece, Dog Soldiers. Reading it again in this collection, I came away convinced that Dog Soldiers, a National Book Award winner, is not only great American fiction, it is also one of the best—and most relevant—American crime novels of the past 50 years. If American crime fiction is a reflection of the soul of the nation, and I believe it is, then Dog Soldiers and its unsparing portrait of “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly,” the novel’s on point epigraph from Joseph Conrad, deserves a place in the pantheon of American crime fiction. There is a beggar’s banquet of rapacious and pitiless folly on display in this novel, but there is nothing flabby, pretending or weak-eyed about it. Dog Soldiers is a clear-eyed and scalpel sharp examination of the darkness at the heart of America’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for opioids, and of the three small-time partners-in-crime who think they can beat the devil and pull off one big score. 

The three partners form a triangle with writer John Converse, something of a stand-in for Robert Stone, according to Smartt Bell, at the center. The novel opens in Saigon, circa 1971, where Converse has spent a year in war-torn South Vietnam purportedly gathering material for a book about the war. Vietnam taught Converse a lesson, but not  one he expected. Instead of finding a story, he came face to face with his fears—and the epiphany he experiences while on assignment in-country is an example of Stone’s powerful writing:

“In the course of being fragmentation-bombed by the South Vietnamese Air Force, Converse experienced several insights; he did not welcome them although they came as no surprise. 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. Another was that in the single moment when the breathing world had hurled itself screeching and murderous at his throat, he had recognized the absolute correctness of its move. In those seconds, it seemed absurd that he had ever been allowed to go his foolish way, pursuing notions and small joys. He was ashamed of the casual arrogance with which he had presumed to scurry about creation. From the bottom of his heart, he concurred in the moral necessity of his destruction.”

After trembling beneath this “friendly” fragmentation bombing, it was a small step for Converse to declare the universe amoral and to convince himself to dispense with “moral objections” and cash in.   Converse never started his book, but he did get his hands on three kilos of pure Vietnamese heroin with a scheme to smuggle the dope to his wife Marge in Berkeley with the help of his friend Ray Hicks, a Marine with a reliable stash onboard the aircraft carrier where he is serving, bound from South Vietnam to San Francisco.   

Move a little dope, make a score and come away with something more tangible than fear for his time in Vietnam. That’s Converse’s simple plan. What could wrong? Everything. How bad could it get? Very bad indeed.

“I’ve been waiting my whole life to fuck up like this.” That joyful little insight belongs to Converse, now freshly back on American soil, when he realizes that his foolproof plan has gone up in flames and that he is the one getting burnt. He is back home in Berkley, but Marge and Ray are missing, and so is the heroin. His home is in shambles, his 3-year old daughter Janey is unaccounted for, and someone has drawn a “distinctly frightening” portrait of a devil above Janey’s empty crib. 

Converse soon finds himself menaced by a rogue federal narcotics agent who has some very disturbing ideas about how to enforce the law; ideas that go well beyond drawing frightening pictures on a bedroom wall. The federal agent, named Antheil, and his contacts in Saigon, don’t play by the rules. For Antheil, the drug trade is a Hobbesian universe where the strong make the rules and the weak, like Converse and Marge, are the prey. Antheil’s simple plan was to rip off the dope when it reached Marge in Berkeley. But Antheil’s plan also goes off wildly the tracks. He did not count on Ray Hicks, a combat veteran who had survived pitched warfare with the Marines in Hue City during the Tet Offensive, and who “cultivates the art of self-defense.” Hicks is a drug courier who has no intention of being ripped off. For Hicks, the heroin “belongs to whoever controls it” and after seeing “six buddies shot to shit in Hue City in one morning,” he has no intention of being “fucked over” by anyone ever again. 

In Berkeley, Hicks pummels two of Antheil’s ex-con muscle boys who had planned to steal the heroin, leaving them handcuffed to a toilet bowl in Marge’s apartment. Hicks calms Marge’s jangled nerves and convinces her to light out of town before more dangerous muscle arrives. After stashing baby Janey at a safe house, Hicks leads Marge, and the three kilos, to Topanga Canyon where he has a hideout in the hills, and a smuggled M-16 rifle, with its handy rocket launcher attachment, buried in this backyard.  Hicks has a plan to unload the heroin on some unsavory contacts in the LA’s dope underworld, which hovers on the margins of the entertainment community. Converse, left alone in Berkeley, is at the mercy of the very angry, very dangerous and completely merciless people who want their dope and plan to leverage Converse’s life to get it.

That’s just the book’s breathless opening act. Over the course of the novel, Converse, Marge, Hicks, Antheil and his muscle boys, and the three keys of pure Vietnamese heroin, will all converge in a blazing firefight at the Mexican border that will bring the sights, the sounds and the horrors of the Vietnam war— a war Stone covered as a journalist and described as a “a mistake ten thousand miles long”—home to America.

Dog Soldiers was one of the first, and is still one of the best, crime novels written about the narcotics trade. In the early 1970s, when Stone wrote the book, heroin from the “Golden Triangle” in Southeast Asia was flowing into the United States and causing havoc across the country from Harlem to Hollywood.  It was during this time that President Nixon dubbed his crackdown on narcotics as a “war on drugs.” 

Few could have guessed how long that war would last.

Dog Soldiers brings Nixon’s “war” to life as well as any work of art I know. As a rival, Don Winslow’s magisterial Power of the Dog trilogy comes to mind. But the other book I repeatedly thought of while reading Dog Soldiers is not a work of fiction. Instead, I was reminded of Dreamland, journalist Sam Quinones’ groundbreaking exploration of the opioid crisis in America. Published in 2015, Dreamland is the definitive account of the crisis, reporting from the complex supply routes in Mexico to the lonely overdose victims in suburban America. 

For me, Dreamland and Dog Soldiers form something akin to grim bookends to a five-decade tragedy.   Dreamland provides readers the comprehensive overview of the syndicate. Dog Soldiers brings readers face-to-face with the darkness lurking behind the needle and the spoon. Ray Hicks, who is very familiar with that darkness, sums it up when he observes that junkies, and there are a lot of them in Dog Soldiers, including Marge, are “everybody’s meat,” nothing more than a “bag of bones” to the syndicate that is every bit as merciless as the product they trade. 

In the end, what I think makes Dog Soldiers a worthy candidate for the pantheon of modern American crime fiction, and what compels me to recommend the book, is the way Stone skillfully brings his three protagonists—Marge, John and Ray—together at the very brink of the darkness, where they have to summon the courage to fight their way out to the light. According to Smartt Bell, the title of the novel is a reference to the fearless and fearsome Cheyenne warriors who fought against the forces of Manifest Destiny before and after the Civil War. The Cheyenne faced insurmountable odds, and the Dog Soldiers, like the Samurai, or the Spartans, were expected to fight as if already dead, content in the knowledge that the only good death was a brave one. 

I won’t reveal how the novel ends, but I will tell you this, as the novel unfolds, and the odds against John, Marge and Ray, the novel’s Dog Soldiers, lengthen, each character must choose to make a personal last stand, not for the dope, and not for a score, but for survival, and, ultimately, for each other. Hicks, when looking at a chance to save his own skin and leave Marge behind to face the devil alone, says it best when he decides, against the odds, to stick with her, reasoning that: 

“In the end there were not many things worth wanting—for the serious man, the samurai. But there were some. In the end, if the serious man is still bound to illusion, he selects the worthiest illusion and takes a stand. The illusion might be waiting for one woman to come under his hands. Of being with her and shivering in the same moment. I walk away from this, he thought, I’ll be an old man – all ghosts, and hangovers and mellow recollections. Fuck it, he thought, follow the blood. This is the one. This is the one to follow till it crashes.”

Later, Marge puts it more succinctly when explaining to her husband John why she and Ray took actions against the odds and contrary to their own personal interests: “Sometimes people do simple-minded things like that. They take a chance to help their friends.”

For me, watching Marge, John and Ray struggle to find the courage to chart a moral course of action and converge for a last stand against the “devil of rapacious and pitiless folly” was both thrilling and intensely moving. In one of his later essays, included in The Eye You See With, entitled “The Reason for Stories: Toward a Moral Fiction,” Stone took exception with writers who believe that “art and moral aspiration were mutually distant,” arguing that moral aspiration is still a suitable subject of fiction and that with his fiction he tried to illustrate that “[t]he most important thing about people is the difficulty they have in identifying and acting upon what is right.”    

You did more than try, Mr. Stone. 

With Dog Soldiers, you hit your target.   

R.I.P. Robert Stone.

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