Dog Soldiers book review Benni

Dog Soldiers

Benni Solomon

1/12/14

            The novel Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone takes place in 1972, in the heat of the Vietnam War. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1975 and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and once for the PEN/Faulkner Awards. A movie was also made based off the book in 1978 starring Nick Nolte. The novel starts out by introducing an American journalist by the name of John Converse living in Vietnam during the violent and menacing times of the Vietnam War. He is currently working for a local tabloid in Vietnam. Money is scarce and John finds himself a risky way to make some money. This is when Stone introduces Charmain, a heroin addict that John once had an affair with. John sees her as a person who once had morals and goals in life until heroin corrupted her. Heroin is big in Vietnam at the time. Everyone does it, including John. He even sells it from time to time. John plans to smuggle heroin into the United States, and is optimistic about everything going smoothly. He buys 10 thousand dollars worth of scag, pure cut heroin, and intends to sell it for 40 thousand dollars in the U.S. This is when Ray Hicks is introduced; he is a trusted friend of John’s. Hicks will be the one smuggling the heroin for Converse. The plan is to smuggle the scag into the U.S aboard a marine ship and deliver it to Converse’s wife Marge, who has had drug problems in the past. The smuggling was successful, but the complications came much later.

Once Hicks delivered the scag to Marge, Antheil, a CIA agent gone rogue caught on to them. Converse went to the United States to meet up with his wife and friend; unaware of the trouble they had gotten themselves into. Marge and Hicks go on the run leaving Janey, Marge and John’s daughter, to escape Antheil. Janey goes to live with Marge’s Father in Canada, and leaves the story. While Hicks and Marge are on the run their character starts to deteriorate. They start getting addicted to the heroin and they even have an affair. Converse is trying to catch up to them and figure out where they are going next, and he’s doing so successfully until two of Antheil’s men catch up to him. They beat him senseless until they are convinced Converse has nothing to do with this drug deal. The way Stone talks about Marge makes it seem like she’s taking a turn for the worse.
"When she had taken everything she could think of,she went into the living room for a quick last look and quite suddenly began to gag. It took her a moment and a few deep breaths to stop."
This quote shows the turning point in the novel. It's when Marge has to leave Janey, and she realizes how awful she's becoming. To leave her daughter with some bearded man and heroin seems awful to her, until she gets over it quickly. Heroin plays a major part in the novel. It seems as if the more a character is around it the more they lose their decency. The climax of the book doesn’t come until the end, where there is this huge scene with all the characters on a cliff and stuff goes down. I recommend Dog Soldiers; it was an action-packed and detailed book. I usually get bored while reading, but this book was a page tuner and and a good read.