DOG SOLDIERS by ROBERT STONE 342 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $8.95.
During the waning days of U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, a journalist named John Converse takes up with a bored American expatriate woman in Saigon. She invites him to buy an interest in three kilograms of pure heroin. Once this deadly package is safely Stateside and distributed to her friends, Converse will earn $40,000. He agrees, persuades an acquaintance, Ray Hicks, to smuggle the heroin to California. There, Converse's wife Marge will take possession and pay Hicks off.
The stark evil in this plan quickly flowers into nightmare. Two hoodlums pick up Hicks' trail the moment he arrives in Berkeley. He and Marge escape with the heroin, but when Converse gets home he walks into a trap. The thugs are not, as it happens, emissaries from the underworld but something worse: agents for a corrupt federal officer, bent on picking off the heroin for himself before staging a phony drug bust on Converse and his accomplices. The chase that follows is unforgettable.
Dog Soldiers is more than a white-knuckled plot; it is a harrowing allegory. The novice smugglers evade a sense of their own villainy through sophistry or indifference. Converse rationalizes that in a world capable of producing the horrors of war, "people are just naturally going to want to get high." Hicks concentrates on the exploit's challenge and itches to hurl his own aggressiveness into the void he imagines around him. Marge, already hooked on pills, accepts the heroin's arrival as fated for her.
Such equivocations blind them to the truth of their situation, which is also the novel's truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does not escape them, but they cannot drop it. Its force has irradiated their world. They know of no good that will shelter them.
Competing Manias. This elemental tale is played out against a backdrop of the here and now. Heroin brings the Viet Nam War home to a sunny California filled with burnt-out cases from the '60s: deracinated hippies, faded gurus, old people driven mad by the gap between promise and truth. This Western strip of civilization has become a collection of competing manias, and its traces—rooming houses, motels, highways—are perched on the edge of primitive wilderness. Driving out of Los Angeles, Hicks comments on the quick change of scenery: "Go out for a Sunday spin, you're a short hair from the dawn of creation."
Novelist Stone's language is spare, constantly earning maximum effects with all but invisible efforts. A military career is summed up as years "of shining shoes and saluting automobiles." Much of the novel is dialogue, simultaneously as laconic and menacing as a scene by Harold Pinter.