SOURCE: Shelton, Frank W. “Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers: Vietnam Comes Home to America.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (winter 1983): 74-81.

In the following essay, Shelton examines Stone's bleak evocation of moral disintegration and the demise of the American Dream in Dog Soldiers.

Dog Soldiers (1974), the National Book Award winning novel by Robert Stone, remains arguably the best novelistic treatment of American involvement in Vietnam. Unlike such other recent novels as Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato (1978) and James Webb's Fields of Fire (1978) (both by former soldiers in Vietnam), Dog Soldiers does not concern the fighting or the political and moral issue of American involvement in Asia. It assumes the war as a given and traces its effects on the noncombatants both in Vietnam and the United States.

In a sense, the novel is a very conventional chase story, for which some reviewers have criticized it. Yet beneath the...