Robert O’Connor - Buffalo Soldiers

London: Flamingo, 1993

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I first saw the film adaptation of this novel in about 2003, a couple of years after its release. I hadn’t heard of it at the time, which I’ve since discovered is because it was released slap-bang in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, and given its robust criticisms of the US Army and the dark underlying themes therein, it sank more or less without trace. As far as I know it’s not yet a cult hit, which is a shame because it’s a solid and fairly faithful representation of the novel.

Nevertheless, it was the film which pointed me in the direction of the book, but I’m also a bit of a Cold War enthusiast, so because the film is set ostensibly in the months just before the Berlin Wall fell, I thought I’d get hold of a copy and then ignore it for about a year, as is my custom.

About the Author - Robert O’Connor is a man of mystery. Although Buffalo Soldiers was seen as a promising debut fashioned in the tank-tracks of Catch 22 and the nihilistic spirit of Bret Easton Ellis, he doesn’t appear to have done much else. Even his author page at Random House doesn’t load properly, and on Goodreads he seems to have branched out into writing books about specialist diets.

Plot - written in the second person (as in, ‘You do this, you think this’ etc), the novel follows the exploits of Specialist Ray Elwood, battalion clerk and dogsbody to General William C. Berman of the 57th Army, sometime around the fag end of the Cold War. A petty criminal and black marketeer, Elwood is a conduit for the production and sale of high-grade heroin and much besides, all the while maintaining his hold over the incompetent Berman. However, following the arrival of a new Staff Sergeant, Robert E. Lee, Elwood’s life becomes complicated. Ostensibly there to look into the death of one of Elwood’s addicts, Parsons McCovey, Lee is an ex-junkie wise to Elwood’s manouverings, and the two begin to bang heads in their battle for the soul of their Army. Into the middle of this drops Lee’s daughter Robyn, recovering from an amputation of her arm and seething at the father she feels is responsible. When you add a huge mound of opium, the cooking of which could allow Elwood to leave the Army with several million dollars, you have an explosive mixture.

Review - Immediately, the use of the second-person narrative hits you between the eyes: how many novelists, particularly debut authors, would dare use it? It’s a style of writing I’ve always been uncomfortable with, particularly to write with, because I find it exhausting, that mixture of being your own omniscient narrator. That said, O’Connor’s use of it allows us to get the best of both worlds, getting the reader closer to that heart of darkness while also being able to explain the finer intricacies of drug production. That removal makes us unsure whether or not we like Elwood: he’s not trying to do his job in difficult circumstances, but neither is he making excuses for his reprehensible use of everybody he touches. One of the novel’s themes is detachment in the form of lying to ourselves, and the second-person perspective affirms that Elwood is the narrator in a life he doesn’t particularly like to live, hence the desperation to see his final cook to fruition and disappear for good.

So far, so undergraduate. But is Buffalo Soldiers an exercise in technical skill only? Happily, the real strength of the novel lies in its frustration, and it’s through those listless arteries where we really see O’Connor’s writing shine. ‘It is November, and Novembers in Germany remind you of the sadness and despair of a fallen woman.’ That’s the novel’s second line, and there is so much in that image that doesn’t need to be said about the pointlessness of fighting a war that doesn’t have the energy to happen. So much of what makes Elwood an interesting protagonist is what he doesn’t say. In a lot of ways he feels like a depressive rather than a desperate man, closing himself off to what he really feels and thinks. This is why he puts himself into sidelines which could cause the greatest amount of harm, rather than say skimming off canteen supplies. At the bottom of one’s reserves of self-respect, only strong emotions register. Elwood doesn’t deny his nature because of the drug he takes, it’s the drug which gives him a reason to keep going.

Of course, getting us to side with a heroin-peddler is a tough ask, and O’Connor doesn’t ask us to choose. Rather deftly, his antagonist Sgt. Lee is the beta to Elwood’s alpha. If Lee had been a straight-up, parade ground shitkicker, you might have been tempted to come over to Elwood’s way of thinking and this would have been nothing but Hogan’s Heroes: The Novel, but Lee is Elwood cured over oak. He’s been treated for drug addiction and now his eyes burn with hatred because of it. As an ex-smoker, I try not to judge others that still have the habit because there’s little worse than an evangelical born-again, but Lee is this and more besides: he wants to bring Elwood down because of the war inside of himself. Late in the novel he confesses to Elwood his love of fighting in the Vietnam War because he could do what he chose without consequence, but it’s his excess which has caused most harm in his own life. Given the choice Lee would kill without pause, but the proper way of doing things has been forced into him cold turkey, and that’s why he cannot abide Elwood - how dare I have to moderate while this fucker runs free?

Without Lee’s dichotomy, his daughter Robyn wouldn’t have had the accident that brings her to West Germany and into Elwood’s life. Contracting gangrene from a badly-set broken arm, Robyn has recently had an arm amputated, which wouldn’t have happened had Lee not spent an evening working rather than getting her discomfort checked. Robyn stresses that she has not gone off the rails because of any residual hatred, but soon enough she has padded up for Elwood’s side. At first, Elwood sees her as his way to defeat Lee - his ‘key’, a strong Elwood theory - but falls for her pretty quickly. In some ways Robyn is his saviour, forcing his head above water for the first time in years, but she’s a fallen angel, with her imperfections, her school expulsions and her readiness to get involved in drug distribution. This is not the standard ‘rogue uses unsuspecting girl and comes to love her’ trope; Robyn becomes Elwood’s weakness because of her own strength. Had she asked him to change he probably would do so, but the only way he can live a normal life with her is to finish his heroin cook, opening him out to huge risk. Early on in the book Elwood spends the night at a brothel with a girl he comes to like in an aesthetic sense, but she can never be his, because she won’t open herself to him. Robyn does, but even then we don’t really believe her, whereas Elwood is a simple man in the end - he’s a tired, outdated piece of military technology who doesn’t have the capability to fight a modern war.

Beyond the parameters of this skirmish, Buffalo Soldiers really is as simple a plot as bored soldiers waiting for something to happen. There’s racial tension there, which in a war situation probably wouldn’t be such a factor, but nobody knows what the battalion is doing in West Germany, and as the old saying goes, the devil makes work and all that guff. A particularly good chapter is when Elwood and his squad are sat around watching a mucky video and shooting the shit - you really do get a sense for the fragmented, badly-constructed conversations people who don’t have anything in common besides their place of employment have. They care about passing the time, not getting to know one another. It’s all a waste of time, so in that environment, who wouldn’t choose to get out of their heads or do something less boring instead?

Simply put, Buffalo Soldiers is a forgotten gem. Plot-wise, it’s pretty thin - wrong’un tries to pull off huge drug deal against the odds - but the book’s about a lot more than what Elwood does, and more about what he feels. His motivation is interesting, as it moves from boredom to money to love. The quotation that both book and film use is “When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself”, said by Friedrich Nietzsche, but here’s the thing: man is inherently warlike. Buffalo Soldiers recognises this, and it’s a book about conflicts both real and imagined. For all of the posturing that went on during the Cold War, its battles were limited rather than involving the entire planet, and so it goes here - in the end, the boneheaded Colonel Berman, obsessed with his epaulettes, misses what’s going on right on front of his nose: his base, infested with drugs, small arms deals, pornography and no-go areas, plays host to two evenly-matched combatants, neither of whom could rally anybody to their bloody standard.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - Absolutely.