The Otero raid was a nighttime assault on a fascist post, remembered by Anselmo as the first occasion on which he killed. Its place in the novel is defined by a stark contrast: Pablo once led daring, coordinated attacks, while Anselmo carried the moral burden of violence even when it was his duty.## The attack and its organizationPablo arranged the raid while the men at the post were asleep. Anselmo recalled that he was struggling with a sentry when Pablo threw explosives through the window; the attack then killed men as they lay in bed and as they rose. In Anselmo’s account, the operation was not an isolated act of violence but an example of the period when Pablo’s raids made fascist posts unsafe at night.## Anselmo’s first killingThe raid remained fixed in Anselmo’s memory because it was where he first killed. He hoped he would not have to kill again in the coming suppression of enemy posts, and his later thoughts about the men at a sawmill show why: he regarded the opposing soldiers as poor men like himself, separated from him by orders, and disliked the prospect of killing them. He would do so if duty required it, but he wanted instead to join the fighting at the bridge, where he believed he could serve without carrying out the post attack.## Pablo’s earlier leadership and later declineAnselmo remembered Otero as part of Pablo’s “great days,” when Pablo moved through the countryside with force and purpose. In the present, Anselmo judged that Pablo had changed and become diminished, though he checked himself from thinking too harshly of him. The recollection thus makes the raid a measure of Pablo’s decline: the man who had once organized effective night attacks was no longer the leader Anselmo remembered.## Violence and moral memoryThe novel sets the raid beside Anselmo’s distinction between killing animals and killing people. He did not like killing animals, while he considered killing people for the cause sometimes necessary; nonetheless, he believed that nothing good remained from killing a fellow human being. Otero gives that judgment a concrete history. The attack was militarily effective, but its success does not erase the cost carried in Anselmo’s memory, or his wish that others would take on the killing ahead.