Assassination of the crapulent major

The Assassination of the crapulent major is a killing arranged by the unnamed narrator to satisfy the General’s demand for action after the narrator had helped make the major look like a spy. Bon fires the shot, but the narrator plans the operation, lures the major into position, and lives with the consequences. The major’s death turns a supposedly correctable intelligence mistake into an irreversible act: the narrator cannot tell himself that the victim was simply an enemy, or that the killing left him untouched.

Suspicion and the decision to act

The narrator’s immediate problem is the suspicion he himself helped plant. He wants to persuade the General that the major is no spy, but recognizes that he cannot simply remove the accusation he introduced. He also believes he must demonstrate that he can correct what he calls his ostensible mistake and prove himself a man of action. At the General’s next meeting with him, the message is unmistakable: the major deserves to die, in the General’s view, but the operation should be patient and painstaking. The General gives no need for a detailed plan, only the instruction to report when the job is done.

The narrator’s confidence in the major’s guilt is complicated by an earlier case. A tax collector had been beaten at the interrogation center for a week before the men concluded he was not a Viet Cong operative; the proof included a large bribe delivered by the man’s wife to the major. The major shared the money with the narrator, who passed his portion to Man for the revolution. The narrator regarded the major as corrupt, perhaps worse than the single act of extortion he knew about, but also admitted that such corruption made him ordinary rather than exceptional. His suspicion of the major as a spy and his judgment of him as a sinful man are therefore distinct claims, not interchangeable proof.

Planning and the killing

The operation takes place on the evening of the Fourth of July, amid fireworks and occasional gunfire. The narrator and Bon wait near a gas station in UCLA sweatshirts and caps, hoping to look like students. The narrator’s car bears stolen license plates, while its legitimate plates are kept in the glove compartment. He has anticipated the neighborhood’s celebrations as cover. Bon, however, is tense and refuses to let the narrator turn on the radio. He recalls a mine explosion outside Sa Dec that tore off another soldier’s testicles while leaving Bon uninjured. The narrator offers the major a quick death as the one favor he can provide.

At the apartment carport, Bon puts on latex gloves and removes his sneakers; he takes up a concealed position between parked cars. The narrator waits with a plastic bag printed with a yellow happy face and THANK YOU! Inside are firecrackers and oranges. When the major arrives carrying his lunch box, the narrator greets him and presents the bag as a Fourth of July gift. Bon emerges behind the major, but does not shoot him from behind. He calls out to him; as the major turns with the gift in one hand and his lunch box in the other, Bon shoots him in the forehead. The major falls onto the pavement, where the bullet wound appears as a third eye. The narrator retrieves the bag, now marked with blood, while Bon takes the major’s wallet and urges him to move.

Escape and the immediate aftermath

At 8:13, the narrator drives away. On the way home, he and Bon say little. They stop in an alley to replace the stolen plates with the car’s legitimate ones. The narrator later finds blood on the white toes of his sneakers and wipes it off with a wet paper towel. He phones the General from the kitchen; after the narrator reports that the job is done, the General answers only, Good. The brief call completes the chain of command without easing the narrator’s reaction.

Bon empties the major’s wallet onto the coffee table. Among its contents are identification, receipts, twenty-two dollars, change, and photographs: one of the major and his wife on their wedding day, another of their infant twins. The narrator tells Bon to burn the photographs and plans to dispose of the wallet, the license plates, the bag, and the ashes. They drink rye while television programs celebrate the United States Bicentennial, then eat three of the oranges from the gift bag. The ordinary remnants of the plan—the wallet, family photographs, bloodied bag, and fruit—make the killing’s human and practical consequences difficult to separate from its staging.

Guilt, memory, and the major’s compromised innocence

The narrator’s account does not present the major as a wholly innocent man: his involvement in the tax collector’s bribe establishes corruption. But in his confession to the Commandant, the narrator calls the major relatively innocent, meaning that innocence is a matter of degree in a world where all sides have reasons and instruments to kill. He recalls Man’s answer to the prospect that revolutionary actions will kill innocent people: revolutionaries are not innocent either, because they know too much and have done too much. The major’s death thus sharpens, rather than resolves, the narrator’s conflict over revolutionary responsibility and his own role in violence.

The narrator also remembers the major from an earlier interrogation of a Communist agent. The major was nominally in charge but had yielded the interrogation to three policemen, while he watched from a chair. When the narrator objected to the abuse and asked for time alone with the agent, the major said that the General wanted to know how she had obtained the names and that there was nothing he could do. In recalling this scene, the narrator describes himself as a witness who watched rather than intervened. The memory complicates the claim that the major was relatively innocent, without turning the killing into a clear act of justice: his presence and failure to stop the abuse do not erase the narrator’s responsibility for engineering his death.

That responsibility returns as an image the narrator cannot dismiss. After the killing, he sees the major’s blood-weeping third eye even with his own eyes closed. In the later confession, the narrator says that the death troubled him greatly, unlike the Commandant, and contrasts his isolation in America with the conversations he once had with Man at the basilica. The operation succeeds in the narrow sense that the major is dead and the General has been informed. Its deeper consequence is the narrator’s growing inability to make violence fit the clean categories—spy, innocent, revolutionary, enemy—that would have made the act easier to bear.