The plot to kill the Crapulent Major

The plot to kill the Crapulent Major is the General’s answer to a suspected spy and a test of The unnamed narrator’s loyalty: the accusation is flimsy, the order is direct, and the two men assigned to carry it out must decide how to turn it into action. The plan also marks the General’s return to political plotting. He speaks of waiting for another chance to fight, then delegates the proposed killing to The unnamed narrator and Bon, binding their shared military past to a new act of violence.

Suspicion and the General’s renewed purpose

The General’s case against The crapulent major is not built on proof of espionage. He lists three grounds: the Major is Chinese, his family is doing unusually well in Saigon, and he is fat. The General treats the family’s prosperity as evidence that someone must be protecting them, reasoning that communist authorities know the officers and their families and that no other officer’s family is prospering at home. When Claude cautions that Chinese ancestry alone does not make a man a spy, the General insists that he is not racist and claims to treat his men alike. His defense does not resolve the contradiction: ethnic suspicion and personal prejudice remain openly embedded in the case.

The unnamed narrator understands the danger of this reasoning. He has accidentally helped direct suspicion toward a man he knows may be blameless, and later describes that success as a coup achieved to his chagrin. The false accusation matters because it turns an uncertain intelligence judgment into a death sentence without supplying new evidence. The General does not ask for further investigation; he treats the suspicion as enough to justify correcting what he calls a mistake.

At the same time, the General presents the proposed killing within a larger political ambition. He has contacts in Saigon, though no direct means of communicating with them, and he tells Claude that he is only biding his time. He argues that his soldiers have not given up and need only a chance to fight. The plot therefore belongs both to a private decision about one suspected man and to the General’s effort to recover authority and organize resistance among exiled followers. His talk of a future campaign does not establish that the Major is guilty; it shows how readily a political project can absorb a doubtful accusation.

The order and its division of labor

The unnamed narrator declares his loyalty to the General, who immediately makes that declaration consequential. He reminds him that he selected the Major and says that the resulting mistake must be corrected. The narrator will not act alone: the General has already discussed the problem with Bon and assigns the two men to handle it together. He leaves the method to their imagination and skill, praising the narrator’s past performance while making clear that choosing the Major was his failure to redeem.

The order divides responsibility rather than removing it. The narrator is told to devise the solution because he knows the area better; Bon accepts the dirtier practical work. When The unnamed narrator asks whether Bon really thinks the Major is a spy, Bon evades the question by describing himself as a grunt who follows orders. He then turns the question back on the narrator: the clever man is to plan, while Bon will do the killing. Their exchange makes obedience the immediate justification for proceeding, even as neither man establishes the Major’s guilt.

The planning takes place amid an ordinary purchase. Bon watches a baseball game on a small black-and-white television while The unnamed narrator cashes an IRS tax refund. He uses the money to buy enough liquor for the two of them to drink through the coming week, imagining the drinking as a chosen means of amnesia. The juxtaposition is pointed: a modest refund and bottles at a store counter become the setting for a state-directed killing. The narrator’s reflections on American taxation and revolutionary redistribution expose his divided attachment to his adopted country and his exiled compatriots, but they do not undo his participation in the plan.

Weapons, access, and complicity

Bon first reveals a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun stored beneath the cash register. The narrator objects that it would make the killing messy. Bon has another weapon ready: a snub-nosed .38 Special, kept in a cigar box beneath the counter and identical to the narrator’s former service pistol. The substitution makes the preparation more deliberate. The shotgun is discarded as unsuitable; the revolver offers the controlled alternative the narrator has requested.

The source of the gun connection further complicates the plan. Bon explains that the Major helped them obtain it because he speaks Chinese and knows the Chinese gangs in Chinatown. The man now marked for death has, through his language and contacts, helped make the means of his own killing accessible. This does not demonstrate that the Major is a spy; instead, it shows how an ordinary connection can be recast as suspicious evidence and then enlisted in a conspiracy against its source.

Bon’s expression is the only clear emotional change in the scene: after a year in which he has rarely appeared happy, he looks happy for the first time. The narrator sees this as the compensation available to him for feeling trapped by circumstances, and recognizes that another man will soon be trapped as well. Their comradeship persists, but the roles they accept are unequal: Bon embraces the violence, while the narrator remains responsible for designing the operation and for the original choice that placed the Major under suspicion.

Violence, memory, and the limits of the plan

The wider narrative places this conspiracy against repeated scenes in which violence is performed, watched, and described. During the making of a film, Vietnamese refugee extras enact the capture and torture of Binh and Pete Attucks; the staged water torture uses a cloth, a plank, and Attucks’s canteens, while the narrator reflects on the physical effort required to simulate an interrogation. The scene is explicitly a film production, not the Major’s killing, but its attention to the labor and choreography of violence gives the assassination plan a disturbing context: violence can be organized as a task and assigned to performers or subordinates.

A later recovered memory is grimmer and is not part of the planning conversation. The unnamed narrator recalls the Communist agent’s interrogation in a room called the movie theater, where The crapulent major is present alongside Claude and three policemen. The Major has authority over the interrogation but has left its conduct to the policemen. The narrator watches their sexual assault of the agent, protests that it is wrong, and asks for time alone with her, but does not stop the assault. The recollection reveals a further setting in which the Major is implicated in institutional violence; it does not establish that this episode caused the earlier plot or that it supplied the General’s stated grounds for suspicion.

The plan’s decisive significance lies in the gap between accusation and action. The Major’s family prosperity, ancestry, and body are treated as clues; the General’s political hopes turn those suspicions into an order; and The unnamed narrator and Bon convert the order into a division of labor and a choice of weapon. The episode ends with preparations rather than the killing itself. Its unresolved edge is therefore moral as well as practical: the men have selected the target and the revolver, while the question of whether the target is guilty remains unanswered.