The narrator introduces himself as a spy writing a confession to a mysterious Commandant from solitary confinement.

The General tasks the narrator with creating a list of ninety-two people to evacuate before Saigon falls.

The evacuation plane is destroyed by explosions on the Saigon airport tarmac, forcing everyone to flee on foot.

Bon's wife and toddler are fatally wounded on the tarmac; the narrator drags a grief-stricken Bon onto a second plane.

The refugee group arrives at Guam, where Bon's wife and child are buried the following day.

The General's inner circle settles in Los Angeles, with the narrator taking a university position and Bon becoming a church janitor.

The General asks the narrator to identify a suspected spy; the narrator falsely names the harmless crapulent major.

The General and Claude order the narrator to arrange the crapulent major's assassination for being a suspected Communist agent.

Bon shoots the crapulent major in the forehead outside his home, leaving the narrator consumed with guilt.

The narrator flies to the Philippines to serve as a cultural consultant on a Vietnam War film called The Hamlet.

A bomb detonates beneath the narrator in the Philippine film set's cemetery, hospitalizing him with burns and a concussion.

After Sonny's newspaper exposes the General's covert military plans, the General orders the narrator to assassinate him.

The narrator shoots and kills Sonny in his apartment, committing his first murder.

The commando group is ambushed while crossing the Mekong River; the narrator and Bon are captured by Communist forces.

After months of brutal sleep-deprivation torture overseen by Man, the narrator and Bon are released and join the boat people.

Pool 1 follows the narrator's most consequential actions as a Communist spy embedded within the General's anti-Communist circle. It begins with Saigon's fall and the desperate evacuation, during which Bon's family is killed, and traces the group's relocation to Los Angeles. There, the narrator is forced to arrange the assassination of an innocent man to protect his cover, and later kills Sonny on the General's orders. After traveling to the Philippines as a film consultant and nearly dying in an explosion on set, the narrator accompanies Bon on a doomed mission to Thailand. The mission ends in ambush and capture, followed by a brutal reeducation that finally breaks the narrator and sets him adrift among the boat people.

The double agent's journey from Saigon's fall to the boat people.

The narrator secretly meets Man in a Catholic church, where Man assigns him to spy on the General in America.

The narrator, Bon, and Man share final goodbyes at a beer garden the night before the evacuation from Saigon.

Refugee women at the Guam camp pelt the General with slippers and tear his military uniform from his body.

The narrator begins a casual sexual relationship with Ms. Mori, a Japanese-American secretary at his university department.

The narrator writes encoded messages to Man using invisible ink, disguising them as letters to a fake aunt in Paris.

The General's liquor store holds its grand opening, drawing Vietnamese refugees and the narrator's former classmate Sonny Do.

The narrator has breakfast with the crapulent major, who joyfully describes his newborn twin sons named Spinach and Kale.

The narrator attends a Vietnamese-American wedding and is stunned to find the General's daughter Lana performing onstage.

A Republican Congressman gives a rousing speech at the wedding, promising Vietnamese refugees their homeland will be reclaimed.

The narrator visits the Auteur at his Hollywood Hills home and criticizes the screenplay for silencing Vietnamese characters.

James Yoon insists on enduring real physical suffering to give his Vietnamese torture death scene more authenticity.

The narrator negotiates his injury settlement with a movie studio executive, using the executive's racism to double the offer.

The narrator delivers half of his film settlement money directly to the crapulent major's widow as an act of penance.

Visiting Ms. Mori's apartment unannounced, the narrator discovers that Sonny is there in what appears to be a romance.

Watching The Hamlet in a Thai theater, the narrator discovers that his name is entirely absent from the film's credits.

Pool 2 captures the scenes that built and sustained the narrator's hidden world as a spy living between two identities. It opens with the secret meeting that gave the narrator his spy mission and the emotional farewell to Man before Saigon fell. In Los Angeles, the narrator builds his cover through his relationship with Ms. Mori, his invisible-ink correspondence with Man, and his social connections to the General's refugee community. His time on The Hamlet's Philippine set is marked by the disturbing spectacle of James Yoon's torture scene, and his return to Los Angeles brings the painful discovery of Sonny and Ms. Mori's romance. The pool closes in Thailand, where the narrator watches himself erased from The Hamlet's credits — a quiet devastation that echoes the book's central theme of Vietnamese invisibility in American storytelling.

The hidden moments that shaped the narrator's double life in America.

The narrator keeps a captured Communist agent's file on his desk as a reminder of his failure to save her.

The General stops his evacuation convoy to give a final salute to an American marine memorial outside Saigon.

The narrator watches the last of South Vietnam's armed forces cram into departing helicopters as Saigon collapses around him.

The General moves his group from the Guam refugee camp to Camp Pendleton in California to begin their American lives.

The General confides to the narrator his belief that a Communist sympathizer has infiltrated their Los Angeles circle.

The narrator begins secretly trailing the crapulent major each night to map out his daily routines before the assassination.

The narrator's mother's ghost appears just before the assassination and asks if he is certain he wants to proceed.

The narrator and the Auteur clash on the Philippine set over a rape scene; the narrator accuses America of broken wartime promises.

The narrator secretly pastes his mother's photograph onto a mock tombstone in the Philippine film set's cemetery.

Bon tells the narrator that a life without purpose feels like a prison and that dying for a cause gives meaning to living.

Sonny publishes a newspaper article exposing the General's covert military training operation in Los Angeles.

The narrator and Bon discuss the planned killing of Sonny over billiards; Bon insists it is assassination, not murder.

The affectless lieutenant steps on a landmine in the jungle; the grizzled captain smothers him to end his suffering.

The narrator is brought before the Commissar and recognizes his childhood friend Man beneath a face destroyed by napalm.

Under brutal sleep deprivation, the narrator finally remembers and confesses to witnessing the gang rape of the Communist agent.

Pool 3 focuses on the pivotal moments of decision, discovery, and emotional collapse that drive the narrator's arc from beginning to end. It begins with the earliest signs of the narrator's guilt — his failure to save a Communist agent and his passive witnessing of Saigon's chaotic collapse — and tracks how that guilt compounds through the crapulent major's murder. The pool highlights the personal contradictions the narrator cannot resolve: his bond with Bon, his attraction to Lana, and his belief in a revolution that will ultimately torture him. In Thailand, the final turning points arrive in rapid succession — a landmine, an ambush, and the shattering revelation that Man is the Commissar overseeing the narrator's reeducation. The pool ends with the forced recovery of a long-repressed memory, completing the confession that costs the narrator his sanity.