How to use "assignments" in a sentence

These diplomatic and intelligence-gathering assignments were never an insult to his family name, but they were always minor postings to embassies in smaller countries like Iceland and Ecuador and Tonga, nothing for which The New York Times would deign to acknowledge his existence.

He had enjoyed those murders so immensely, had been so profoundly thrilled by them, that he had, by choice, performed the executioner's role on half a dozen other assignments