Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Major’s squadron. The solution he provided was
to have Hungry Joe fly the courier ship once a week, removing him from the
squadron for four nights, and the remedy, like all Colonel Korn’s remedies, was
successful.
       Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions
and returned Hungry Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stopped and Hungry Joe
settled down into a normal state of terror with a smile of relief. Yossarian
read Hungry Joe’s shrunken face like a headline. It was good when Hungry Joe
looked bad and terrible when Hungry Joe looked good. Hungry Joe’s inverted set
of responses was a curious phenomenon to everyone but Hungry Joe, who denied
the whole thing stubbornly.
       ‘Who dreams?’ he answered, when Yossarian asked him what he
dreamed about.
       ‘Joe, why don’t you go see Doc Daneeka?’ Yossarian advised.
       ‘Why should I go see Doc Daneeka? I’m not sick.’
       ‘What about your nightmares?’
       ‘I don’t have nightmares,’ Hungry Joe lied.
       ‘Maybe he can do something about them.’
       ‘There’s nothing wrong with nightmares,’ Hungry Joe answered.
‘Everybody has nightmares.’ Yossarian thought he had him. ‘Every night?’ he
asked.
       ‘Why not every night?’ Hungry Joe demanded.
       And suddenly it all made sense. Why not every night, indeed?
It made sense to cry out in pain every night. It made more sense than Appleby,
who was a stickler for regulations and had ordered Kraft to order Yossarian to
take his Atabrine tablets on the flight overseas after Yossarian and Appleby
had stopped talking to each other. Hungry Joe made more sense than Kraft, too,
who was dead, dumped unceremoniously into doom over Ferrara by an exploding
engine after Yossarian took his flight of six planes in over the target a
second time. The group had missed the bridge at Ferrara again for the seventh
straight day with the bombsight that could put bombs into a pickle barrel at
forty thousand feet, and one whole week had already passed since Colonel
Cathcart had volunteered to have his men destroy the bridge in twenty-four
hours. Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be
liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an
ambition. Instead of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the
barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the
plane with one wing plummeted. He had lived innocuously for a little while and
then had gone down in flame over Ferrara on the seventh day, while God was
resting, when McWatt turned and Yossarian guided him in over the target on a
second bomb run because Aarfy was confused and Yossarian had been unable to
drop his bombs the first time.
       ‘I guess we do have to go back again, don’t we?’ McWatt had
said somberly over the intercom.
       ‘I guess we do,’ said Yossarian.
       ‘Do we?’ said McWatt.
       ‘Yeah.’
       ‘Oh, well,’ sang McWatt, ‘what the hell.’ And back they had
gone while the planes in the other flights circled safely off in the distance
and every crashing cannon in the Hermann Goering Division below was busy
crashing shells this time only at them.
       Colonel Cathcart had courage and never hesitated to volunteer
his men for any target available. No target was too dangerous for his group to
attack, just as no shot was too difficult for Appleby to handle on the
ping-pong table. Appleby was a good pilot and a superhuman ping-pong player
with flies in his eyes who never lost a point. Twenty-one serves were all it
ever took for Appleby to disgrace another opponent. His prowess on the
ping-pong table was legendary, and Appleby won every game he started until the
night Orr got tipsy on gin and juice and smashed open Appleby’s forehead with
his paddle after Appleby had smashed back each of Orr’s first five serves. Orr
leaped on top of the table after hurling his paddle and came sailing