Catch-22 by Joseph Heller Page B

tent, lift Huple’s cat off
his face and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear, so that everybody in
the squadron but Captain Flume could get a good night’s sleep.
       Even though Chief White Halfoat kept busting Colonel Moodus
in the nose for General Dreedle’s benefit, he was still outside the pale. Also
outside the pale was Major Major, the squadron commander, who had found that
out the same time he found out that he was squadron commander from Colonel
Cathcart, who came blasting into the squadron in his hopped-up jeep the day
after Major Duluth was killed over Perugia. Colonel Cathcart slammed to a
screeching stop inches short of the railroad ditch separating the nose of his
jeep from the lopsided basketball court on the other side, from which Major
Major was eventually driven by the kicks and shoves and stones and punches of
the men who had almost become his friends.
       ‘You’re the new squadron commander,’ Colonel Cathcart had
bellowed across the ditch at him. ‘But don’t think it means anything, because
it doesn’t. All it means is that you’re the new squadron commander.’ And
Colonel Cathcart had roared away as abruptly as he’d come, whipping the jeep
around with a vicious spinning of wheels that sent a spray of fine grit blowing
into Major Major’s face. Major Major was immobilized by the news. He stood
speechless, lanky and gawking, with a scuffed basketball in his long hands as
the seeds of rancor sown so swiftly by Colonel Cathcart took root in the
soldiers around him who had been playing basketball with him and who had let
him come as close to making friends with them as anyone had ever let him come
before. The whites of his moony eyes grew large and misty as his mouth
struggled yearningly and lost against the familiar, impregnable loneliness drifting
in around him again like suffocating fog.
       Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except
Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he
believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside
Group Headquarters with equal fervor. Nevertheless, he believed in his men. As
he told them frequently in the briefing room, he believed they were at least
ten missions better than any other outfit and felt that any who did not share
this confidence he had placed in them could get the hell out. The only way they
could get the hell out, though, as Yossarian learned when he flew to visit
ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, was by flying the extra ten missions.
       ‘I still don’t get it,’ Yossarian protested. ‘Is Doc Daneeka
right or isn’t he?’
       ‘How many did he say?’
       ‘Forty.’
       ‘Daneeka was telling the truth,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen
admitted. ‘Forty missions is all you have to fly as far as Twenty-seventh Air
Force Headquarters is concerned.’ Yossarian was jubilant. ‘Then I can go home,
right? I’ve got forty-eight.’
       ‘No, you can’t go home,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen corrected him.
‘Are you crazy or something?’
       ‘Why not?’
       ‘Catch-22.’
       ‘Catch-22?’ Yossarian was stunned. ‘What the hell has
Catch-22 got to do with it?’
       ‘Catch-22,’ Doc Daneeka answered patiently, when Hungry Joe
had flown Yossarian back to Pianosa, ‘says you’ve always got to do what your
commanding officer tells you to.’
       ‘But Twenty-seventh Air Force says I can go home with forty
missions.’
       ‘But they don’t say you have to go home. And regulations do
say you have to obey every order. That’s the catch. Even if the colonel were
disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions,
you’d still have to fly them, or you’d be guilty of disobeying an order of his.
And then Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters would really jump on you.’
Yossarian slumped with disappointment. ‘Then I really have to fly the fifty
missions, don’t I?’ he grieved.
       ‘The