Catch 22

'Give him Ewing's tumor,' Yossarian advised Doc Daneeka, who would come to
Yossarian for help in handling Hungry Joe, 'and follow it up with melanoma.

Milo lifted his arm suddenly
and pointed toward the open-air theater, where the milky, dust-filled beam bursting
horizontally from the projector slashed a conelike swath in the blackness and draped
in a fluorescent membrane of light the audience tilted on the seats there in hypnotic
sags, their faces focused upward toward the aluminized movie screen.

But Nately's whore was already bored by the time they
started back, and she decided to go streetwalking with two other girls rather than
spend more time with him.

With a pensive expression on his
oblong, rather pale face, he allowed his gaze to settle on several of the high bushels
filled with red plum tomatoes that stood in rows against each of the walls.

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPT...

Abreast of his trailer, he left the ditch and wove his way speedily
toward home through the dense underbrush, in which the only person he ever
encountered was Captain Flume, who, drawn and ghostly, frightened him half to death
one twilight by materializing without warning out of a patch of dewberry bushes to
complain that Chief White Halfoat had threatened to slit his throat open from ear to
ear.

In a bed in the small private section at the end of the ward, always working
ceaselessly behind the green plyboard partition, was the solemn middle-aged colonel
who was visited every day by a gentle, sweet-faced woman with curly ash-blond hair
who was not a nurse and not a Wac and not a Red Cross girl but who nevertheless
appeared faithfully at the hospital in Pianosa each afternoon wearing pretty pastel
summer dresses that were very smart and white leather pumps with heels half ...

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPTER 16 -...

The handwriting throughout was
shaky and hurried, but the style resembled her husband's and the melancholy, self-pitying tone was familiar, although more dreary than usual.

The U.S.O. troupes were sent by General P. P. Peckem, who had moved his
headquarters up to Rome and had nothing better to do while he schemed against
General Dreedle.

Thanks to Orr, his roommate, it was the most
luxurious tent in the squadron.

Yossarian's perceptions were soon so fuzzy that he paid no
notice to the beige turban the fat one crowding into him kept wearing until late the
next morning when the scheming ten-year-old pimp with the Cuban panatella snatched
it off in public in a bestial caprice that exposed in the brilliant Sicilian daylight her
shocking, misshapen and denudate skull.

Yossarian did feel almost sick enough to go back into the hospital, and he felt even
sicker three combat missions later when Doc Daneeka still shook his melancholy head
and refused to ground him.

Colonel Cathcart was a very large, pouting, broadshouldered man with close-cropped
curly dark hair that was graying at the tips and an ornate cigarette holder that he
purchased the day before he arrived in Pianosa to take command of his group.

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPT...

Wintergreen confided with a laugh to Yossarian, after he had come to
Pianosa to learn if it was really true about Milo and the Egyptian cotton.

'Casaba melons?'

'When I was a kid,' Orr replied, 'I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my
cheeks.

The day before Yossarian met the chaplain, a stove exploded in the mess hall and set
fire to one side of the kitchen.

Every time she met Orr after that, she'd hoist her
skirts up over her tight white elastic panties and, jeering coarsely, bulge her firm,
round belly out at him, cursing him contemptuously and then roaring with husky
laughter as she saw him giggle fearfully and take refuge behind Yossarian.

Corporal Whitcomb, an atheist, was a disgruntled
subordinate who felt he could do the chaplain's job much better than the chaplain
was doing it and viewed himself, therefore, as an underprivileged victim of social
inequity.

They covered the whole top floor, and Yossarian knew they extended down to the
fifth floor as well, for it was in Snowden's room on the fifth floor that he had finally
found the maid in the lime-colored panties with a dust mop the day after Bologna,
after Hungry Joe had discovered him in bed with Luciana at the officers' apartment
that same morning and had gone running like a fiend for his camera.

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.

His own girl sat sprawled out gracelessly
on an overstuffed sofa with an expression of otiose boredom.

CHAPTER 29 - PECKEM
There was no word about Orr the next day, and Sergeant Whitcomb, with
commendable dispatch and considerable hope, dropped a reminder in his tickler file
to send a form letter over Colonel Cathcart's signature to Orr's next of kin when
nine more days had elapsed.

He felt goose pimples clacking
all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled
all over the messy floor.

'I hate that son of a bitch,' Yossarian growled.

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never
took evasive action going in to the target and thereby increased the danger of all the
men who flew in the same formation with him.

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.

He licked his parched, thirsting lips with a sticky tongue and moaned in misery
again, loudly enough this time to attract the startled, searching glances of the men
sitting around him on the rows of crude wooden benches in their chocolate-colored
coveralls and stitched white parachute harnesses.

He stepped into the briefing room with mixed emotions, uncertain how he was
supposed to feel about Kraft and the others, for they had all died in the distance of
a mute and secluded agony at a moment when he was up to his own ass in the same
vile, excruciating dilemma of duty and damnation.

'I wonder what that Shithead is up to,' Lieutenant Engle said.

He knew, for example, that it was
called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena
as *jamais vu*, never seen, and *presque vu*, almost seen.

He enjoyed Nurse Sue
Ann Duckett's long white legs and supple, callipygous ass; he often neglected to
remember that she was quite slim and fragile from the waist up and hurt her
unintentionally in moments of passion when he hugged her too roughly.

Late one night, Havermeyer fired a shot at a mouse that brought Hungry Joe bolting
out at him barefoot, ranting at the top of his screechy voice and emptying his own
.45 into Havermeyer's tent as he came charging down one side of the ditch and up
the other and vanished all at once inside one of the slit trenches that had appeared
like magic beside every tent the morning after Milo Minderbinder had bombed the
squadron.

She was
a marvelous piece of ass who found him only fair.

'I couldn't see, sir, I kept getting bounced around back here pretty hard and I
couldn't see.

The subtle, recurring confusion
between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the
chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it.

A tally clerk kept score.

Didn't they put poison in my food during
Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?'

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.

The meal was served in enormous helpings
on damask tablecloths by the skilled Italian waiters Major - de Coverley had kidnaped
from the mainland and given to Milo.

Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and
lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night
with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian's tent.

His first thought was that
Milo was attacking the squadron again, and he rolled of his cot to the floor and lay
underneath in a trembling, praying ball, his heart thumping like a drop forge, his body
bathed in a cold sweat.

A cluster of
fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of the officers' club and punched jagged
holes in the side of the wooden building and in the bellies and backs of a row of
lieutenants and captains standing at the bar.

'Neither do I,' answered Yossarian, who was ready to pursue him through all the
words in the world to wring the knowledge from him if he could, but Clevinger
intervened, pale, thin, and laboring for breath, a humid coating of tears already
glistening in his undernourished eyes.

In a bed in the small private section at the end of the ward, always working
ceaselessly behind the green plyboard partition, was the solemn middle-aged colonel
who was visited every day by a gentle, sweet-faced woman with curly ash-blond hair
who was not a nurse and not a Wac and not a Red Cross girl but who nevertheless
appeared faithfully at the hospital in Pianosa each afternoon wearing pretty pastel
summer dresses that were very smart and white leather pumps with heels half ...

Captain Black, who had aspired to the position himself,
maintained that Major Major really *was* Henry Fonda but was too chickenshit
to admit it.

He choked up even more a second later when he spied Colonel Korn's tubby
monochrome figure trotting up the curved, wide, yellow stone staircase toward him in
lackadaisical haste from the great dilapidated lobby below with its lofty walls of
cracked dark marble and circular floor of cracked grimy tile.

Furthermore, it was none of General Peckem's goddam business how the tents in
General Dreedle's wing were pitched.

Milo had cried out in alarm, when he came upon the enormous
corrugated carton filled with packages of dried fruit and cans of fruit juices and
desserts that two of the Italian laborers Major de Coverley had kidnaped for his
kitchen were about to carry off to Yossarian's tent.

The chaplain was tongue-tied with indecision for a moment.

General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the
Solomon Islands to dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and
a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with
a yearning for Polish sausage.

'Good practice in case you ever have to ditch or make a crash landing.

Bills piled up rapidly, and he
was soon faced with the loss of his most precious medical instruments: his adding
machine was repossessed, and then his typewriter.

Colonel Cathcart was overjoyed, for he was relieved of the embarrassing commitment
to bomb Bologna without blemish to the reputation for valor he had earned by
volunteering his men to do it.

Behind the
building was the modern skeet-shooting range that had been constructed by Colonel
Cathcart for the exclusive recreation of the officers at Group and at which every
officer and enlisted man on combat status now, thanks to General Dreedle, had to
spend a minimum of eight hours a month.

Havermeyer was a lead bombardier who never
took evasive action going in to the target and thereby increased the danger of all the
men who flew in the same formation with him.

All men reporting on sick call
with temperatures above 102 were rushed to the hospital.

'You're out of your goddamn head,' he would reply.

Behind the
building was the modern skeet-shooting range that had been constructed by Colonel
Cathcart for the exclusive recreation of the officers at Group and at which every
officer and enlisted man on combat status now, thanks to General Dreedle, had to
spend a minimum of eight hours a month.

'Because they're better than horse chestnuts,'
he answered.

It was still more frustrating to try to
appeal directly to Major Major, the long and bony squadron commander, who looked a
little bit like Henry Fonda in distress and went jumping out the window of his office
each time Yossarian bullied his way past Sergeant Towser to speak to him about it.

Then he ate a whole tin
of Cheddar cheese from a package of K rations.

His manner was always casual and
relaxed, and his uniforms were custom-made.

He was like a man who had
grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed.

His bait was a bar of candy and he
would presight in the darkness as he sat waiting for the nibble with a finger of his
other hand inside a loop of the line he had run from the frame of his mosquito net to
the chain of the unfrosted light bulb overhead.

I've also ordered a tremendous shipment of Peruvian balsa wood for distribution to
each of the mess halls in the syndicate on a pro rata basis.'

He was beginning to lose confidence in Gus and Wes and was thinking of having
them both transferred back to the motor pool and replaced by someone who could
find something wrong.

Yossarian staggered up to
his feet not a moment too soon, for she came charging back in from the kitchen
carrying a long bread knife.

DANEEKA
CHAPTER 32 - YO-YO'S ROOMIES
CHAPTER 33 - NATELY'S WHORE
CHAPTER 34 - THANKSGIVING
CHAPTER 35 - MILO THE MILITANT
CHAPTER 36 - THE CELLAR
CHAPTER 37 - GENERAL SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 38 - KID SISTER
CHAPTER 39 - THE ETERNAL CITY
CHAPTER 40 - CATCH-22
CHAPTER 41 - SNOWDEN
CHAPTER 42 - YOSSARIAN
APPENDIX
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
It was love at first sight.

His mind germinated feverishly with challenging new ideas for sparking the great
spiritual revival of which he dreamed himself the architect - box lunches, church
socials, form letters to the families of men killed and injured in combat, censorship,
Bingo.

Havermeyer held mortal men rigid in
six planes as steady and still as sitting ducks while he followed the bombs all the way
down through the plexiglass nose with deep interest and gave the German gunners
below all the time they needed to set their sights and take their aim and pull their
triggers or lanyards or switches or whatever the hell they did pull when *they*
wanted to kill people they didn't know.

Next he found some bouillon cubes and aluminum cups and made us some soup.

Wintergreen, mail clerk at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters.

And Yossarian crawled
slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear
section of the plane - passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for -to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as
a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers
inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound
that was almost a foot long and ma...

Colonel Moodus was General Dreedle's son-in-law, and General Dreedle, at the insistence of his wife and against his own better
judgment, had taken him into the military business.

From this meager beginning had sprung the ineffectual squadron commander who was
now spending the better part of each working day in Pianosa forging Washington
Irving's name to official documents.

Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead.

DANEEKA
CHAPTER 32 - YO-YO'S ROOMIES
CHAPTER 33 - NATELY'S WHORE
CHAPTER 34 - THANKSGIVING
CHAPTER 35 - MILO THE MILITANT
CHAPTER 36 - THE CELLAR
CHAPTER 37 - GENERAL SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 38 - KID SISTER
CHAPTER 39 - THE ETERNAL CITY
CHAPTER 40 - CATCH-22
CHAPTER 41 - SNOWDEN
CHAPTER 42 - YOSSARIAN
APPENDIX
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
It was love at first sight.

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 as good at shooting
crap as he was at playing ping-pong, and he was as good at playing ping-pong as he was
at everything else.

General Dreedle devoured fresh
eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner - between meals he devoured more fresh eggs -until Milo located abundant sources of fresh veal, beef, duck, baby lamb chops,
mushroom caps, broccoli, South African rock lobster tails, shrimp, hams, puddings,
grapes, ice cream, strawberries and artichokes.

To German intelligence, Major - de Coverley was a vexatious enigma; not one of the
hundreds of American prisoners would ever supply any concrete information about
the elderly white-haired officer with the gnarled and menacing brow and blazing,
powerful eyes who seemed to spearhead every important advance so fearlessly and
successfully.

Officers' clubs
everywhere pulsated with blurred but knowing accounts of lavish, hushed-up drinking
and sex orgies there and of secret, intimate nights of ecstasy with the most
beautiful, the most tantalizing, the most readily aroused and most easily satisfied
Italian courtesans, film actresses, models and countesses.

On those
he did read he wrote, 'Washington Irving.'

There were fertile red meadows of epithelial tissue to catch and coddle a cancer
cell.

Luciana
had her green-and-white summer dress on and was holding the skirt bunched up
above her waist.

The warrant officer on Yossarian's left was unimpressed.

She was
crouched against the wall near the bottom of the staircase and came pouncing down
upon him like a hawk with a glittering silver steak knife in her fist.

CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
Ordinarily, Yossarian's pilot was McWatt, who, shaving in loud red, clean pajamas
outside his tent each morning, was one of the odd, ironic, incomprehensible things
surrounding Yossarian.

The only thing I want to do after the war is
marry some girl who's got more money than I have and shack up with lots more
pretty girls.

She was never without a good book close by, not even when she was
lying in bed with nothing on her but Yossarian and Dori Duz's dog tags.

'I will beat you up,' boasted the chaplain, dancing up very close to Major Danby and
shadowboxing.

There were
billions of conscientious body cells oxidating away day and night like dumb animals at
their complicated job of keeping him alive and healthy, and every one was a potential
traitor and foe.

Their single fault, from where Yossarian sat as a
bombardier, was the tight crawlway separating the bombardier's compartment in the
plexiglass nose from the nearest escape hatch.

Engines rolled over disgruntedly on lollipop-shaped hardstands,
resisting first, then idling smoothly awhile, and then the planes lumbered around and
nosed forward lamely over the pebbled ground like sightless, stupid, crippled things
until they taxied into the line at the foot of the landing strip and took off swiftly,
one behind the other, in a zooming, rising roar, banking slowly into formation over
mottled treetops, and circling the field at even speed until all the flights o...

Doc Daneeka had been drafted and shipped to Pianosa as a flight surgeon, even
though he was terrified of flying.

Yossarian swore at Aarfy again and continued searching intently, cold with a
compassionate kind of fear now for the little bouncy and bizarre buck-toothed
tentmate who had smashed Appleby's forehead open with a ping-pong racket and who
was scaring the daylights out of Yossarian once again.

Milo had never seen a
stock ticker before, and the quotation for Egyptian cotton happened to be coming in
just as he asked the headwaiter to explain it to him.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf's first thought had been to have a
friend of his in the sheet metal shop sink pegs of nickel alloy into each man's
thighbones and link them to the wrists by strands of copper wire with exactly three
inches of play, but there wasn't time - there was never enough time - and good
copper wire was hard to come by in wartime.

Can't we do without that horseshit?'

Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who
had not yet made his reputation as a parader, shuddered violently at the picture
Major Major would make marching barefoot in his squadron that coming Sunday.

This was a calamity he had not foreseen, and he
wanted to bust his roommates' heads open with his fists or pick them up, each in
turn, by the seats of their pants and the scruffs of their necks and pitch them out
once and for all into the dank, rubbery perennial weeds growing between his rusty
soupcan urinal with nail holes in the bottom and the knotty-pine squadron latrine that
stood like a beach locker not far away.

The path from the squadron led him around a mysterious gun emplacement in the
woods; two of the three enlisted men stationed there lay sleeping on the circle of
sand bags and the third sat eating a purple pomegranate, biting off large mouthfuls
between his churning jaws and spewing the ground roughage out away from him into
the bushes.

A real wise guy, you know.

And throw that silly ice bag away before you die of pneumonia.'

He
glowered at the chaplain with swollen fury for a moment, his good humor gone, and
turned back toward the bar disgruntedly, rolling from side to side like a sailor on his
short bandy legs.

Milo was correct, of course, as everyone soon agreed but a few embittered misfits
like Doc Daneeka, who sulked cantankerously and muttered offensive insinuations
about the morality of the whole venture until Milo mollified him with a donation, in
the name of the syndicate, of a lightweight aluminum collapsible garden chair that
Doc Daneeka could fold up conveniently and carry outside his tent each time Chief
White Halfoat came inside his tent and carry back inside his tent each t...

'And just in time, too,' announced the doctor with whom Yossarian next found
himself alone, a tall, torpedo-shaped congenial man with an unshaven growth of brown
beard and a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket that he chain-smoked insouciantly
as he leaned against the wall.

He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he
dared over Yossarian's tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could
frighten him, and loved to go buzzing with a wild, close roar over the wooden raft
floating on empty oil drums out past the sand bar at the immaculate white beach
where the men went swimming naked.

Milo was dressed in his customary business attire - olive-drab trousers, a fresh olive-drab shirt and tie, with one silver first lieutenant's bar gleaming on the collar, and a
regulation dress cap with a stiff leather bill.

'Do you want to buy some Zippo lighters?' he asked
Yossarian.

She pulled him out of the night club into the street and down a flight of steps into a
black-market restaurant filled with lively, chirping, attractive girls who all seemed to
know each other and with the self-conscious military officers from different
countries who had come there with them.

'After all, I suppose it did take a lot of courage to go over that target a
second time with no other planes around to divert the antiaircraft fire.

April was spring, and in the spring Milo
Minderbinder's fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.

I've got these rubber
models in my office with all the reproductive organs of both sexes that I keep locked
up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal.

The stove Orr was manufacturing out of an
inverted metal drum stood in the middle of the smooth cement floor he had
constructed.

But Milo was deaf and kept pushing forward, nonviolently but irresistibly, sweating,
his eyes, as though he were in the grip of a blind fixation, burning feverishly, and his
twitching mouth slavering.

Nurse Duckett plucked Yossarian's arm and whispered to him furtively to meet her in
the broom closet outside in the corridor.

'T. S. Eliot,' ex-P.F.C.

Then
she came at him with a full wine bottle and struck him squarely on the temple,
knocking him down half-stunned on one knee.

I've got some live Maine lobsters hidden away
that I can serve you tonight with an excellent Roquefort salad and two frozen ‚clairs
that were smuggled out of Paris only yesterday together with an important member
of the French underground.

He could interpret their naked presence in his hands only as a
cosmic oversight destined to be rectified speedily, and he was driven always to make
what carnal use of them he could in the fleeting moment or two he felt he had before
Someone caught wise and whisked them away.

'I hate that son of a bitch,' Yossarian growled.

Doc Daneeka had lost his head during Milo's bombardment;
instead of running for cover, he had remained out in the open and performed his
duty, slithering along the ground through shrapnel, strafing and incendiary bombs like
a furtive, wily lizard from casualty to casualty, administering tourniquets, morphine,
splints and sulfanilamide with a dark and doleful visage, never saying one word more
than he had to and reading in each man's bluing wound a dreadful portent of his own
decay.

'You're in the hospital for
a stone in your salivary gland.

Aarfy was a dedicated fraternity man
who loved cheerleading and class reunions and did not have brains enough to be
afraid.

He found some shark repellent and he
sprinkled it right out into the water.

Milo lifted his arm suddenly
and pointed toward the open-air theater, where the milky, dust-filled beam bursting
horizontally from the projector slashed a conelike swath in the blackness and draped
in a fluorescent membrane of light the audience tilted on the seats there in hypnotic
sags, their faces focused upward toward the aluminized movie screen.

There were lymph glands that might do him in.

'What does his blood count show?'

'Couldn't you forge some official orders on that
mimeograph machine of yours and get us out of flying to Bologna?'

He smiled at Yossarian wanly, looking frail and exceptionally young and
bashful in the bulky dungeon of his earphones, hat, throat mike, flak suit and
parachute.

General Dreedle devoured fresh
eggs for breakfast, lunch and dinner - between meals he devoured more fresh eggs -until Milo located abundant sources of fresh veal, beef, duck, baby lamb chops,
mushroom caps, broccoli, South African rock lobster tails, shrimp, hams, puddings,
grapes, ice cream, strawberries and artichokes.

When his inspiring dissertation was finished, he gave the men the
colors of the day still one more time, stressed the angle of approach and reviewed
the weather conditions again.

'Let me be your partner,' he blurted out imploringly.

This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man reminded Nately of his father because the
two were nothing at all alike.

Appleby was as good at shooting
crap as he was at playing ping-pong, and he was as good at playing ping-pong as he was
at everything else.

He sat all
tucked up into himself, his slender shoulders huddled halfway around his head, his
suntanned hands with their luminous silver fingernails massaging the backs of his
bare, folded arms gently as though he were cold.

A letter arrived that same week from the Social Security Administration stating
that, under the provisions of the Old Age and Survivors Insurance Act Of 1935, she
would receive monthly support for herself and her dependent children until they
reached the age of eighteen, and a burial allowance of $250.

But to abandon Orr's tent would be to abandon Orr, who would have been spurned
and humiliated clannishly by these four simple-minded officers waiting to move in.

Begin with a salt-free diet for General Peckem and a
fat-free diet for General Dreedle.'

You should've been in my office the day those newlyweds
walked in.'

Last night in
the latrine.

'Chaplain,' resumed the officer without insignia at a more leisurely pace, lifting a
typewritten sheet of yellow paper from the open folder, 'I have a signed statement
here from Colonel Cathcart asserting you stole that plum tomato from him.'

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.

There were many strange things taking place,
but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked,
inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board, glazing their unforgiving
expressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyes
malignantly like inextinguishable coals.

'Don't let the bastard know who's calling.'

Seeing everyone in the squadron he didn't like afraid once again throughout the
appalling, interminable Great Big Siege of Bologna reminded Captain Black
nostalgically of the good old days of his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade when he had
been a man of real consequence, and when even big shots like Milo Minderbinder, Doc
Daneeka and Piltchard and Wren had trembled at his approach and groveled at his
feet.

He was downcast and burdened with self-reproach when he stepped without noise from the colonel's office on his rubber-soled and rubber-heeled brown shoes.

'At first I
thought it was you, hightailing it for Mexico.

He had an uncanny knowledge of wildlife and was not afraid of dogs or cats
or beetles or moths, or of foods like scrod or tripe.

'*Si, si*,' she responded co-operatively, and ran for her shoes and earrings.

Wintergreen was a snide little punk who enjoyed working at cross-purposes.

Why else would he go around shooting
his mouth off about me?

He took a
number of photostats out of a large red expansion envelope he had been hiding
conspicuously beneath a leather flight jacket painted garishly with pictures of
airplanes flying through orange bursts of flak and with orderly rows of little bombs
signifying fifty-five combat missions flown.

The next thing he finds is a fishing line and dried bait, and his face lights
up as though the Air-Sea Rescue launch had just sped up to save us before we died
of exposure or before the Germans sent a boat out from Spezia to take us prisoner
or machine-gun us.

Sergeant Knight came
plummeting down from the top gun turret and began pounding them all on the back
with delirious enthusiasm.

Kid Sampson asked nervously.

His own girl sat sprawled out gracelessly
on an overstuffed sofa with an expression of otiose boredom.

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.

The girls grew
friendlier then and called an address to the driver, who drove them at a clopping
pace halfway across the city into a section they had never visited before and stopped
in front of an old, tall building on a dark street.

He glanced
back apprehensively, half expecting to find the limp white things crawling after him
in sightless pursuit or snaking up through the treetops in a writhing and ungovernable
mutative mass.

Through the lavender gloom clouding the entrance of the operations tent, Yossarian
glimpsed Chief White Halfoat, diligently embezzling whiskey rations, forging the
signatures of nondrinkers and pouring off the alcohol with which he was poisoning
himself into separate bottles rapidly in order to steal as much as he could before
Captain Black roused himself with recollection and came hurrying over indolently to
steal the rest himself.

Wintergreen, mail clerk at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters.

All he
could ever see was Aarfy, with whose fustian, moon-faced ineptitude he had finally
lost all patience, and there were minutes of agonizing fury and frustration in the sky
when he hungered to be demoted again to a wing plane with a loaded machine gun in
the compartment instead of the precision bombsight that he really had no need for, a
powerful, heavy fifty-caliber machine gun he could seize vengefully in both hands and
turn loose savagely against all the demons tyrannizing him: ...

Once Yossarian had
driven him back from the nose, Aarfy was free to cower on the floor where Yossarian
longed to cower, but he stood bolt upright instead with his stumpy arms resting
comfortably on the backs of the pilot's and co-pilot's seats, pipe in hand, making
affable small talk to McWatt and whoever happened to be co-pilot and pointing out
amusing trivia in the sky to the two men, who were too busy to be interested.

He had
stopped at the operations tent to inquire the way to the orderly-room tent and had
been sent right into action because so many men had completed the thirty-five
missions required then that Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren were finding it
difficult to assemble the number of crews specified by Group.

First
he found a box of chocolate bars and he passed those around so we sat there eating
salty chocolate bars while the waves kept knocking us out of the raft into the water.

The soldier in
white was encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze.

The question upset them, because Snowden had been killed over Avignon when Dobbs
went crazy in mid-air and seized the controls away from Huple.

All over the world, boys
on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been
told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were
laying down their young lives.

I'd just as soon goldbrick with malaria as with
anything else.

His warm
canteen was empty, and he was too distraught to remember the lister bag hanging
outside in the shade between the two tents.

Nately's death, in fact, almost killed Yossarian too, for when he broke the news to
Nately's whore in Rome she uttered a piercing, heartbroken shriek and tried to stab
him to death with a potato peeler.

You give me a belly laugh now and I'll give you a whole bushel of
plum tomatoes.'

'It means that I want to escort you now to wherever the hell I have to
take you next so that I can rush back to that night club before Aarfy leaves with
that wonderful tomato he's got without giving me a chance to ask about an aunt or
friend she must have who's just like her.'

Orders transferring him away were sent to the
mimeograph room late in the afternoon, and at three o'clock in the morning Major
Major was again shaken roughly awake, bidden Godspeed by the sergeant and placed
aboard a plane heading west.

Major Major barely recognized him because he was wearing a faded maroon corduroy
bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty flannel pajamas, and worn house
slippers with one flapping sole.

There was nothing funny about living like a bum
in a tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front
that could gulp down a person with a cramp in the twinkling of an eye and ship him
back to shore three days later, all charges paid, bloated, blue and putrescent, water
draining out through both cold nostrils.

They fell into ranks in the civilian clothes they had brought into the Army with them
three days before.

There was a time of tension then, a time of
waiting with nothing to hear and nothing to see and nothing to do but wait as the
antiaircraft guns below took aim and made ready to knock them all sprawling into
infinite sleep if they could.

But the men back at the squadron never even saw any of the bananas, for it was a
seller's market for bananas in Istanbul and a buyer's market in Beirut for the
caraway seeds Milo rushed with to Bengasi after selling the bananas, and when they
raced back into Pianosa breathlessly six days later at the conclusion of Orr's rest
leave, it was with a load of best white eggs from Sicily that Milo said were from
Egypt and sold to his mess halls for only *four* cents apiece so that all t...

It was those
teletype machines they have in all the good restaurants there.

When
he spun around in his bewilderment, Aarfy was grinning proudly from ear to ear like
something inhuman as he held up a shattered paper map for Yossarian to see.

'You outrank me.'

It's really cotton candy, delicious cotton candy.

In the bed on Yossarian's right, still lying amorously on
his belly, was the startled captain with malaria in his blood and a mosquito bite on his
ass.

He stuffed the remainder of the chocolate-covered cotton ball into his shirt pocket and edged his way back gingerly along the
branch to the smooth gray trunk.

'But would you say
that, sir, even in the light of General Peckem's recent memorandum on the subject of
appropriate military attire in combat areas?'

There'll be tangerines too, and casaba melons, honeydews, filet of
Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.'

The escape hatches in the front and rear sections flew
open while the sea was still foaming white and green around the plane, and the men
scrambled out as speedily as they could in their flaccid orange Mae West life jackets
that failed to inflate and dangled limp and useless around their necks and waists.

Somewhere in the European theater of operations
is a man who's getting his hands on communications addressed to you.

The system worked just fine for everybody, especially for Doc Daneeka, who found
himself with all the time he needed to watch old Major - de Coverley pitching
horseshoes in his private horseshoe-pitching pit, still wearing the transparent eye
patch Doc Daneeka had fashioned for him from the strip of celluloid stolen from
Major Major's orderly room window months before when Major - de Coverley had
returned from Rome with an injured cornea after renting two apartments there for
th...

He was like a man who had
grown frozen with horror once and had never come completely unthawed.

'How should I know?' answered Chief White Halfoat, staggering inside the tent just
then with a bottle of whiskey cradled in his arm and sitting himself down pugnaciously
between the two of them.

'When I was a kid,' Orr replied, 'I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my
cheeks.

The only one who
ever did dare address him was Milo Minderbinder, who approached the horseshoe-pitching pit with a hard-boiled egg his second week in the squadron and held it aloft
for Major - de Coverley to see.

Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he
didn't know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop
bombs on them, and it wasn't funny at all.

The window unbuttoned and was low and large and easy to jump through
from either side.

'I'm an Anabaptist.'

His eyes were amused behind his glinting rimless spectacles.

'At first I
thought it was you, hightailing it for Mexico.

Records attesting to his death were pullulating like insect eggs and
verifying each other beyond all contention.

The maid in the lime-colored panties was a cheerful, fat, obliging woman in her mid-thirties with squashy thighs and swaying hams in lime-colored panties that she was
always rolling off for any man who wanted her.

The Group Headquarters building was an enormous, windy,
antiquated structure built of powdery red stone and banging plumbing.

There was something fearful and minute about Doc Daneeka as he sat despondently
outside his tent in the sunlight as often as he could, dressed in khaki summer
trousers and a short-sleeved summer shirt that was bleached almost to an antiseptic
gray by the daily laundering to which he had it subjected.

Once, they took off and were flying in formation when
the control tower summoned them down.

CATCH-22
JOSEPH HELLER
Copyright (c) Joseph Heller, 1955, 1961
The island of Pianosa lies in the Mediterranean Sea eight miles south of Elba.

And Yossarian crawled
slowly out of the nose and up on top of the bomb bay and wriggled back into the rear
section of the plane - passing the first-aid kit on the way that he had to return for -to treat Snowden for the wrong wound, the yawning, raw, melon-shaped hole as big as
a football in the outside of his thigh, the unsevered, blood-soaked muscle fibers
inside pulsating weirdly like blind things with lives of their own, the oval, naked wound
that was almost a foot long and ma...

Milo's planes, ballooning serenely in over the blossoming treetops with their
bomb bay doors open and wing flaps down and with their monstrous, bug-eyed,
blinding, fiercely flickering, eerie landing lights on, were the most apocalyptic sight
he had ever beheld.

The only one who
ever did dare address him was Milo Minderbinder, who approached the horseshoe-pitching pit with a hard-boiled egg his second week in the squadron and held it aloft
for Major - de Coverley to see.

There was a time of tension then, a time of
waiting with nothing to hear and nothing to see and nothing to do but wait as the
antiaircraft guns below took aim and made ready to knock them all sprawling into
infinite sleep if they could.

In about fifteen minutes the crash trucks from the airfield arrived to fight
the fire.

Every time she met Orr after that, she'd hoist her
skirts up over her tight white elastic panties and, jeering coarsely, bulge her firm,
round belly out at him, cursing him contemptuously and then roaring with husky
laughter as she saw him giggle fearfully and take refuge behind Yossarian.

He worked himself relentlessly into exhaustion before the long night was over
and came down with a sniffle the next day that sent him hurrying querulously into the
medical tent to have his temperature taken by Gus and Wes and to obtain a mustard
plaster and vaporizer.

Chief White Halfoat was a handsome, swarthy Indian from Oklahoma with a heavy,
hard-boned face and tousled black hair, a half-blooded Cree from Enid who, for
occult reasons of his own, had made up his mind to die of pneumonia.

Oh, *God, oh, God*,
Yossarian had been pleading wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of
the ship by the top of his head, unable to move.

On the
other hand, he was busted down to buck private each time he was court-martialed.

'Does Milo know you're selling cigarette lighters?'

It was still more frustrating to try to
appeal directly to Major Major, the long and bony squadron commander, who looked a
little bit like Henry Fonda in distress and went jumping out the window of his office
each time Yossarian bullied his way past Sergeant Towser to speak to him about it.

I can roll the cotton up on wooden
toothpicks and peddle them as sterile swabs.

He knew, for example, that it was
called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena
as *jamais vu*, never seen, and *presque vu*, almost seen.

He sat all
tucked up into himself, his slender shoulders huddled halfway around his head, his
suntanned hands with their luminous silver fingernails massaging the backs of his
bare, folded arms gently as though he were cold.

Yossarian was a lead
bombardier who had been demoted because he no longer gave a damn whether he
missed or not.

That seemed like a good idea,
too, and they began to move him back to the sidewalk, but before they could finish, a
jeep raced up with a flashing red spotlight at the side and two military policemen in
the front seat.

The girls disrobed at
once, pausing in different stages to point proudly to their garish underthings and
bantering all the while with the gaunt and dissipated old man with the shabby long
white hair and slovenly white unbuttoned shirt who sat cackling lasciviously in a musty
blue armchair almost in the exact center of the room and bade Nately and his
companions welcome with a mirthful and sardonic formality.

'That dirty goddam midget-assed, apple-cheeked, goggle-eyed, undersized, buck-toothed, grinning, crazy sonofabitchin-bastard!'

I've also ordered a tremendous shipment of Peruvian balsa wood for distribution to
each of the mess halls in the syndicate on a pro rata basis.'

'You fellas are crazy.

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPT...

Behind the
building was the modern skeet-shooting range that had been constructed by Colonel
Cathcart for the exclusive recreation of the officers at Group and at which every
officer and enlisted man on combat status now, thanks to General Dreedle, had to
spend a minimum of eight hours a month.

Luciana fled
mirthfully along the sidewalk in her high white wedgies, pulling Yossarian along in tow
with the same lusty and ingenuous zeal she had displayed in the dance hall the night
before and at every moment since.

Appleby was a fair-haired boy
from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood and the American Way of Life, without
ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

'And a very good idea it was, too,' retorted Colonel Korn, 'since it eliminated that
superfluous major that's been giving you such an awful black eye as an administrator.

He enjoyed Nurse Sue
Ann Duckett's long white legs and supple, callipygous ass; he often neglected to
remember that she was quite slim and fragile from the waist up and hurt her
unintentionally in moments of passion when he hugged her too roughly.

He swam languorously
out to the raft, held on a moment, and swam languorously back to where he could
stand on the sand bar.

He knew Orr, and he
knew there was not a chance in hell of finding out from him then why he had wanted
big cheeks.

Instead there was the crawlway, and since the mess on the mission over
Avignon he had learned to detest every mammoth inch of it, for it slung him seconds
and seconds away from his parachute, which was too bulky to be taken up front with
him, and seconds and seconds more after that away from the escape hatch on the
floor between the rear of the elevated flight deck and the feet of the faceless top
turret gunner mounted high above.

When he turned to his teammates, he encountered a reef of curious, reflective
faces all gazing at him woodenly with morose and inscrutable animosity.

He rubbed his forehead harshly
with his knuckles, like a man in an alcoholic stupor, and snickered lewdly.

He rummaged through the first-aid kit for scissors.

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPT...

They conducted their duties humbly and reticently, with
a minimum of fuss, and went to great lengths not to antagonize anyone.

'Hiya, Father,' he said tonelessly without looking at the chaplain.

While he waited, he spent
each day shuffling rhythmically around the entrance of the operations tent, making
boisterous wisecracks to everybody who came by and jocosely calling Sergeant
Towser a lousy son of a bitch every time Sergeant Towser popped out
of the orderly room.

With
them this time was the twenty-four-year-old fighter-pilot captain with the sparse
golden mustache who had been shot into the Adriatic Sea in midwinter and not even
caught cold.

With damp dish towels they wiped the dust several times a day from the slim
black rubber tubes leading in and out of him to the two large stoppered jars, one of
them, hanging on a post beside his bed, dripping fluid into his arm constantly through
a slit in the bandages while the other, almost out of sight on the floor, drained the
fluid away through the zinc pipe rising from his groin.

In the morning he stepped from his tent looking
haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human building rocking
perilously on the brink of collapse.

A steady warm wind flowed in
from the beach, and an old cart filled with dirty straw rumbled into view on the main
road, drawn by a black donkey and driven by a farmer in a flopping hat and faded
brown work clothes who paid no attention to the formal military ceremony taking
place in the small field on his right.

All those except Yossarian
reporting on sick call with temperatures below 102 had their gums and toes painted
with gentian violet solution and were given a laxative to throw away into the bushes.

He tied a sloppy double bow in his opened shoelace
and then transferred a lined yellow pad from his desk to his lap.

CATCH-22
JOSEPH HELLER
Copyright (c) Joseph Heller, 1955, 1961
The island of Pianosa lies in the Mediterranean Sea eight miles south of Elba.

Catch-22
required that each censored letter bear the censoring officer's name.

Until Clevinger was snatched from existence so adroitly,
Yossarian had assumed that the men had simply decided unanimously to go AWOL the
same day.

'Who gives a shit?' he asked tiredly, and turned over on his
side to go to sleep.

They were stopped at the gates by gargantuan Berber guards
with scimitars and chased away.

A new group of specialists came pounding up to his bedside with their instruments to
find out if it was true.

My father, for example, died of
cancer of the liver and was never sick a day of his life right up till the moment it
killed him.

Nurse
Duckett bounced out across the aisle once more like a ping-pong ball with legs.

The three creaked forward timidly, holding themselves close to each other in a
stealthy, funereal group and inching forward almost in step, until they arrived at the
side of the bed and stood staring down at Yossarian.

Orr sniggered as he shook his head.

Didn't they put poison in my food during
Ferrara and during the Great Big Siege of Bologna?'

If word reached him that General Dreedle or General Peckem had been seen
smiling, frowning, or doing neither, he could not make himself rest until he had found
an acceptable interpretation and grumbled mulishly until Colonel Korn persuaded him
to relax and take things easy.

'When I was a kid,' Orr replied, 'I used to walk around all day with crab apples in my
cheeks.

'Who ever heard of a C.I.D. man
with purple gums?' he moaned.

Major Major forged diligently with his left hand
to elude identification, insulated against intrusion by his own undesired authority and
camouflaged in his false mustache and dark glasses as an additional safeguard against
detection by anyone chancing to peer in through the dowdy celluloid window from
which some thief had carved out a slice.

The purpose of the mission is to knock the whole village sliding down the
side of the mountain and create a roadblock that the Germans will have to clear.

Okay?"

As soon as the
latch of the door had clicked shut, the whole humiliating recollection of the naked
man in formation came cascading down upon him in a mortifying, choking flood of
stinging details.

He seethed with self-recrimination as he
hastened back as rapidly as he could stride along the splintered, irregularly spaced
railroad ties.

He looked toward stony Elba, and his eyes automatically searched overhead for the
fluffy, white, turnip-shaped cloud in which Clevinger had vanished.

Thanks to Orr, his roommate, it was the most
luxurious tent in the squadron.

He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out
everything in the letters but *a, an* and *the*.

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.

The men played cards on a towel, undershirt, or blanket, and Nurse Duckett mixed
the extra deck of cards, sitting with her back resting against a sand dune.

There was shish-kabob for lunch, huge, savory hunks of spitted meat sizzling like the
devil over charcoal after marinating seventy-two hours in a secret mixture Milo had
stolen from a crooked trader in the Levant, served with Iranian rice and asparagus
tips Parmesan, followed by cherries jubilee for dessert and then steaming cups of
fresh coffee with Benedictine and brandy.

His shoes kicked
lightly against the yellow oak wood, his sludge-brown socks, garterless, collapsed in
sagging circles below ankles that were surprisingly small and white.

It had died of its own accord, expired completely without even an
ember to be watered down, and there was nothing for the disappointed firemen to do
but drink tepid coffee and hang around trying to screw the nurses.

When he had exhausted all possibilities in the letters, he began attacking the names
and addresses on the envelopes, obliterating whole homes and streets, annihilating
entire metropolises with careless flicks of his wrist as though he were God.

There was a urologist for
his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a
psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist
for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from
the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the
Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the
dying colonel trying to discuss *Moby Dick*...

'Now, men, we're going to synchronize our watches,' Colonel Korn began promptly in a
sharp, commanding manner, rolling his eyes flirtatiously in General Dreedle's
direction.

The War Department replied touchily that there had been no error and that she was
undoubtedly the victim of some sadistic and psychotic forger in her husband's
squadron.

He wished again
that he was where Aarfy was, making obscene, brutal, cheerful love with a juicy
drunken tart who didn't give a tinker's dam about him and would never
think of him again.

The name of the man who had stood naked in ranks that day
to receive his Distinguished Flying Cross from General Dreedle had also been -*Yossarian!*

The
life jackets failed to inflate because Milo had removed the twin carbon-dioxide
cylinders from the inflating chambers to make the strawberry and crushed-pineapple
ice-cream sodas he served in the officers' mess hall and had replaced them with
mimeographed notes that read: 'What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the
country.'

Yossarian often thought of
scheming with some pilot he trusted to fake a crippled engine and then destroy the
evidence of deception with a belly landing, but the only pilot he really trusted was
McWatt, who was happiest where he was and still got a big boot out of buzzing his
plane over Yossarian's tent or roaring in so low over the bathers at the beach that
the fierce wind from his propellers slashed dark furrows in the water and whipped
sheets of spray flapping back for second...

Then there was the educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in
Technicolor and felt, patriotically, that people of means - decent folk - should be
given more votes than drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists and indecent
folk - people without means.

They were both superb creatures with pulpy, bright, pointed tongues and mouths like
round warm plums, a little sweet and sticky, a little rotten.

Yossarian put another can of soup up to
cook and ate that too when it was hot.

Dori Duz was a lively little tart of copper-green and gold who loved doing it best in
toolsheds, phone booths, field houses and bus kiosks.

One more
girl appeared wearing only panties and sat down, bringing the total congregating
there in just a few minutes to eleven, all but one of them completely unclothed.

They doubled over in agony and dropped.

The engines droned on monotonously like a fat, lazy
fly.

He manipulated
boxes of chocolate soldiers until they melted in his hands and then maneuvered in
ranks of twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had bought from a mail-order house
under an assumed name and kept locked away from everyone's eyes during the day.

He hated the chaplain venomously for being a chaplain and making a
coarse blunder out of an observation that in any other circumstances, he knew, would
have been considered witty and urbane.

Colonel
Korn was a lousy smart aleck.

Help who?' called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back
into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the
controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening,
paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of
the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time
by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly ...

Lieutenant Scheisskopf had the facts at his fingertips.

Luciana
vanished aboard one of the diminutive green vehicles, and Yossarian hurried as fast
as he could all the way back to the cabaret and the bleary-eyed bleached blonde in
the open orange satin blouse.

Milo's eyes
were liquid with integrity, and his artless and uncorrupted face was lustrous with a
shining mixture of sweat and insect repellent.

His office was in Staten Island in a two-family firetrap
just four blocks away from the ferry stop and only one block south of a supermarket,
three beauty parlors, and two corrupt druggists.

Yossarian and Milo were covered in
their bower by tissue-thin tiers of sloping green and largely surrounded by other
gray chestnut trees and a silver spruce.

'That's where they
keep the mental cases.

He could drill holes.

Multi *dinero*.

A person misplaced, disorganized,
miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he
thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and
spoiled everything.

Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and
lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night
with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian's tent.

The remaining wing revolved as ponderously as a grinding cement mixer as the plane
plummeted nose downward in a straight line at accelerating speed until it struck the
water, which foamed open at the impact like a white water lily on the dark-blue sea,
and washed back in a geyser of apple-green bubbles when the plane sank.

Yossarian let the girl drag him through the lovely Roman spring night for almost a
mile until they reached a chaotic bus depot honking with horns, blazing with red and
yellow lights and echoing with the snarling vituperations of unshaven bus drivers
pouring loathsome, hair-raising curses out at each other, at their passengers and at
the strolling, unconcerned knots of pedestrians clogging their paths, who ignored
them until they were bumped by the buses and began shouting curses ...

One day Milo flew away to England to pick up a load of Turkish halvah and came flying
back from Madagascar leading four German bombers filled with yams, collards,
mustard greens and black-eyed Georgia peas.

He could come through other people's
tonsillectomies without suffering any postoperative distress, and even endure their
hernias and hemorrhoids with only mild nausea and revulsion.

He drank her in insatiably from head to painted toenail.

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPTER 16 -...

Help who?' called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back
into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the
controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening,
paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of
the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time
by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly ...

Men like Hungry Joe glowered at him
with blameful hatred, and Appleby subjected him to vindictive discourtesy now that
he had established himself as a hot pilot and a ping-pong player who never lost a
point.

General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the
Solomon Islands to dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and
a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with
a yearning for Polish sausage.

'It might even get me into *The Saturday Evening Post*,' Colonel Cathcart boasted in
his office with a smile, swaggering back and forth convivially as he reproached the
chaplain.

Abreast of his trailer, he left the ditch and wove his way speedily
toward home through the dense underbrush, in which the only person he ever
encountered was Captain Flume, who, drawn and ghostly, frightened him half to death
one twilight by materializing without warning out of a patch of dewberry bushes to
complain that Chief White Halfoat had threatened to slit his throat open from ear to
ear.

He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing
from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy
particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent.

I was in Barcelona buying olive
oil and skinless and boneless sardines, and I've got the purchase orders to prove it.

Don't you
want to earn more unit citations and more oak leaf clusters for your Air Medal?

Within days after publication, there was a review in *The Nation* by Nelson Algren
(a client of my own literary agent, who had urged him to read it), who wrote of
*Catch-22* that it 'was the best novel to come out of anywhere in years'.

He sat all
tucked up into himself, his slender shoulders huddled halfway around his head, his
suntanned hands with their luminous silver fingernails massaging the backs of his
bare, folded arms gently as though he were cold.

We can slip you in while
Major Danby is synchronizing the watches.

He was dashing and dejected,
poised and chagrined.

Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and
bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind
his eyes like severed sections of snake.

He saw a simple,
sincere face that was incapable of subtlety or guile, an honest, frank face with
disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black eyebrows and an unfortunate reddish-brown
mustache.

But the chaplain's impression of a prior
meeting was of some occasion far more momentous and occult than that, of a
significant encounter with Yossarian in some remote, submerged and perhaps even
entirely spiritual epoch in which he had made the identical, foredooming admission
that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, he could do to help him.

There was a urologist for
his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a
psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist
for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from
the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the
Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the
dying colonel trying to discuss *Moby Dick*...

Inevitably, the chaplain's attention, as he cowered meekly before him,
focused on Colonel Korn's midriff, where the shirttails bunching up from inside his
sagging belt and ballooning down over his waist gave him an appearance of slovenly
girth and made him seem inches shorter than his middle height.

The wheels were sibilant on the whizzing blacktop surface.

The day before Yossarian met the chaplain, a stove exploded in the mess hall and set
fire to one side of the kitchen.

Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly
at the tips of his fingers, stammered, choked, itched, sweated, salivated, and sprang
from spot to spot fanatically with an intricate black camera with which he was always
trying to take pictures of naked girls.

Yossarian was warm when the cold weather came because of Orr's marvelous stove,
and he might have existed in his warm tent quite comfortably if not for the memory
of Orr, and if not for the gang of animated roommates that came swarming inside
rapaciously one day from the two full combat crews Colonel Cathcart had
requisitioned - and obtained in less than forty-eight hours - as replacements for Kid
Sampson and McWatt.

She gazed at him with new approval
when she stopped, the lush, responsive tissues of her dark face turning darker still
and blooming somnolently with a swelling and beautifying infusion of blood.

Separate trickles of blood spilled to a puddle on the floor through one saturated
trouser leg like countless unstoppable swarms of wriggling red worms.

On those
he did read he wrote, 'Washington Irving.'

'But I won't let you sleep with me.'

He was a pilot and flew his plane as low as he
dared over Yossarian's tent as often as he could, just to see how much he could
frighten him, and loved to go buzzing with a wild, close roar over the wooden raft
floating on empty oil drums out past the sand bar at the immaculate white beach
where the men went swimming naked.

The fact
that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained
the rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on
the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were
already generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him
gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than
Hungry Joe's.

The colonel
was more than a head taller than the chaplain and over twice as broad, and his
swollen, overbearing authority made the chaplain feel frail and sickly by contrast.

They might do whatever they wished to
him, he realized; these brutal men might beat him to death right there in the
basement, and no one would intervene to save him, no one, perhaps, but the devout
and sympathetic major with the sharp face, who set a water tap dripping loudly into a
sink and returned to the table to lay a length of heavy rubber hose down beside the
brass knuckles.

'Havermeyer,' he asked hesitantly.

When such misgivings assailed Colonel
Cathcart, he choked back a sob and wanted to throw the damned thing away, but he
was restrained by his unswerving conviction that the cigarette holder never failed to
embellish his masculine, martial physique with a high gloss of sophisticated heroism
that illuminated him to dazzling advantage among all the other full colonels in the
American Army with whom he was in competition.

There was always sunshine, always a tiny sticking in the throat from the
rarefied air.

Doc Daneeka would never go swimming again; a
person could swoon or suffer a mild coronary occlusion in an inch or two of water and
drown to death, be carried out to sea by an undertow, or made vulnerable to
poliomyelitis or meningococcus infection through chilling or over-exertion.

Doc Daneeka had lost his head during Milo's bombardment;
instead of running for cover, he had remained out in the open and performed his
duty, slithering along the ground through shrapnel, strafing and incendiary bombs like
a furtive, wily lizard from casualty to casualty, administering tourniquets, morphine,
splints and sulfanilamide with a dark and doleful visage, never saying one word more
than he had to and reading in each man's bluing wound a dreadful portent of his own
decay.

Yossarian put aside the musette bag from which he had begun removing his toilet
articles and braced himself suspiciously.

I remember one day we tricked these two dumb high-school girls from town into the
fraternity house and made them put out for all the fellows there who wanted them
by threatening to call up their parents and say they were putting out for us.

Corporal Whitcomb's mud-caked shoes were on the chaplain's
blanket, and he was eating one of the chaplain's candy bars as he thumbed with
sneering expression through one of the chaplain's Bibles.

The crawlway was a narrow, square,
cold tunnel hollowed out beneath the flight controls, and a large man like Yossarian
could squeeze through only with difficulty.

Rolling back down, the jeep turned over on its
side and settled softly in the mud.

CHAPTER 16 - LUCIANA
He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the
drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert
her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar.

You've got to roll your wrist watch up in a pair
of wool socks every night and keep it on the bottom of your foot locker on the other
side of the room.'

'I'm going to tell him,' Clevinger insisted, as the two of them sat high in the
reviewing stands looking down on the auxiliary parade-ground at Lieutenant
Scheisskopf raging back and forth like a beardless Lear.

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being
jaundice.

I worked at it just like one of those crazy
guys you read about who go around squeezing rubber balls all day long just to
strengthen their hands.

A chubby, moon-faced navigator with little reptilian eyes and a pipe like Aarfy's had
trouble, too, and Yossarian used to chase him back from the nose as they turned
toward the target, now minutes away.

Hungry Joe had finished flying his first twenty-five missions during the week of the
Salerno beachhead, when Yossarian was laid up in the hospital with a burst of clap he
had caught on a low-level mission over a Wac in bushes on a supply flight to
Marrakech.

His meditations were polluted with threats of dread diseases like Ewing's tumor
and leukemia; he saw his infant son die two or three times every week because he
had never taught his wife how to stop arterial bleeding; watched, in tearful,
paralyzed silence, his whole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard
socket because he had never told her that a human body would conduct electricity;
all four went up in flames almost every night when the water heater exploded and se...

His fee
for attacking the bridge for America was the total cost of the operation plus six per
cent and his fee from Germany for defending the bridge was the same cost-plus-six
agreement augmented by a merit bonus of a thousand dollars for every American
plane he shot down.

Justice
is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up
down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a
word of warning.

'You're right,' Yossarian shouted back.

He placed a
set of brass knuckles and box of wooden matches on the table.

All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the
enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own.

Havermeyer held mortal men rigid in
six planes as steady and still as sitting ducks while he followed the bombs all the way
down through the plexiglass nose with deep interest and gave the German gunners
below all the time they needed to set their sights and take their aim and pull their
triggers or lanyards or switches or whatever the hell they did pull when *they*
wanted to kill people they didn't know.

'Beat it,' said the doctor on duty there, who was doing a crossword puzzle.

McWatt
was deeply impressed with Milo, who, to the amusement of Corporal Snark, his mess
sergeant, was already buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five
cents.

'I will beat you up,' boasted the chaplain, dancing up very close to Major Danby and
shadowboxing.

He felt an urgent desire to be alone with her again soon and sprang up impetuously
from his table and went running outside and back down the street toward the
apartment in search of the tiny bits of paper in the gutter, but they had all been
flushed away by a street cleaner's hose.

Engines rolled over disgruntedly on lollipop-shaped hardstands,
resisting first, then idling smoothly awhile, and then the planes lumbered around and
nosed forward lamely over the pebbled ground like sightless, stupid, crippled things
until they taxied into the line at the foot of the landing strip and took off swiftly,
one behind the other, in a zooming, rising roar, banking slowly into formation over
mottled treetops, and circling the field at even speed until all the flights o...

A
silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber
hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear,
stoppered jar on the floor.

Didn't he ever hear what happened to that kid - what was the name of that rotten
rat bastard pimp of a snotnose back in Colorado?'

He's a lecher.'

He could come through other people's
tonsillectomies without suffering any postoperative distress, and even endure their
hernias and hemorrhoids with only mild nausea and revulsion.

He broke the
brunt of her assault with his upraised elbow and punched her neatly on the jaw.

Be our pal.

A little while later she rose with an unconscious sigh and stepped
lethargically into her tight cotton panties and dark skirt, then buckled on her shoes
and left.

In the bed on Yossarian's right, still lying amorously on
his belly, was the startled captain with malaria in his blood and a mosquito bite on his
ass.

His eyes moved toward the hunting knife
that had been slung over the mosquito-net bar by the dead man the day he arrived.

He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing
from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy
particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent.

There was word from General Peckem's headquarters,
though, and Yossarian was drawn to the crowd of officers and enlisted men in shorts
and bathing trunks buzzing in grumpy confusion around the bulletin board just
outside the orderly room.

Seeing everyone in the squadron he didn't like afraid once again throughout the
appalling, interminable Great Big Siege of Bologna reminded Captain Black
nostalgically of the good old days of his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade when he had
been a man of real consequence, and when even big shots like Milo Minderbinder, Doc
Daneeka and Piltchard and Wren had trembled at his approach and groveled at his
feet.

An innocent nest of ancient pimple pricks lay in the basin of each cheek.

As always occurred when he quarreled over principles
in which he believed passionately, he would end up gasping furiously for air and
blinking back bitter tears of conviction.

First there had been the awful humiliation of the Great Loyalty Oath
Crusade, when not one of the thirty or forty people circulating competitive loyalty
oaths would even allow him to sign.

The plane bounced hard inside an air pocket, and he
remembered with a start that he had left his own parachute up front in the nose.

But the men back at the squadron never even saw any of the bananas, for it was a
seller's market for bananas in Istanbul and a buyer's market in Beirut for the
caraway seeds Milo rushed with to Bengasi after selling the bananas, and when they
raced back into Pianosa breathlessly six days later at the conclusion of Orr's rest
leave, it was with a load of best white eggs from Sicily that Milo said were from
Egypt and sold to his mess halls for only *four* cents apiece so that all t...

He
endeavored to trap and nourish the impression in order to predict, and perhaps even
control, what incident would occur next, but the afatus melted away unproductively,
as he had known beforehand it would.

The Army has invested a lot
of money to make you an airplane pilot, and you've no right to disobey
the doctor's orders.'

There were diseases of the skin, diseases of the bone, diseases of the lung,
diseases of the stomach, diseases of the heart, blood and arteries.

When the chaplain had finished, the colonel
took the pad back and held it up alongside a sheet of paper he removed from a
folder.

Instead he had
failed miserably, had choked up once again in the face of opposition from a stronger
personality.

He sat for a moment with a
hangdog look, then spurted to his feet suddenly and stamped away to have another
impetuous crack at persuading Doc Daneeka to ground him, knocking over Yossarian's
washstand with his hip when he lurched around and tripping over the fuel line of the
stove Orr was still constructing.

At the end of the successor volume I've just
completed, *Closing Time* (that fleeing cartoon figure is again on the book jacket of
the American edition, but wearing a businessman's chapeau and moving with a cane),
he is again still alive, more than forty years older but definitely still there.

'I've been goofing off since the
day I was born.

The path from the squadron led him around a mysterious gun emplacement in the
woods; two of the three enlisted men stationed there lay sleeping on the circle of
sand bags and the third sat eating a purple pomegranate, biting off large mouthfuls
between his churning jaws and spewing the ground roughage out away from him into
the bushes.

He greeted Milo jovially each time they
met and, in an excess of contrite generosity, impulsively recommended Major Major
for promotion.

Dunbar was disgusted by their sentimentality, and all three were relieved when
Hungry Joe came barging in unexpectedly with his intricate black camera and
trumped-up symptoms of appendicitis to be near enough to Yossarian to take pictures
of him feeling up Nurse Duckett.

Yossarian missed Nurse Duckett so much that he went searching
hungrily through the streets for Luciana, whose laugh and invisible scar he had never
forgotten, or the boozy, blowzy, bleary-eyed floozy in the overloaded white
brassiŠre and unbuttoned orange satin blouse whose naughty salmon-colored cameo
ring Aarfy had thrown away so callously through the window of her car.

McWatt wore fleecy bedroom slippers with his
red pajamas and slept between freshly pressed colored bedsheets like the one Milo
had retrieved half of for him from the grinning thief with the sweet tooth in
exchange for none of the pitted dates Milo had borrowed from Yossarian.

You know, I can see where a certain
type of person might get a big kick out of doing just that.

Doc Daneeka
emitted a glum, self-pitying sniff and strolled disconsolately across the tent to help
himself to some aspirin and sulphur pills and paint his own throat with Argyrol.

The civilian clothing in which he reported for
duty to Lieutenant Scheisskopf was rumpled and dirty.

When everybody who was going to had signed up with M & M Enterprises,
Fine Fruits and Produce, Milo created a wholly owned subsidiary, M & M Fancy Pastry,
and obtained more airplanes and more money from the mess funds for scones and
crumpets from the British Isles, prune and cheese Danish from Copenhagen, ‚clairs,
cream puffs, Napoleons and *petits fours* from Paris, Reims and Grenoble,
*Kugelhopf*, pumpernickel and *Pfefferkuchen* from Berlin, *Linzer* and *Dobos
*Torten* from ...

Wind whistling up
through the jagged gash in the floor kept the myriad bits of paper circulating like
alabaster particles in a paperweight and contributed to a sensation of lacquered,
waterlogged unreality.

'Who gives a shit?' he asked tiredly, and turned over on his
side to go to sleep.

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.

The father stood very rigid and
quaint in a double-breasted suit with padded shoulders that were much too tight for
him.

General Dreedle waited in austere silence until the car door
slammed and then demanded, 'Which one is this?'

'That
averages out to almost one combat mission every two months.

There were six people and a Scotch terrier inhabiting the
remote farmhouse Major Major called home, and five of them and the Scotch terrier
turned out to be agents for the F.B.I.

For a little while in the morning he had to censor letters, but he was
free after that to spend the rest of each day lying around idly with a clear
conscience.

That was where he wanted to be if he
had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam
cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam
foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above
and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical,
cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced,
and threatened to annihilate them all in o...

The flaming wreck dropped, first
the fuselage, then the spinning wing, while a shower of tiny metal fragments began
tap dancing on the roof of Yossarian's own plane and the incessant *cachung! cachung!
cachung!* of the flak was still thumping all around him.

He snapped off the safety catch and was ready to shoot.

He made the whole thing fast
with a tidy square knot.

And flight time was the time
he had to spend in airplane flight each month in order to get his flight pay.

It was like watching some kind of a moron.

The escape hatches in the front and rear sections flew
open while the sea was still foaming white and green around the plane, and the men
scrambled out as speedily as they could in their flaccid orange Mae West life jackets
that failed to inflate and dangled limp and useless around their necks and waists.

What are you fellas talkin' about?' the Texan asked nervously.

General Dreedle's nurse was only a little chubby, and his senses were stuffed to
congestion with the yellow radiance of her hair and the unfelt pressure of her soft
short fingers, with the rounded, untasted wealth of her nubile breasts in her Army-pink shirt that was opened wide at the throat and with the rolling, ripened, triangular
confluences of her belly and thighs in her tight, slick forest-green gabardine
officer's pants.

Yossarian padded ahead into
the forest again, caressing his bare, tingling belly adoringly from time to time as
though to reassure himself it was all still there.

When I see him coming, I'll shove a big log out into the road to make him
stop his jeep.

The chaplain rose quickly and edged away from Yossarian's bed, and then nodded with
a conciliating smile and promised to conduct himself with appropriate caution.

His bait was a bar of candy and he
would presight in the darkness as he sat waiting for the nibble with a finger of his
other hand inside a loop of the line he had run from the frame of his mosquito net to
the chain of the unfrosted light bulb overhead.

Orr had buck teeth and bulging eyes to go with his big cheeks and was even smaller
than young Huple, who lived on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in the tent in
the administration area in which Hungry Joe lay screaming in his sleep every night.

Fifty grand a
year I was knocking down, and almost all of it tax-free, since I made my customers
pay me in cash.

Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being
jaundice.

He gave Yossarian and Orr generous permission to spend the night on the thick
carpet in his office, but shortly after he left a sentry in battle dress appeared and
drove them from the building at the tip of his bayonet, and they rode out
exhaustedly to the airport with a surly cab driver, who overcharged them, and went
to sleep inside the plane again, which was filled now with leaking gunny sacks of cocoa
and freshly ground coffee and reeking with an odor so rich that they were both
ou...

It was the first really good laugh Captain Black had enjoyed since the day Major
Major outsmarted him and was appointed squadron commander, and he rose with
torpid enthusiasm and stationed himself behind the front counter in order to wring
the most enjoyment from the occasion when the bombardiers arrived for
their map kits.

The girls led them up four steep,
very long flights of creaking wooden stairs and guided them through a doorway into
their own wonderful and resplendent tenement apartment, which burgeoned
miraculously with an infinite and proliferating flow of supple young naked girls and
contained the evil and debauched ugly old man who irritated Nately constantly with
his caustic laughter and the clucking, proper old woman in the ash-gray woolen
sweater who disapproved of everything immoral t...

The three hundred thousand bucks was left to me before I was born by
a grandfather who made a fortune selling on an international scale.

Soon whole drilling crews were following us around with all their
equipment just to get the jump on each other.

'That's a pretty scummy trick I'd be playing on the men in the squadron, isn't it?'

Havermeyer held mortal men rigid in
six planes as steady and still as sitting ducks while he followed the bombs all the way
down through the plexiglass nose with deep interest and gave the German gunners
below all the time they needed to set their sights and take their aim and pull their
triggers or lanyards or switches or whatever the hell they did pull when *they*
wanted to kill people they didn't know.

There was nothing funny about living like a bum
in a tent in Pianosa between fat mountains behind him and a placid blue sea in front
that could gulp down a person with a cramp in the twinkling of an eye and ship him
back to shore three days later, all charges paid, bloated, blue and putrescent, water
draining out through both cold nostrils.

'That guy gives me the willies,' he confessed in a
grouchy whisper.

He whirled around upon Yossarian in near hysteria.

The girls grew
friendlier then and called an address to the driver, who drove them at a clopping
pace halfway across the city into a section they had never visited before and stopped
in front of an old, tall building on a dark street.

He did not pause, but strode directly across the clearing into the
orderly room, where he was welcomed by a gaunt, stoop-shouldered staff sergeant
with prominent cheekbones and long, very light blond hair, who informed him
graciously that he could go right in, since Major Major was out.

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.

The only end in sight was
Yossarian's own, and he might have remained in the hospital until doomsday had it not
been for that patriotic Texan with his infundibuliform jowls and his lumpy,
rumpleheaded, indestructible smile cracked forever across the front of his face like
the brim of a black ten-gallon hat.

'I caught cold in the hospital
from a fighter pilot and came down with a very serious case of pneumonia.'

'Just that crackpot Yossarian again.

General Dreedle, the wing commander, was a blunt, chunky, barrel-chested man in his
early fifties.

It was raining in
Pianosa too by the time they returned to the squadron, and they had the rest of that
day to stare woodenly at the bomb line on the map under the awning of the
intelligence tent and ruminate hypnotically on the fact that there was no escape.

Wintergreen sneered obnoxiously, resting his
filthy GI shoe on his spade and lounging back in a surly slouch against the wall of one
of the deep, square holes it was his military specialty to dig.

The fear flowed everywhere, into Dunbar's squadron, where Dunbar poked his head
inquiringly through the entrance of the medical tent there one twilight and spoke
respectfully to the blurred outline of Dr. Stubbs, who was sitting in the dense
shadows inside before a bottle of whiskey and a bell jar filled with purified drinking
water.

'The fifty-five,' Doc Daneeka corrected him.

It would do no more good to ask than it had done to ask him why that
whore had kept beating him over the head with her shoe that morning in Rome in the
cramped vestibule outside the open door of Nately's whore's kid sister's room.

Small ones enraged him and he
hollered himself hoarse at Aarfy for the wet, sucking sounds he made puffing on his
pipe, at Orr for tinkering, at McWatt for the explosive snap he gave each card he
turned over when he dealt at blackjack or poker, at Dobbs for letting his teeth
chatter as he went blundering clumsily about bumping into things.

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was
known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

Yossarian shook his head and explained that *d‚j… vu* was just a momentary
infinitesimal lag in the operation of two coactive sensory nerve centers that
commonly functioned simultaneously.

They might do whatever they wished to
him, he realized; these brutal men might beat him to death right there in the
basement, and no one would intervene to save him, no one, perhaps, but the devout
and sympathetic major with the sharp face, who set a water tap dripping loudly into a
sink and returned to the table to lay a length of heavy rubber hose down beside the
brass knuckles.

It's no different than a gear or a bedpan.

Immediately next door to Yossarian was Havermeyer, who liked peanut brittle and
lived all by himself in the two-man tent in which he shot tiny field mice every night
with huge bullets from the .45 he had stolen from the dead man in Yossarian's tent.

'What would they do to me,' he asked in confidential tones,
'if I refused to fly them?'

The colonel was in
Communications, and he was kept busy day and night transmitting glutinous messages
from the interior into square pads of gauze which he sealed meticulously and
delivered to a covered white pail that stood on the night table beside his bed.

But Yossarian still didn't understand either how Milo could buy eggs in Malta for
seven cents apiece and sell them at a profit in Pianosa for five cents.

Havermeyer was the best damned bombardier they had, but he flew straight and
level all the way from the I.P. to the target, and even far beyond the target until he
saw the falling bombs strike ground and explode in a darting spurt of abrupt orange
that flashed beneath the swirling pall of smoke and pulverized debris geysering up
wildly in huge, rolling waves of gray and black.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf's first thought had been to have a
friend of his in the sheet metal shop sink pegs of nickel alloy into each man's
thighbones and link them to the wrists by strands of copper wire with exactly three
inches of play, but there wasn't time - there was never enough time - and good
copper wire was hard to come by in wartime.

It was just before dawn during the Great Big Siege of Bologna, when
tongueless dead men peopled the night hours like living ghosts and Hungry Joe was
half out of his mind because he had finished his missions again and was not scheduled
to fly.

Each morning they came around, three brisk and serious men with efficient mouths
and inefficient eyes, accompanied by brisk and serious Nurse Duckett, one of the
ward nurses who didn't like Yossarian.

He banged his fist down into his palm.

He laughed caustically.

He sat for a moment with a
hangdog look, then spurted to his feet suddenly and stamped away to have another
impetuous crack at persuading Doc Daneeka to ground him, knocking over Yossarian's
washstand with his hip when he lurched around and tripping over the fuel line of the
stove Orr was still constructing.

Yossarian took a firm stand.

On squishing straw sandals, a young woman materialized with her whole face
disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and
stretched in a raw, corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes!

Nurse
Duckett bounced out across the aisle once more like a ping-pong ball with legs.

There was something fearful and minute about Doc Daneeka as he sat despondently
outside his tent in the sunlight as often as he could, dressed in khaki summer
trousers and a short-sleeved summer shirt that was bleached almost to an antiseptic
gray by the daily laundering to which he had it subjected.

At night he had eerie, ear-splitting nightmares that
kept everyone in the squadron awake but Huple, the fifteen-year-old pilot who had
lied about his age to get into the Army and lived with his pet cat in the same tent
with Hungry Joe.

He
left his flak suit and parachute there and crossed back past the water wagon to the
intelligence tent to return his map case to Captain Black, who sat drowsing in his
chair with his skinny long legs up on his desk and inquired with indifferent curiosity
why Yossarian's plane had turned back.

It's a terrible
thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.'

So much attention to the work at publication was in large part the result of the
industrious zeal and appreciation of my literary agent, Candida Donadio, and my
editor, Robert Gottlieb, and I embrace the opportunity afforded now to dedicate
this new edition to both of them, as colleagues and allies with talents that were of
immeasurable value.

'General Peckem even recommends
that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good
impression on the enemy when they're shot down.'

But they got no sleep at all, for Yossarian and Orr found themselves jammed into the
same double bed with the two twelve-year-old twenty-eight-year-old prostitutes,
who turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking them up all night long to ask
them to switch partners.

In the meantime, I'd also like you to dream up the answers to some of
those questions I asked you.

'You killed him,' said Yossarian.

McWatt switched off the windshield wipers to make certain.

As soon as the chaplain said the words, he was sorry and shoved his
knuckles into his mouth with a giggle of alarm, but Yossarian remained silent and
disappointed him.

Yossarian
shot out of bed even faster and began shouting at Luciana to get dressed.

Dobbs swallowed and
bent his intense face very close to Yossarian's, the muscles in his bronze, rocklike
jaw bunching up into quivering knots.

To Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a
glorious pain in the ass, since it complicated their task of organizing the crews for
each combat mission.

Yossarian clenched his fists and looked at the long bone-handled hunting knife hanging in a holster over the cot of the dead man in the tent.

And she was alone in the room with him after
Michaela had departed, lovely, hale and statuesque, steaming and rippling with an
irrepressible affectionate vitality even as she remained in one place and frowned at
him irately.

Their marching footsteps on the dull tile
floor thundered like an awesome, quickening drum roll through the vacant center of
the building as they moved with even greater speed and precision toward Colonel
Cathcart's office, and violent winds of panic began blowing in Yossarian's ears when
they turned him toward his doom inside the office, where Colonel Korn, his rump
spreading comfortably on a corner of Colonel Cathcart's desk, sat waiting to greet
him with a genial smile and sa...

Dirt flew
everywhere; the scene was almost like the morning in Pianosa seven months later
after the night Milo bombed the squadron with every plane he had accumulated in his
M & M syndicate, and the airfield, bomb dump and repair hangars as well, and all the
survivors were outside hacking cavernous shelters into the solid ground and roofing
them over with sheets of armor plate stolen from the repair sheds at the field and
with tattered squares of waterproof canvas stolen from th...

Milo's planes separated in a well co-ordinated attack and bombed the fuel stocks and the ordnance dump, the repair
hangars and the B-25 bombers resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field.

A
silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber
hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear,
stoppered jar on the floor.

I charged him two piasters for his.'

'Just a head cold,' the chaplain added quickly.

Small ones enraged him and he
hollered himself hoarse at Aarfy for the wet, sucking sounds he made puffing on his
pipe, at Orr for tinkering, at McWatt for the explosive snap he gave each card he
turned over when he dealt at blackjack or poker, at Dobbs for letting his teeth
chatter as he went blundering clumsily about bumping into things.

'Boy, are you bastards in for it!' he announced exuberantly, splashing away from the
puddle forming at his feet.

The argument with Clevinger had begun a few minutes earlier when Yossarian had
been unable to find a machine gun.

'He's the best damned bombardier we've got.'

Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and
bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind
his eyes like severed sections of snake.

He beamed urbanely as he began orienting
Colonel Scheisskopf to his new surroundings.

As
Yossarian watched, the burning plane floated over on its side and began spiraling
down slowly in wide, tremulous, narrowing circles, its huge flaming burden blazing
orange and flaring out in back like a long, swirling cape of fire and smoke.

People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in
front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows
with a *whoosh!*, accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second to land with a
hideous *plop!* on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack
full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

The Texan backed away in mounting confusion.

He was forced to admit that the hospitals had
altered steadily for the worse as the war continued and one moved closer to the
battlefront, the deterioration in the quality of the guests becoming most marked
within the combat zone itself where the effects of booming wartime conditions were
apt to make themselves conspicuous immediately.

Kid Sampson, Nately and the others wandered apart
in a noiseless eddy of motion and were sucked away into the cloying yellow stillness.

As an additional precaution, he made a happy switch from
Washington Irving to John Milton.

Captain Flume turned to ice, his eyes, flung open wide, staring directly up into
Chief White Halfoat's, glinting drunkenly only inches away.

'That stinking little punk wise-guy son of a bitch ain't afraid of nobody.'

'Exactly,' Clevinger snapped smugly.

The men played cards on a towel, undershirt, or blanket, and Nurse Duckett mixed
the extra deck of cards, sitting with her back resting against a sand dune.

What in the world was running through that warped, evil,
scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their
bowel movements?

His meditations were polluted with threats of dread diseases like Ewing's tumor
and leukemia; he saw his infant son die two or three times every week because he
had never taught his wife how to stop arterial bleeding; watched, in tearful,
paralyzed silence, his whole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard
socket because he had never told her that a human body would conduct electricity;
all four went up in flames almost every night when the water heater exploded...

Yossarian had everything he wanted in the hospital.

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.

There was Hodgkin's disease,
leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The other men wore swimming trunks in deference to Nurse Duckett, and in
deference also to Nurse Cramer, who accompanied Nurse Duckett and Yossarian to
the beach every time and sat haughtily by herself ten yards away.

That was where he wanted to be if he
had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam
cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam
foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above
and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical,
cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced,
and threatened to annihilate them all in o...

He was even more comfortable than Dunbar, who
had to keep falling down on his face in order to get his meals brought to him in bed.

It's a terrible
thing to treat a decent, loyal Indian like a nigger, kike, wop or spic.'

The path from the squadron led him around a mysterious gun emplacement in the
woods; two of the three enlisted men stationed there lay sleeping on the circle of
sand bags and the third sat eating a purple pomegranate, biting off large mouthfuls
between his churning jaws and spewing the ground roughage out away from him into
the bushes.

The flaming wreck dropped, first
the fuselage, then the spinning wing, while a shower of tiny metal fragments began
tap dancing on the roof of Yossarian's own plane and the incessant *cachung! cachung!
cachung!* of the flak was still thumping all around him.

In a bed in the small private section at the end of the ward, always working
ceaselessly behind the green plyboard partition, was the solemn middle-aged colonel
who was visited every day by a gentle, sweet-faced woman with curly ash-blond hair
who was not a nurse and not a Wac and not a Red Cross girl but who nevertheless
appeared faithfully at the hospital in Pianosa each afternoon wearing pretty pastel
summer dresses that were very smart and white leather pumps with heels half ...

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.

But the men back at the squadron never even saw any of the bananas, for it was a
seller's market for bananas in Istanbul and a buyer's market in Beirut for the
caraway seeds Milo rushed with to Bengasi after selling the bananas, and when they
raced back into Pianosa breathlessly six days later at the conclusion of Orr's rest
leave, it was with a load of best white eggs from Sicily that Milo said were from
Egypt and sold to his mess halls for only *four* cents apiece so that all t...

Major Major lowered his gaze sheepishly and fiddled with his fingers.

Milo stood his ground, taking shelter behind the hard-boiled egg raised
protectively before his face like a magic charm.

Major Major floundered bewilderedly from one embarrassing catastrophe to another.

His face flushed with discomfort,
and he was rooted to the spot in disbelief as the rain clouds gathered above him
again.

It
was cut like a man's undershirt, with narrow shoulder straps, and concealed the
invisible scar on her back that she refused to let him see after he had made her tell
him it was there.

'Move back the walls!'

McWatt
was deeply impressed with Milo, who, to the amusement of Corporal Snark, his mess
sergeant, was already buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five
cents.

The broad, rain-blotched boulevard was illuminated every
half-block by short, curling lampposts with eerie, shimmering glares surrounded by
smoky brown mist.

They read the chart at the foot of the bed
and asked impatiently about the pain.

'Appleby, you've got flies in your eyes,' he whispered helpfully as they passed by
each other in the doorway of the parachute tent on the day of the weekly
milk run to Parma.

The girl shook her head, eyeing him mistrustfully and keeping her knees pressed
together.

When the physical-education officer at Lowery Field ordered everyone to
fall out for calisthenics one afternoon, Yossarian, the private, reported instead at
the dispensary with what he said was a pain in his right side.

He was late getting out of the plane and ended up alone in a raft that
began drifting away from the men in the other raft and was out of sight by the time
the Air-Sea Rescue launch came plowing up through the wind and splattering
raindrops to take them aboard.

Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both
elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar.

Wintergreen, who also wanted to be a general and who
always distorted, destroyed, rejected or misdirected any correspondence by, for or
about Colonel Cathcart that might do him credit.

Along the ground suddenly, on both sides of the path, he saw dozens of new
mushrooms the rain had spawned poking their nodular fingers up through the clammy
earth like lifeless stalks of flesh, sprouting in such necrotic profusion everywhere he
looked that they seemed to be proliferating right before his eyes.

He wore a
hangdog, hopeless look.

All those except Yossarian
reporting on sick call with temperatures below 102 had their gums and toes painted
with gentian violet solution and were given a laxative to throw away into the bushes.

Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn lived and worked in the Group
Headquarters building, as did all the members of the headquarters staff, with the
exception of the chaplain.

It was clear to everybody but Major Danby, who was still concentrating on his wrist
watch and counting down the seconds aloud. 'four three two one time!' called out
Major Danby, and raised his eyes triumphantly to discover that no one had been
listening to him and that he would have to begin all over again.

'They're really a couple of good kids,' Aarfy confided earnestly to Yossarian,
whose recurring dream it was to have the nude milk-white female bodies of both
these beautiful rich black-haired good kids lying stretched out in bed erotically with
him at the same time.

He gave Yossarian and Orr generous permission to spend the night on the thick
carpet in his office, but shortly after he left a sentry in battle dress appeared and
drove them from the building at the tip of his bayonet, and they rode out
exhaustedly to the airport with a surly cab driver, who overcharged them, and went
to sleep inside the plane again, which was filled now with leaking gunny sacks of cocoa
and freshly ground coffee and reeking with an odor so rich that they were b...

'Even the latrines and urinals are backing up in protest.

It was a raw, violent, guzzling saturnalia that spilled obstreperously
through the woods to the officers' club and spread up into the hills toward the
hospital and the antiaircraft-gun emplacements.

Then he snipped off the roll
with the scissors and slit the end down the center.

Yossarian knew it was a good one because Yossarian was a collector of good questions
and had used them to disrupt the educational sessions Clevinger had once conducted
two nights a week in Captain Black's intelligence tent with the corporal in eyeglasses
who everybody knew was probably a subversive.

He was pummeled spinning to the edge of the ditch and sent slithering down on his
head and shoulders.

Colonel Cathcart responded sprucely, wincing in extreme
pain and gingerly rubbing the spot where Colonel Korn had just jabbed him again.

The bottle fell against his head with a clunk, and
whiskey poured down his neck.

Late one night, Havermeyer fired a shot at a mouse that brought Hungry Joe bolting
out at him barefoot, ranting at the top of his screechy voice and emptying his own
.45 into Havermeyer's tent as he came charging down one side of the ditch and up
the other and vanished all at once inside one of the slit trenches that had appeared
like magic beside every tent the morning after Milo Minderbinder had bombed the
squadron.

Within days after publication, there was a review in *The Nation* by Nelson Algren
(a client of my own literary agent, who had urged him to read it), who wrote of
*Catch-22* that it 'was the best novel to come out of anywhere in years'.

Dobbs was almost as bad as Orr, who seemed happy as
an undersized, grinning lark with his deranged and galvanic giggle and shivering
warped buck teeth and who was sent along for a rest leave with Milo and Yossarian on
the trip to Cairo for eggs when Milo bought cotton instead and took off at dawn for
Istanbul with his plane packed to the gun turrets with exotic spiders and unripened
red bananas.

It was still more frustrating to try to
appeal directly to Major Major, the long and bony squadron commander, who looked a
little bit like Henry Fonda in distress and went jumping out the window of his office
each time Yossarian bullied his way past Sergeant Towser to speak to him about it.

Actually, the pain in
his liver had gone away, but Yossarian didn't say anything and the doctors never
suspected.

A pair of captain's bars ulcerated with rust hung on the man's ragged
shirt collar.

But Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn't jump, and went running
uncontrollably down the whole length of the squadron after McWatt's plane, waving
his arms and shouting up at him imploringly to come down, McWatt, come down; but
no one seemed to hear, certainly not McWatt, and a great, choking moan tore from
Yossarian's throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided
oh, well, what the hell, and flew into a mountain.

'Wonderful!' cheered the chaplain, proudly throwing on the bed a pillowcase full of
Yossarian's clothing.

He began hating Sergeant
Towser, focusing all blame upon him venomously, even though he knew Sergeant
Towser had nothing to do with the arrival of Colonel Cathcart or the delay in the
processing of shipping orders that might have rescued him seven days earlier and
five times since.

*'Adios*, Padre.'

Aarfy had been no use to Yossarian as a navigator or as anything else, and Yossarian
drove him back from the nose vehemently each time so that they would not clutter up
each other's way if they had to scramble suddenly for safety.

Now that his secret was out, Milo relaxed with Yossarian and Orr and inflated
opulently with a vast, shy pride.

Actually, the pain in
his liver had gone away, but Yossarian didn't say anything and the doctors never
suspected.

A
silent zinc pipe rose from the cement on his groin and was coupled to a slim rubber
hose that carried waste from his kidneys and dripped it efficiently into a clear,
stoppered jar on the floor.

Sewn into the bandages over the insides of both
elbows were zippered lips through which he was fed clear fluid from a clear jar.

Wintergreen struck open a water pipe while digging in one of his
holes and almost drowned to death before he was fished out nearly unconscious.

There were extra rations of fresh meat, and
during the hot part of the afternoon he and the others were served chilled fruit
juice or chilled chocolate milk.

He
thought Nurse Duckett finally wanted to get laid and pulled her skirt up the second
they were alone in the broom closet, but she pushed him away.

None of his superiors would listen, and it was the day the number
of missions was raised to sixty that Dobbs stole into Yossarian's tent while Orr was
out looking for gaskets and disclosed the plot he had formulated to murder Colonel
Cathcart.

The woman had a long, brooding oval face
of burnt umber, with coarse graying black hair parted severely in the middle and
combed back austerely behind her neck without curl, wave or ornamentation.

Milo perked up.

Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn lived and worked in the Group
Headquarters building, as did all the members of the headquarters staff, with the
exception of the chaplain.

Help who?' called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back
into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the
controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening,
paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of
the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time
by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly ...

'It's a pity the schmuck won't whip his wife.'

'Good practice in case you ever have to ditch or make a crash landing.

These three
men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless
faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly
that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in
the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame
throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering
Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the ...

The squadron stood insensate, bereft of everything
human but Doc Daneeka, who roosted dolorously like a shivering turkey buzzard
beside the closed door of the medical tent, his stuffed nose jabbing away in thirsting
futility at the hazy sunlight streaming down around him.

CATCH-22
JOSEPH HELLER
Copyright (c) Joseph Heller, 1955, 1961
The island of Pianosa lies in the Mediterranean Sea eight miles south of Elba.

Yossarian listened very carefully as Doc Daneeka told him about Colonel
Cathcart at Group, who wanted to be a general, about General Dreedle at Wing and
General Dreedle's nurse, and about all the other generals at Twenty-seventh Air
Force Headquarters, who insisted on only forty missions as a completed tour of duty.

There were now eight, and they filed with precise, wordless discipline into two cars
and sped on humming tires past the four squadron areas to the Group Headquarters
building, where still two more M.P.s were waiting at the parking area.

He had flown fearlessly into
danger and criticism by selling petroleum and ball bearings to Germany at good prices
in order to make a good profit and help maintain a balance of power between the
contending forces.

We were speaking about conducting religious services in the
briefing room before each mission.

Captain Black was deeply disillusioned by this treacherous stab in the back from
someone in high place upon whom he had relied so confidently for support.

They
were free, as Colonel Cathcart was free, to force their men to fly sixty missions if
they chose, and they were free, as Yossarian had been free, to stand in formation
naked if they wanted to, although General Dreedle's granite jaw swung open at the
sight and he went striding dictatorially right down the line to make certain that
there really was a man wearing nothing but moccasins waiting at attention in ranks to
receive a medal from him.

Everyone gawked at
everyone else in oafish surprise.

He drank her in insatiably from head to painted toenail.

The corner location really
started paying off, and I soon found myself handling more patients than I could
handle competently.

'Don't worry,' reassured Kid Sampson, still wrapped in the heavy blankets and
raincoat in which he had been swaddled on the boat by his rescuers.

'You never trust me with information,' he whined
truculently.

McWatt crinkled his fine, freckled nose apologetically and vowed not to snap the
cards any more, but always forgot.

And it's a good thing he didn't catch any,
because he would have eaten that codfish raw if he had caught any, and would have
made us eat it, too, because he had found this little book that said it was all right to
eat codfish raw.

Captain Flume was obsessed with the idea that Chief White Halfoat would
tiptoe up to his cot one night when he was sound asleep and slit his throat open for
him from ear to ear.

The soldier in
white was encased from head to toe in plaster and gauze.

A key to a safe-deposit box led to a fourth life insurance policy with a face value of $50,000, and to
$18,000 in cash on which income tax had never been paid and need never be paid.

He
could hear the hollow *boom-boom-boom-boom* of the flak pounding all around him in
overlapping measures of four, the sharp, piercing crack! of a single shell exploding
suddenly very close by.

Why don't they draft some of these old doctors
who keep shooting their kissers off in public about what big sacrifices the medical
game stands ready to make?

Milo turned livid with indignation, his slim long nose flickering spasmodically between
his black eyebrows and his unbalanced orange-brown mustache like the pale, thin
flame of a single candle.

With a scornful snicker, he settled himself behind his desk, replaced the empty
cigarette holder in his mouth and lapsed into parturient silence for a few moments.

'That dirty goddam midget-assed, apple-cheeked, goggle-eyed, undersized, buck-toothed, grinning, crazy sonofabitchin-bastard!'

Engines rolled over disgruntedly on lollipop-shaped hardstands,
resisting first, then idling smoothly awhile, and then the planes lumbered around and
nosed forward lamely over the pebbled ground like sightless, stupid, crippled things
until they taxied into the line at the foot of the landing strip and took off swiftly,
one behind the other, in a zooming, rising roar, banking slowly into formation over
mottled treetops, and circling the field at even speed until all the flights o...

Nobody could find out what had happened, not even the cackling old man and clucking
old woman, who were in a position to find out everything that happened in that vast
and endless brothel with its multitudinous bedrooms on facing sides of the narrow
hallways going off in opposite directions from the spacious sitting room with its
shaded windows and single lamp.

Like that virgin I'm
telling you about that couldn't have a baby.'

History did
not demand Yossarian's premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it,
progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it.

They were both naked, and raising a rumpus that brought everyone in the apartment
into the hall to watch, each couple in a bedroom doorway, all of them naked except
the aproned and sweatered old woman, who clucked reprovingly, and the lecherous,
dissipated old man, who cackled aloud hilariously through the whole episode with a
kind of avid and superior glee.

The chaplain shook his head, feeling despicably remiss because he did not
know how to delegate responsibility and had no initiative, and because he really had
been tempted to disagree with the colonel.

The first one fell in the yard,
exactly where he had aimed, and then the rest of the bombs from his own plane and
from the other planes in his flight burst open on the ground in a charge of rapid
orange flashes across the tops of the buildings, which collapsed instantly in a vast,
churning wave of pink and gray and coal-black smoke that went rolling out turbulently
in all directions and quaked convulsively in its bowels as though from great blasts of
red and white and golden she...

'You should see her naked,' General Dreedle chortled with croupy relish, while his
nurse stood smiling proudly right at his shoulder.

But if he waits at the bus terminal where the young farm girls looking for work
arrive, I -'
'Luigi, you still don't understand,' Milo snapped with such brusque impatience that
the police commissioner's face flushed and he jumped to attention and began
buttoning his uniform in confusion.

Yossarian missed Nurse Duckett so much that he went searching
hungrily through the streets for Luciana, whose laugh and invisible scar he had never
forgotten, or the boozy, blowzy, bleary-eyed floozy in the overloaded white
brassiŠre and unbuttoned orange satin blouse whose naughty salmon-colored cameo
ring Aarfy had thrown away so callously through the window of her car.

Right here in the
tent, he'd start digging, right under my cot.

General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the
Solomon Islands to dig graves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and
a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo to the B-17 general on the mainland with
a yearning for Polish sausage.

She was a worse
dancer than even he was, but she threw herself about to the synthetic jitterbug
music with more uninhibited pleasure than he had ever observed until he felt his legs
falling asleep with boredom and yanked her off the dance floor toward the table at
which the girl he should have been screwing was still sitting tipsily with one hand
around Aarfy's neck, her orange satin blouse still hanging open slovenly below her full
white lacy brassiŠre as she made dirty sex tal...

There was Hodgkin's disease,
leukemia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Dunbar, Dobbs and
Hungry Joe just kept dumping everything they could lift out the window with great,
howling whoops of happy abandon.

On the landing above lived the beautiful rich black-haired
Countess and her beautiful, rich black-haired daughter-in-law, both of whom would
put out only for Nately, who was too shy to want them, and for Aarfy, who was too
stuffy to take them and tried to dissuade them from ever putting out for anyone but
their husbands, who had chosen to remain in the north with the family's
business interests.

Nately went back to the caf‚ and bought the kid sister chocolate ice cream until her
spirits improved and then returned with her to the apartment, where Yossarian and
Dunbar were flopped out in the sitting room with an exhausted Hungry Joe, who was
still wearing on his battered face the blissful, numb, triumphant smile with which he
had limped into view from his massive harem that morning like a person with
numerous broken bones.

'Will you look at this?' he murmured, waggling two of his stubby fingers playfully into
Yossarian's face through the hole in one of his maps.

TO MY MOTHER AND TO SHIRLEY, AND MY CHILDREN, ERICA AND TED
CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1 - THE TEXAN
CHAPTER 2 - CLEVINGER
CHAPTER 3 - HAVERMEYER
CHAPTER 4 - DOC DANEEKA
CHAPTER 5 - CHIEF WHITE HALFOAT
CHAPTER 6 - HUNGRY JOE
CHAPTER 7 - McWATT
CHAPTER 8 - LIEUTENANT SCHEISSKOPF
CHAPTER 9 - MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR
CHAPTER 10 - WINTERGREEN
CHAPTER 11 - CAPTAIN BLACK
CHAPTER 12 - BOLOGNA
CHAPTER 13 - MAJOR - DE COVERLEY
CHAPTER 14 - KID SAMPSON
CHAPTER 15 - PILTCHARD & WREN
CHAPTER 16 -...

Milo had cried out in alarm, when he came upon the enormous
corrugated carton filled with packages of dried fruit and cans of fruit juices and
desserts that two of the Italian laborers Major de Coverley had kidnaped for his
kitchen were about to carry off to Yossarian's tent.

Nately, sitting trancelike on the floor of the truck, held his grave young face in both
hands and did not answer him.

The squadron stood insensate, bereft of everything
human but Doc Daneeka, who roosted dolorously like a shivering turkey buzzard
beside the closed door of the medical tent, his stuffed nose jabbing away in thirsting
futility at the hazy sunlight streaming down around him.

In the spring he had longed to plant
begonias and zinnias in a narrow bed around his tent but had been deterred by his
fear of Corporal Whitcomb's rancor.

When the jar feeding the
inside of his elbow was just about empty, the jar on the floor was just about full, and
the two were simply uncoupled from their respective hoses and reversed quickly so
that the liquid could be dripped right back into him.

He was still bent over staring with one eye into the
lightless, unstirring void of the soldier in white's mouth when the doctors and the
M.P.s came running to help Yossarian pull him away.

She
shrieked and Orr giggled right up to the time she shrieked and knocked him cold with
a good solid crack on the temple that made him stop giggling and sent him off to the
hospital in a stretcher with a hole in his head that wasn't very deep and a very mild
concussion that kept him out of combat only twelve days.

'Let me in!' he begged urgently, wriggling and squirming maniacally.

There'll be tangerines too, and casaba melons, honeydews, filet of
Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.'

He had a raw bulgy face, with hazel eyes squeezing
from their sockets like matching brown halves of marbles and thick, wavy
particolored hair sloping up to a peak on the top of his head like a pomaded pup tent.

An innocent nest of ancient pimple pricks lay in the basin of each cheek.

They were seated in back near the
crap table on which Appleby always managed to win.

He
could use a soldering iron and hammer two boards together so that the wood did not
split and the nails did not bend.

Victory gave us such insane delusions of grandeur that we helped
start a world war we hadn't a chance of winning.

Clevinger was
a troublemaker and a wise guy.

'I just can't imagine what your father and mother
would say if they knew you were running around with filthy trollops like that one.

You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about
something we ought to be ashamed of.

With a grinding howl of engines, he flipped the plane
over on one wing and wrung it around remorselessly in a screaming turn away from the
twin spires of flak Yossarian had spied stabbing toward them.

But if he waits at the bus terminal where the young farm girls looking for work
arrive, I -'
'Luigi, you still don't understand,' Milo snapped with such brusque impatience that
the police commissioner's face flushed and he jumped to attention and began
buttoning his uniform in confusion.

Yossarian bent forward to peer and
saw a strangely colored stain seeping through the coveralls just above the armhole of
Snowden's flak suit.

His meditations were polluted with threats of dread diseases like Ewing's tumor
and leukemia; he saw his infant son die two or three times every week because he
had never taught his wife how to stop arterial bleeding; watched, in tearful,
paralyzed silence, his whole family electrocuted, one after the other, at a baseboard
socket because he had never told her that a human body would conduct electricity;
all four went up in flames almost every night when the water heater exploded...

She had sallow skin and myopic
eyes, and none of the men had ever slept with her because none of the men had ever
wanted to, none but Aarfy, who had raped her once that same evening and had then
held her prisoner in a clothes closet for almost two hours with his hand over her
mouth until the civilian curfew sirens sounded and it was unlawful for her
to be outside.

It had died of its own accord, expired completely without even an
ember to be watered down, and there was nothing for the disappointed firemen to do
but drink tepid coffee and hang around trying to screw the nurses.