“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 117
lousy Big Chief White Halfoat in his group who that lousy, lazy Captain Black claimed
was the one really responsible for the bomb line’s being moved during the Big Siege of
Bologna. Colonel Cathcart liked Big Chief White Halfoat because Big Chief White
Halfoat kept punching that lousy Colonel Moodus in the nose every time he got drunk
and Colonel Moodus was around. He wished that Big Chief White Halfoat would begin
punching Colonel Korn in his fat face, too. Colonel Korn was a lousy smart aleck.
Someone at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters had it in for him and sent back
every report he wrote with a blistering rebuke, and Colonel Korn had bribed a clever
mail clerk there named Wintergreen to try to find out who it was. Losing the plane over
Ferrara the second time around had not done him any good, he had to admit, and
neither had having that other plane disappear inside that cloud—that was one he hadn’t
even written down! He tried to recall, longingly, if Yossarian had been lost in that plane
in the cloud and realized that Yossarian could not possibly have been lost in that plane
in the cloud if he was still around now raising such a big stink about having to fly a lousy
five missions more.
Maybe sixty missions were too many for the men to fly, Colonel Cathcart reasoned, if
Yossarian objected to flying them, but he then remembered that forcing his men to fly
more missions than everyone else was the most tangible achievement he had going for
him. As Colonel Korn often remarked, the war was crawling with group commanders
who were merely doing their duty, and it required just some sort of dramatic gesture like
making his group fly more combat missions than any other bomber group to spotlight his
unique qualities of leadership. Certainly none of the generals seemed to object to what
he was doing, although as far as he could detect they weren’t particularly impressed
either, which made him suspect that perhaps sixty combat missions were not nearly
enough and that he ought to increase the number at once to seventy, eighty, a hundred,
or even two hundred, three hundred, or six thousand!
Certainly he would be much better off under somebody suave like General Peckem
than he was under somebody boorish and insensitive like General Dreedle, because
General Peckem had the discernment, the intelligence and the Ivy League background
to appreciate and enjoy him at his full value, although General Peckem had never given
the slightest indication that he appreciated or enjoyed him at all. Colonel Cathcart felt
perceptive enough to realize that visible signals of recognition were never necessary
between sophisticated, self-assured people like himself and General Peckem who could
warm to each other from a distance with innate mutual understanding. It was enough
that they were of like kind, and he knew it was only a matter of waiting discreetly for
preferment until the right time, although it rotted Colonel Cathcart’s self-esteem to
observe that General Peckem never deliberately sought him out and that he labored no
harder to impress Colonel Cathcart with his epigrams and erudition than he did to
impress anyone else in earshot, even enlisted men. Either Colonel Cathcart wasn’t
getting through to General Peckem or General Peckem was not the scintillating,
discriminating, intellectual, forward-looking personality he pretended to be and it was
really General Dreedle who was sensitive, charming, brilliant and sophisticated and
under whom he would certainly be much better off, and suddenly Colonel Cathcart had
absolutely no conception of how strongly he stood with anyone and began banging on
his buzzer with his fist for Colonel Korn to come running into his office and assure him
that everybody loved him, that Yossarian was a figment of his imagination, and that he
was making wonderful progress in the splendid and valiant campaign he was waging to
become a general.
Actually, Colonel Cathcart did not have a chance in hell of becoming a general. For
one thing, there was ex-P.F.C. 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. For another, there already was a
general, General Dreedle who knew that General Peckem was after his job but did not
know how to stop him.
General Dreedle, the wing commander, was a blunt, chunky, barrel-chested man in