“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 157
‘No, sir, that was Colonel Korn. I intend to punish him severely, too.’
‘If he wasn’t a chaplain,’ General Dreedle muttered, ‘I’d have him taken outside and
shot.’
‘He’s not a chaplain, sir.’ Colonel Cathcart advised helpfully.
‘Isn’t he? Then why the hell does he wear that cross on his collar if he’s not a
chaplain?’
‘He doesn’t wear a cross on his collar, sir. He wears a silver leaf. He’s a lieutenant
colonel.’
‘You’ve got a chaplain who’s a lieutenant colonel?’ inquired General Dreedle with
amazement.
‘Oh, no, sir. My chaplain is only a captain.’
‘Then why the hell does he wear a silver leaf on his collar if he’s only a captain?’
‘He doesn’t wear a silver leaf on his collar, sir. He wears a cross.’
‘Go away from me now, you son of a bitch,’ said General Dreedle. ‘Or I’ll have you
taken outside and shot!’
‘Yes, sir.’ Colonel Cathcart went away from General Dreedle with a gulp and kicked
the chaplain out of the officers’ club, and it was exactly the way it almost was two
months later after the chaplain had tried to persuade Colonel Cathcart to rescind his
order increasing the number of missions to sixty and had failed abysmally in that
endeavor too, and the chaplain was ready now to capitulate to despair entirely but was
restrained by the memory of his wife, whom he loved and missed so pathetically with
such sensual and exalted ardor, and by the lifelong trust he had placed in the wisdom
and justice of an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, humane, universal,
anthropomorphic, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, pro-American God, which had begun
to waver.
So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible
was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of
the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that
the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to
understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom,
really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to
heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a
finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun
was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There
were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal
brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and
character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God of his
fathers—would truly have resigned both his calling and his commission and taken his
chances as a private in the infantry or field artillery, or even, perhaps, as a corporal in
the paratroopers—had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked
man in the tree at that poor sergeant’s funeral weeks before and the cryptic, haunting,
encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: ‘Tell them I’ll
be back when winter comes.’
Aarfy
In a way it was all Yossarian’s fault, for if he had not moved the bomb line during the
Big Siege of Bologna, Major—de Coverley might still be around to save him, and if he
had not stocked the enlisted men’s apartment with girls who had no other place to live,
Nately might never have fallen in love with his whore as she sat naked from the waist
down in the room full of grumpy blackjack players who ignored her. Nately stared at her
covertly from his over-stuffed yellow armchair, marveling at the bored, phlegmatic
strength with which she accepted the mass rejection. She yawned, and he was deeply
moved. He had never witnessed such heroic poise before.
The girl had climbed five steep flights of stairs to sell herself to the group of satiated