“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 182
for me, for your country, for God, and for that great American, General P. P. Peckem.
And let’s see you put all those bombs on a dime!’
Dunbar
Yossarian no longer gave a damn where his bombs fell, although he did not go as far
as Dunbar, who dropped his bombs hundreds of yards past the village and would face a
court-martial if it could ever be shown he had done it deliberately. Without a word even
to Yossarian, Dunbar had washed his hands of the mission. The fall in the hospital had
either shown him the light or scrambled his brains; it was impossible to say which.
Dunbar seldom laughed any more and seemed to be wasting away. He snarled
belligerently at superior officers, even at Major Danby, and was crude and surly and
profane even in front of the chaplain, who was afraid of Dunbar now and seemed to be
wasting away also. The chaplain’s pilgrimage to Wintergreen had proved abortive;
another shrine was empty. Wintergreen was too busy to see the chaplain himself. A
brash assistant brought the chaplain a stolen Zippo cigarette lighter as a gift and
informed him condescendingly that Wintergreen was too deeply involved with wartime
activities to concern himself with matters so trivial as the number of missions men had to
fly. The chaplain worried about Dunbar and brooded more over Yossarian now that Orr
was gone. To the chaplain, who lived by himself in a spacious tent whose pointy top
sealed him in gloomy solitude each night like the cap of a tomb, it seemed incredible
that Yossarian really preferred living alone and wanted no roommates.
As a lead bombardier again, Yossarian had McWatt for a pilot, and that was one
consolation, although he was still so utterly undefended. There was no way to fight
back. He could not even see McWatt and the co-pilot from his post in the nose. 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: at the smoky black puffs of
the flak itself; at the German antiaircraft gunners below whom he could not even see
and could not possibly harm with his machine gun even if he ever did take the time to
open fire, at Havermeyer and Appleby in the lead plane for their fearless straight and
level bomb run on the second mission to Bologna where the flak from two hundred and
twenty-four cannons had knocked out one of Orr’s engines for the very last time and
sent him down ditching into the sea between Genoa and La Spezia just before the brief
thunderstorm broke.
Actually, there was not much he could do with that powerful machine gun except load
it and test-fire a few rounds. It was no more use to him than the bombsight. He could
really cut loose with it against attacking German fighters, but there were no German
fighters any more, and he could not even swing it all the way around into the helpless
faces of pilots like Huple and Dobbs and order them back down carefully to the ground,
as he had once ordered Kid Sampson back down, which is exactly what he did want to
do to Dobbs and Huple on the hideous first mission to Avignon the moment he realized
the fantastic pickle he was in, the moment he found himself aloft in a wing plane with
Dobbs and Huple in a flight headed by Havermeyer and Appleby. Dobbs and Huple?
Huple and Dobbs? Who were they? What preposterous madness to float in thin air two
miles high on an inch or two of metal, sustained from death by the meager skill and
intelligence of two vapid strangers, a beardless kid named Huple and a nervous nut like
Dobbs, who really did go nuts right there in the plane, running amuck over the target
without leaving his copilot’s seat and grabbing the controls from Huple to plunge them
all down into that chilling dive that tore Yossarian’s headset loose and brought them
right back inside the dense flak from which they had almost escaped. The next thing he
knew, another stranger, a radio-gunner named Snowden, was dying in back. It was