“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 187
Yossarian drove both stumbling, faltering women before him frantically, shoving them
and prodding them to make them hurry, and raced back with a curse to help when
Hungry Joe tripped on the blanket or the camera case he was carrying and fell forward
on his face in the mud of the stream.
Back at the squadron everyone already knew. Men in uniform were screaming and
running there too, or standing motionless in one spot, rooted in awe, like Sergeant
Knight and Doc Daneeka as they gravely craned their heads upward and watched the
guilty, banking, forlorn airplane with McWatt circle and circle slowly and climb.
‘Who is it?’ Yossarian shouted anxiously at Doc Daneeka as he ran up, breathless and
limp, his somber eyes burning with a misty, hectic anguish. ‘Who’s in the plane?’
‘McWatt,’ said Sergeant Knight. ‘He’s got the two new pilots with him on a training
flight. Doc Daneeka’s up there, too.’
‘I’m right here,’ contended Doc Daneeka, in a strange and troubled voice, darting an
anxious look at Sergeant Knight.
‘Why doesn’t he come down?’ Yossarian exclaimed in despair. ‘Why does he keep
going up?’
‘He’s probably afraid to come down,’ Sergeant Knight answered, without moving his
solemn gaze from McWatt’s solitary climbing airplane. ‘He knows what kind of trouble
he’s in.’ And McWatt kept climbing higher and higher, nosing his droning airplane
upward evenly in a slow, oval spiral that carried him far out over the water as he headed
south and far in over the russet foothills when he had circled the landing field again and
was flying north. He was soon up over five thousand feet. His engines were soft as
whispers. A white parachute popped open suddenly in a surprising puff. A second
parachute popped open a few minutes later and coasted down, like the first, directly in
toward the clearing of the landing strip. There was no motion on the ground. The plane
continued south for thirty seconds more, following the same pattern, familiar and
predictable now, and McWatt lifted a wing and banked gracefully around into his turn.
‘Two more to go,’ said Sergeant Knight. ‘McWatt and Doc Daneeka.’
‘I’m right here, Sergeant Knight,’ Doc Daneeka told him plaintively. ‘I’m not in the
plane.’
‘Why don’t they jump?’ Sergeant Knight asked, pleading aloud to himself. ‘Why don’t
they jump?’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ grieved Doc Daneeka, biting his lip. ‘It just doesn’t make
sense.’ 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.
Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he
raised the missions to sixty-five.
Mrs. Daneeka
When Colonel Cathcart learned that Doc Daneeka too had been killed in McWatt’s
plane, he increased the number of missions to seventy.
The first person in the squadron to find out that Doc Daneeka was dead was Sergeant
Towser, who had been informed earlier by the man in the control tower that Doc
Daneeka’s name was down as a passenger on the pilot’s manifest McWatt had filed
before taking off. Sergeant Towser brushed away a tear and struck Doc Daneeka’s
name from the roster of squadron personnel. With lips still quivering, he rose and
trudged outside reluctantly to break the bad news to Gus and Wes, discreetly avoiding
any conversation with Doc Daneeka himself as he moved by the flight surgeon’s slight
sepulchral figure roosting despondently on his stool in the late-afternoon sunlight
between the orderly room and the medical tent. Sergeant Towser’s heart was heavy;