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“Catch-22” <strong>By</strong> <strong>Joseph</strong> Heller 190<br />
There was nowhere else to turn but to his wife, and he scribbled an impassioned letter<br />
begging her to bring his plight to the attention of the War Department and urging her to<br />
communicate at once with his group commander, Colonel Cathcart, for assurances<br />
that—no matter what else she might have heard—it was indeed he, her husband, Doc<br />
Daneeka, who was pleading with her, and not a corpse or some impostor. Mrs. Daneeka<br />
was stunned by the depth of emotion in the almost illegible appeal. She was torn with<br />
compunction and tempted to comply, but the very next letter she opened that day was<br />
from that same Colonel Cathcart, her husband’s group commander, and began: Dear<br />
Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal<br />
grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or<br />
reported missing in action.<br />
Mrs. Daneeka moved with her children to Lansing, Michigan, and left no forwarding<br />
address.<br />
Yo-Yo’s Roomies<br />
Yossarian was warm when the cold weather came and whale-shaped clouds blew low<br />
through a dingy, slate-gray sky, almost without end, like the droning, dark, iron flocks of<br />
B-17 and B-24 bombers from the long-range air bases in Italy the day of the invasion of<br />
southern France two months earlier. Everyone in the squadron knew that Kid<br />
Sampson’s skinny legs had washed up on the wet sand to lie there and rot like a purple<br />
twisted wishbone. No one would go to retrieve them, not Gus or Wes or even the men in<br />
the mortuary at the hospital; everyone made believe that Kid Sampson’s legs were not<br />
there, that they had bobbed away south forever on the tide like all of Clevinger and Orr.<br />
Now that bad weather had come, almost no one ever sneaked away alone any more to<br />
peek through bushes like a pervert at the moldering stumps.<br />
There were no more beautiful days. There were no more easy missions. There was<br />
stinging rain and dull, chilling fog, and the men flew at week-long intervals, whenever<br />
the weather cleared. At night the wind moaned. The gnarled and stunted tree trunks<br />
creaked and groaned and forced Yossarian’s thoughts each morning, even before he<br />
was fully awake, back on Kid Sampson’s skinny legs bloating and decaying, as<br />
systematically as a ticking clock, in the icy rain and wet sand all through the blind, cold,<br />
gusty October nights. After Kid Sampson’s legs, he would think of pitiful, whimpering<br />
Snowden freezing to death in the rear section of the plane, holding his eternal,<br />
immutable secret concealed inside his quilted, armor-plate flak suit until Yossarian had<br />
finished sterilizing and bandaging the wrong wound on his leg, and then spilling it out<br />
suddenly all over the floor. At night when he was trying to sleep, Yossarian would call<br />
the roll of all the men, women and children he had ever known who were now dead. He<br />
tried to remember all the soldiers, and he resurrected images of all the elderly people he<br />
had known when a child—all the aunts, uncles, neighbors, parents and grandparents,<br />
his own and everyone else’s, and all the pathetic, deluded shopkeepers who opened<br />
their small, dusty stores at dawn and worked in them foolishly until midnight. They were<br />
all dead, too. The number of dead people just seemed to increase. And the Germans<br />
were still fighting. Death was irreversible, he suspected, and he began to think he was<br />
going to lose.<br />
Yossarian was warm when the cold weather came because of Orr’s marvelous stove,<br />
and he might have existed in his warm tent quite comfortably if not for the memory of<br />
Orr, and if not for the gang of animated roommates that came swarming inside<br />
rapaciously one day from the two full combat crews Colonel Cathcart had<br />
requisitioned—and obtained in less than forty-eight hours—as replacements for Kid<br />
Sampson and McWatt. Yossarian emitted a long, loud, croaking gasp of protest when<br />
he trudged in tiredly after a mission and found them already there.<br />
There were four of them, and they were having a whale of a good time as they helped<br />
each other set up their cots. They were horsing around. The moment he saw them,<br />
Yossarian knew they were impossible. They were frisky, eager and exuberant, and they