“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 28
had caught on a low-level mission over a Wac in bushes on a supply flight to Marrakech.
Yossarian did his best to catch up with Hungry Joe and almost did, flying six missions in
six days, but his twenty-third mission was to Arezzo, where Colonel Nevers was killed,
and that was as close as he had ever been able to come to going home. The next day
Colonel Cathcart was there, brimming with tough pride in his new outfit and celebrating
his assumption of command by raising the number of missions required from twenty-five
to thirty. Hungry Joe unpacked his bags and rewrote the happy letters home. He
stopped hounding Sergeant Towser humorously. He began hating Sergeant Towser,
focusing all blame upon him venomously, even though he knew Sergeant Towser had
nothing to do with the arrival of Colonel Cathcart or the delay in the processing of
shipping orders that might have rescued him seven days earlier and five times since.
Hungry Joe could no longer stand the strain of waiting for shipping orders and
crumbled promptly into ruin every time he finished another tour of duty. Each time he
was taken off combat status, he gave a big party for the little circle of friends he had. He
broke out the bottles of bourbon he had managed to buy on his four-day weekly circuits
with the courier plane and laughed, sang, shuffled and shouted in a festival of inebriated
ecstasy until he could no longer keep awake and receded peacefully into slumber. As
soon as Yossarian, Nately and Dunbar put him to bed he began screaming in his sleep.
In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an
eaten shell of a human building rocking perilously on the brink of collapse.
The nightmares appeared to Hungry Joe with celestial punctuality every single night
he spent in the squadron throughout the whole harrowing ordeal when he was not flying
combat missions and was waiting once again for the orders sending him home that
never came. Impressionable men in the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume were
so deeply disturbed by Hungry Joe’s shrieking nightmares that they would begin to have
shrieking nightmares of their own, and the piercing obscenities they flung into the air
every night from their separate places in the squadron rang against each other in the
darkness romantically like the mating calls of songbirds with filthy minds. Colonel Korn
acted decisively to arrest what seemed to him to be the beginning of an unwholesome
trend in Major Major’s squadron. The solution he provided was to have Hungry Joe fly
the courier ship once a week, removing him from the squadron for four nights, and the
remedy, like all Colonel Korn’s remedies, was successful.
Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions and returned Hungry
Joe to combat duty, the nightmares stopped and Hungry Joe settled down into a normal
state of terror with a smile of relief. Yossarian read Hungry Joe’s shrunken face like a
headline. It was good when Hungry Joe looked bad and terrible when Hungry Joe
looked good. Hungry Joe’s inverted set of responses was a curious phenomenon to
everyone but Hungry Joe, who denied the whole thing stubbornly.
‘Who dreams?’ he answered, when Yossarian asked him what he dreamed about.
‘Joe, why don’t you go see Doc Daneeka?’ Yossarian advised.
‘Why should I go see Doc Daneeka? I’m not sick.’
‘What about your nightmares?’
‘I don’t have nightmares,’ Hungry Joe lied.
‘Maybe he can do something about them.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with nightmares,’ Hungry Joe answered. ‘Everybody has
nightmares.’ Yossarian thought he had him. ‘Every night?’ he asked.
‘Why not every night?’ Hungry Joe demanded.
And suddenly it all made sense. Why not every night, indeed? It made sense to cry
out in pain every night. It made more sense than Appleby, who was a stickler for
regulations and had ordered Kraft to order Yossarian to take his Atabrine tablets on the
flight overseas after Yossarian and Appleby had stopped talking to each other. Hungry
Joe made more sense than Kraft, too, who was dead, dumped unceremoniously into
doom over Ferrara by an exploding engine after Yossarian took his flight of six planes in
over the target a second time. The group had missed the bridge at Ferrara again for the
seventh straight day with the bombsight that could put bombs into a pickle barrel at forty