“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 34
happen to know why he was busted to private and is only a corporal now?’
‘Yes,’ said Yossarian. ‘He poisoned the squadron.’ Milo went pale again. ‘He did
what?’
‘He mashed hundreds of cakes of GI soap into the sweet potatoes just to show that
people have the taste of Philistines and don’t know the difference between good and
bad. Every man in the squadron was sick. Missions were canceled.’
‘Well!’ Milo exclaimed, with thin-upped disapproval. ‘He certainly found out how wrong
he was, didn’t he?’
‘On the contrary,’ Yossarian corrected. ‘He found out how right he was. We packed it
away by the plateful and clamored for more. We all knew we were sick, but we had no
idea we’d been poisoned.’ Milo sniffed in consternation twice, like a shaggy brown hare.
‘In that case, I certainly do want to get him over to the administrative side. I don’t want
anything like that happening while I’m in charge. You see,’ he confided earnestly, ‘what I
hope to do is give the men in this squadron the best meals in the whole world. That’s
really something to shoot at, isn’t it? If a mess officer aims at anything less, it seems to
me, he has no right being mess officer. Don’t you agree?’ Yossarian turned slowly to
gaze at Milo with probing distrust. He saw a simple, sincere face that was incapable of
subtlety or guile, an honest, frank face with disunited large eyes, rusty hair, black
eyebrows and an unfortunate reddish-brown mustache. Milo had a long, thin nose with
sniffing, damp nostrils heading sharply off to the right, always pointing away from where
the rest of him was looking. It was the face of a man of hardened integrity who could no
more consciously violate the moral principles on which his virtue rested than he could
transform himself into a despicable toad. One of these moral principles was that it was
never a sin to charge as much as the traffic would bear. He was capable of mighty
paroxysms of righteous indignation, and he was indignant as could be when he learned
that a C.I.D. man was in the area looking for him.
‘He’s not looking for you,’ Yossarian said, trying to placate him. ‘He’s looking for
someone up in the hospital who’s been signing Washington Irving’s name to the letters
he’s been censoring.’
‘I never signed Washington Irving’s name to any letters,’ Milo declared.
‘Of course not.’
‘But that’s just a trick to get me to confess I’ve been making money in the black
market.’ Milo hauled violently at a disheveled hunk of his off-colored mustache. ‘I don’t
like guys like that. Always snooping around people like us. Why doesn’t the government
get after ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, if it wants to do some good? He’s got no respect for
rules and regulations and keeps cutting prices on me.’ Milo ’s mustache was unfortunate
because the separated halves never matched. They were like Milo ’s disunited eyes,
which never looked at the same thing at the same time. Milo could see more things than
most people, but he could see none of them too distinctly. In contrast to his reaction to
news of the C.I.D. man, he learned with calm courage from Yossarian that Colonel
Cathcart had raised the number of missions to fifty-five.
‘We’re at war,’ he said. ‘And there’s no use complaining about the number of missions
we have to fly. If the colonel says we have to fly fifty-five missions, we have to fly them.’
‘Well, I don’t have to fly them,’ Yossarian vowed. ‘I’ll go see Major Major.’
‘How can you? Major Major never sees anybody.’
‘Then I’ll go back into the hospital.’
‘You just came out of the hospital ten days ago,’ Milo reminded him reprovingly. ‘You
can’t keep running into the hospital every time something happens you don’t like. No,
the best thing to do is fly the missions. It’s our duty.’ Milo had rigid scruples that would
not even allow him to borrow a package of pitted dates from the mess hall that day of
McWatt’s stolen bedsheet, for the food at the mess hall was all still the property of the
government.
‘But I can borrow it from you,’ he explained to Yossarian, ‘since all this fruit is yours
once you get it from me with Doctor Daneeka’s letter. You can do whatever you want to
with it, even sell it at a high profit instead of giving it away free. Wouldn’t you want to do