“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 38
parades and about bringing Clevinger up on charges before the Action Board for
conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the cadet officers Lieutenant Scheisskopf had
appointed. Clevinger was a troublemaker and a wise guy. Lieutenant Scheisskopf knew
that Clevinger might cause even more trouble if he wasn’t watched. Yesterday it was the
cadet officers; tomorrow it might be the world. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant
Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get pretty smart at times.
Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger had
helped into office were eager to give damning testimony against him. The case against
Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.
It could not be anything to do with parades, for Clevinger took the parades almost as
seriously as Lieutenant Scheisskopf himself. The men fell out for the parades early each
Sunday afternoon and groped their way into ranks of twelve outside the barracks.
Groaning with hangovers, they limped in step to their station on the main paradeground,
where they stood motionless in the heat for an hour or two with the men from the sixty or
seventy other cadet squadrons until enough of them had collapsed to call it a day. On
the edge of the field stood a row of ambulances and teams of trained stretcher bearers
with walkie-talkies. On the roofs of the ambulances were spotters with binoculars. A tally
clerk kept score. Supervising this entire phase of the operation was a medical officer
with a flair for accounting who okayed pulses and checked the figures of the tally clerk.
As soon as enough unconscious men had been collected in the ambulances, the
medical officer signaled the bandmaster to strike up the band and end the parade. One
behind the other, the squadrons marched up the field, executed a cumbersome turn
around the reviewing stand and marched down the field and back to their barracks.
Each of the parading squadrons was graded as it marched past the reviewing stand,
where a bloated colonel with a big fat mustache sat with the other officers. The best
squadron in each wing won a yellow pennant on a pole that was utterly worthless. The
best squadron on the base won a red pennant on a longer pole that was worth even
less, since the pole was heavier and was that much more of a nuisance to lug around all
week until some other squadron won it the following Sunday. To Yossarian, the idea of
pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like
Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done
something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.
The parades themselves seemed equally absurd. Yossarian hated a parade. Parades
were so martial. He hated hearing them, hated seeing them, hated being tied up in
traffic by them. He hated being made to take part in them. It was bad enough being an
aviation cadet without having to act like a soldier in the blistering heat every Sunday
afternoon. It was bad enough being an aviation cadet because it was obvious now that
the war would not be over before he had finished his training. That was the only reason
he had volunteered for cadet training in the first place. As a soldier who had qualified for
aviation cadet training, he had weeks and weeks of waiting for assignment to a class,
weeks and weeks more to become a bombardier-navigator, weeks and weeks more of
operational training after that to prepare him for overseas duty. It seemed inconceivable
then that the war could last that long, for God was on his side, he had been told, and
God, he had also been told, could do whatever He wanted to. But the war was not
nearly over, and his training was almost complete.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf longed desperately to win parades and sat up half the night
working on it while his wife waited amorously for him in bed thumbing through Krafft-
Ebing to her favorite passages. He read books on marching. He manipulated boxes of
chocolate soldiers until they melted in his hands and then maneuvered in ranks of
twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had bought from a mail-order house under an
assumed name and kept locked away from everyone’s eyes during the day. Leonardo’s
exercises in anatomy proved indispensable. One evening he felt the need for a live
model and directed his wife to march around the room.
‘Naked?’ she asked hopefully.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in exasperation. It was the