“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 59
squadron and was not happy doing it. Men like Hungry Joe glowered at him with
blameful hatred, and Appleby subjected him to vindictive discourtesy now that he had
established himself as a hot pilot and a ping-pong player who never lost a point.
Sergeant Towser ran the squadron because there was no one else in the squadron to
run it. He had no interest in war or advancement. He was interested in shards and
Hepplewhite furniture.
Almost without realizing it, Sergeant Towser had fallen into the habit of thinking of the
dead man in Yossarian’s tent in Yossarian’s own terms &mash; as a dead man in
Yossarian’s tent. In reality, he was no such thing. He was simply a replacement pilot
who had been killed in combat before he had officially reported for duty. He had stopped
at the operations tent to inquire the way to the orderly-room tent and had been sent right
into action because so many men had completed the thirty-five missions required then
that Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren were finding it difficult to assemble the number
of crews specified by Group. Because he had never officially gotten into the squadron,
he could never officially be gotten out, and Sergeant Towser sensed that the multiplying
communications relating to the poor man would continue reverberating forever.
His name was Mudd. To Sergeant Towser, who deplored violence and waste with
equal aversion, it seemed like such an abhorrent extravagance to fly Mudd all the way
across the ocean just to have him blown into bits over Orvieto less than two hours after
he arrived. No one could recall who he was or what he had looked like, least of all
Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, who remembered only that a new officer had
shown up at the operations tent just in time to be killed and who colored uneasily every
time the matter of the dead man in Yossarian’s tent was mentioned. The only one who
might have seen Mudd, the men in the same plane, had all been blown to bits with him.
Yossarian, on the other hand, knew exactly who Mudd was. Mudd was the unknown
soldier who had never had a chance, for that was the only thing anyone ever did know
about all the unknown soldiers—they never had a chance. They had to be dead. And
this dead one was really unknown, even though his belongings still lay in a tumble on
the cot in Yossarian’s tent almost exactly as he had left them three months earlier the
day he never arrived—all contaminated with death less than two hours later, in the same
way that all was contaminated with death in the very next week during the Great Big
Siege of Bologna when the moldy odor of mortality hung wet in the air with the
sulphurous fog and every man scheduled to fly was already tainted.
There was no escaping the mission to Bologna once Colonel Cathcart had
volunteered his group for the ammunition dumps there that the heavy bombers on the
Italian mainland had been unable to destroy from their higher altitudes. Each day’s delay
deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering
conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, soaking mordantly into
each man’s ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease.
Everyone smelled of formaldehyde. There was nowhere to turn for help, not even to the
medical tent, which had been ordered closed by Colonel Korn so that no one could
report for sick call, as the men had done on the one clear day with a mysterious
epidemic of diarrhea that had forced still another postponement. With sick call
suspended and the door to the medical tent nailed shut, Doc Daneeka spent the
intervals between rain perched on a high stool, wordlessly absorbing the bleak outbreak
of fear with a sorrowing neutrality, roosting like a melancholy buzzard below the
ominous, hand-lettered sign tacked up on the closed door of the medical tent by Captain
Black as a joke and left hanging there by Doc Daneeka because it was no joke. The
sign was bordered in dark crayon and read: ‘CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
DEATH IN THE FAMILY.’ The fear flowed everywhere, into Dunbar’s squadron, where
Dunbar poked his head inquiringly through the entrance of the medical tent there one
twilight and spoke respectfully to the blurred outline of Dr. Stubbs, who was sitting in the
dense shadows inside before a bottle of whiskey and a bell jar filled with purified
drinking water.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked solicitously.