“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 75
promotion just to please Colonel Cathcart. Colonel Cathcart was stung by the blunt
rebuke and skulked guiltily about his room in smarting repudiation. He blamed Major
Major for this black eye and decided to bust him down to lieutenant that very same day.
‘They probably won’t let you,’ Colonel Korn remarked with a condescending smile,
savoring the situation. ‘For precisely the same reasons that they wouldn’t let you
promote him. Besides, you’d certainly look foolish trying to bust him down to lieutenant
right after you tried to promote him to my rank.’ Colonel Cathcart felt hemmed in on
every side. He had been much more successful in obtaining a medal for Yossarian after
the debacle of Ferrara, when the bridge spanning the Po was still standing undamaged
seven days after Colonel Cathcart had volunteered to destroy it. Nine missions his men
had flown there in six days, and the bridge was not demolished until the tenth mission
on the seventh day, when Yossarian killed Kraft and his crew by taking his flight of six
planes in over the target a second time. Yossarian came in carefully on his second
bomb run because he was brave then. He buried his head in his bombsight until his
bombs were away; when he looked up, everything inside the ship was suffused in a
weird orange glow. At first he thought that his own plane was on fire. Then he spied the
plane with the burning engine directly above him and screamed to McWatt through the
intercom to turn left hard. A second later, the wing of Kraft’s plane blew off. The flaming
wreck dropped, first the fuselage, then the spinning wing, while a shower of tiny metal
fragments began tap dancing on the roof of Yossarian’s own plane and the incessant
cachung! cachung! cachung! of the flak was still thumping all around him.
Back on the ground, every eye watched grimly as he walked in dull dejection up to
Captain Black outside the green clapboard briefing room to make his intelligence report
and learned that Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn were waiting to speak to him inside.
Major Danby stood barring the door, waving everyone else away in ashen silence.
Yossarian was leaden with fatigue and longed to remove his sticky clothing. He stepped
into the briefing room with mixed emotions, uncertain how he was supposed to feel
about Kraft and the others, for they had all died in the distance of a mute and secluded
agony at a moment when he was up to his own ass in the same vile, excruciating
dilemma of duty and damnation.
Colonel Cathcart, on the other hand, was all broken up by the event. ‘Twice?’ he
asked.
‘I would have missed it the first time,’ Yossarian replied softly, his face lowered.
Their voices echoed slightly in the long, narrow bungalow.
‘But twice?’ Colonel Cathcart repeated, in vivid disbelief.
‘I would have missed it the first time,’ Yossarian repeated.
‘But Kraft would be alive.’
‘And the bridge would still be up.’
‘A trained bombardier is supposed to drop his bombs the first time,’ Colonel Cathcart
reminded him. ‘The other five bombardiers dropped their bombs the first time.’
‘And missed the target,’ Yossarian said. ‘We’d have had to go back there again.’
‘And maybe you would have gotten it the first time then.’
‘And maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it at all.’
‘But maybe there wouldn’t have been any losses.’
‘And maybe there would have been more losses, with the bridge still left standing. I
thought you wanted the bridge destroyed.’
‘Don’t contradict me,’ Colonel Cathcart said. ‘We’re all in enough trouble.’
‘I’m not contradicting you, sir.’
‘Yes you are. Even that’s a contradiction.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry.’ Colonel Cathcart cracked his knuckles violently. Colonel Korn, a
stocky, dark, flaccid man with a shapeless paunch, sat completely relaxed on one of the
benches in the front row, his hands clasped comfortably over the top of his bald and
swarthy head. His eyes were amused behind his glinting rimless spectacles.
‘We’re trying to be perfectly objective about this,’ he prompted Colonel Cathcart.
‘We’re trying to be perfectly objective about this,’ Colonel Cathcart said to Yossarian