“Catch-22” By Joseph - Khamkoo

“Catch-22” By Joseph Heller 79
until he was completely immersed. On the other side of the sea, a bumpy sliver of dark
land lay wrapped in mist, almost invisible. He swam languorously out to the raft, held on
a moment, and swam languorously back to where he could stand on the sand bar. He
submerged himself head first into the green water several times until he felt clean and
wide-awake and then stretched himself out face down in the sand and slept until the
planes returning from Bologna were almost overhead and the great, cumulative rumble
of their many engines came crashing in through his slumber in an earth-shattering roar.
He woke up blinking with a slight pain in his head and opened his eyes upon a world
boiling in chaos in which everything was in proper order. He gasped in utter amazement
at the fantastic sight of the twelve flights of planes organized calmly into exact formation.
The scene was too unexpected to be true. There were no planes spurting ahead with
wounded, none lagging behind with damage. No distress flares smoked in the sky. No
ship was missing but his own. For an instant he was paralyzed with a sensation of
madness. Then he understood, and almost wept at the irony. The explanation was
simple: clouds had covered the target before the planes could bomb it, and the mission
to Bologna was still to be flown.
He was wrong. There had been no clouds. Bologna had been bombed. Bologna was a
milk run. There had been no flak there at all.
Piltchard & Wren
Captain Piltchard and Captain Wren, the inoffensive joint squadron operations officers,
were both mild, soft-spoken men of less than middle height who enjoyed flying combat
missions and begged nothing more of life and Colonel Cathcart than the opportunity to
continue flying them. They had flown hundreds of combat missions and wanted to fly
hundreds more. They assigned themselves to every one. Nothing so wonderful as war
had ever happened to them before; and they were afraid it might never happen to them
again. They conducted their duties humbly and reticently, with a minimum of fuss, and
went to great lengths not to antagonize anyone. They smiled quickly at everyone they
passed. When they spoke, they mumbled. They were shifty, cheerful, subservient men
who were comfortable only with each other and never met anyone else’s eye, not even
Yossarian’s eye at the open-air meeting they called to reprimand him publicly for making
Kid Sampson turn back from the mission to Bologna.
‘Fellas,’ said Captain Piltchard, who had thinning dark hair and smiled awkwardly.
‘When you turn back from a mission, try to make sure it’s for something important, will
you? Not for something unimportant… like a defective intercom… or something like that.
Okay? Captain Wren has more he wants to say to you on that subject.’
‘Captain Piltchard’s right, fellas,’ said Captain Wren. ‘And that’s all I’m going to say to
you on that subject. Well, we finally got to Bologna today, and we found out it’s a milk
run. We were all a little nervous, I guess, and didn’t do too much damage. Well, listen to
this. Colonel Cathcart got permission for us to go back. And tomorrow we’re really going
to paste those ammunition dumps. Now, what do you think about that?’ And to prove to
Yossarian that they bore him no animosity, they even assigned him to fly lead
bombardier with McWatt in the first formation when they went back to Bologna the next
day. He came in on the target like a Havermeyer, confidently taking no evasive action at
all, and suddenly they were shooting the living shit out of him!
Heavy flak was everywhere! He had been lulled, lured and trapped, and there was
nothing he could do but sit there like an idiot and watch the ugly black puffs smashing
up to kill him. There was nothing he could do until his bombs dropped but look back into
the bombsight, where the fine cross-hairs in the lens were glued magnetically over the
target exactly where he had placed them, intersecting perfectly deep inside the yard of
his block of camouflaged warehouses before the base of the first building. He was
trembling steadily as the plane crept ahead. He could hear the hollow boom-boomboom-boom
of the flak pounding all around him in overlapping measures of four, the
sharp, piercing crack! of a single shell exploding suddenly very close by. His head was