Catch-22 - Heller, Joseph [28]
‘You’re the new squadron commander,’ Colonel Cathcart had bellowed across the ditch at him. ‘But don’t think it means anything, because it doesn’t. All it means is that you’re the new squadron commander.’ And Colonel Cathcart had roared away as abruptly as he’d come, whipping the jeep around with a vicious spinning of wheels that sent a spray of fine grit blowing into Major Major’s face. Major Major was immobilized by the news. He stood speechless, lanky and gawking, with a scuffed basketball in his long hands as the seeds of rancor sown so swiftly by Colonel Cathcart took root in the soldiers around him who had been playing basketball with him and who had let him come as close to making friends with them as anyone had ever let him come before. The whites of his moony eyes grew large and misty as his mouth struggled yearningly and lost against the familiar, impregnable loneliness drifting in around him again like suffocating fog.
Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters except Major Danby, Colonel Cathcart was infused with the democratic spirit: he believed that all men were created equal, and he therefore spurned all men outside Group Headquarters with equal fervor. Nevertheless, he believed in his men. As he told them frequently in the briefing room, he believed they were at least ten missions better than any other outfit and felt that any who did not share this confidence he had placed in them could get the hell out. The only way they could get the hell out, though, as Yossarian learned when he flew to visit ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, was by flying the extra ten missions.
‘I still don’t get it,’ Yossarian protested. ‘Is Doc Daneeka right or isn’t he?’
‘How many did he say?’
‘Forty.’
‘Daneeka was telling the truth,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen admitted. ‘Forty missions is all you have to fly as far as Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters is concerned.’ Yossarian was jubilant. ‘Then I can go home, right? I’ve got forty-eight.’
‘No, you can’t go home,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen corrected him. ‘Are you crazy or something?’
‘Why not?’
‘Catch-22.’
‘Catch-22?’ Yossarian was stunned. ‘What the hell has Catch-22 got to do with it?’
‘Catch-22,’ Doc Daneeka answered patiently, when Hungry Joe had flown Yossarian back to Pianosa, ‘says you’ve always got to do what your commanding officer tells you to.’
‘But Twenty-seventh Air Force says I can go home with forty missions.’
‘But they don’t say you have to go home. And regulations do say you have to obey every order. That’s the catch. Even if the colonel were disobeying a Twenty-seventh Air Force order by making you fly more missions, you’d still have to fly them, or you’d be guilty of disobeying an order of his. And then Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters would really jump on you.’ Yossarian slumped with disappointment. ‘Then I really have to fly the fifty missions, don’t I?’ he grieved.
‘The fifty-five,’ Doc Daneeka corrected him.
‘What fifty-five?’
‘The fifty-five missions the colonel now wants all of you to fly.’ Hungry Joe heaved a huge sigh of relief when he heard Doc Daneeka and broke into a grin. Yossarian grabbed Hungry Joe by the neck and made him fly them both right back to ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen.
‘What would they do to me,’ he asked in confidential tones, ‘if I refused to fly them?’
‘We’d probably shoot you,’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
‘We?’ Yossarian cried in surprise. ‘What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?’
‘If you’re going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted.
Yossarian winced. Colonel Cathcart had raised him again.
Catch-22