Authors: Joseph Heller
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 with the zeal of sudden inspiration. ‘It’s not that
I’m being sentimental or anything. I don’t give a damn about the men or the
airplane. It’s just that it looks so lousy on the report. How am I going to
cover up something like this in the report?’
‘Why don’t you give me a medal?’ Yossarian suggested timidly.
‘For going around twice?’
‘You gave one to Hungry Joe when he cracked up that airplane
by mistake.’ Colonel Cathcart snickered ruefully. ‘You’ll be lucky if we don’t
give you a court-martial.’
‘But I got the bridge the second time around,’ Yossarian
protested. ‘I thought you wanted the bridge destroyed.’
‘Oh, I don’t know what I wanted,’ Colonel Cathcart cried out
in exasperation. ‘Look, of course I wanted the bridge destroyed. That bridge
has been a source of trouble to me ever since I decided to send you men out to
get it. But why couldn’t you do it the first time?’
‘I didn’t have enough time. My navigator wasn’t sure we had
the right city.’
‘The right city?’ Colonel Cathcart was baffled. ‘Are you
trying to blame it all on Aarfy now?’
‘No, sir. It was my mistake for letting him distract me. All
I’m trying to say is that I’m not infallible.’
‘Nobody is infallible,’ Colonel Cathcart said sharply, and
then continued vaguely, with an afterthought: ‘Nobody is indispensable,
either.’ There was no rebuttal. Colonel Korn stretched sluggishly. ‘We’ve got
to reach a decision,’ he observed casually to Colonel Cathcart.
‘We’ve got to reach a decision,’ Colonel Cathcart said to
Yossarian. ‘And it’s all your fault. Why did you have to go around twice? Why
couldn’t you drop your bombs the first time like all the others?’
‘I would have missed the first time.’
‘It seems to me that we’re going around twice,’ Colonel Korn
interrupted with a chuckle.
‘But what are we going to do?’ Colonel Cathcart exclaimed
with distress. ‘The others are all waiting outside.’
‘Why don’t we give him a medal?’ Colonel Korn proposed.
‘For going around twice? What can we give him a medal for?’
‘For going around twice,’ Colonel Korn answered with a
reflective, self-satisfied smile. ‘After all, I suppose it did take a lot of
courage to go over that target a second time with no other planes around to
divert the antiaircraft fire. And he did hit the bridge. You know, that might
be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of.
That’s a trick that never seems to fail.’
‘Do you think it will work?’
‘I’m sure it will. And let’s promote him to captain, too,
just to make certain.’
‘Don’t you think that’s going a bit farther than we have to?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s best to play safe. And a
captain’s not much difference.’
‘All right,’ Colonel Cathcart decided. ‘We’ll give him a
medal for being brave enough to go around over the target twice. And we’ll make
him a captain, too.’ Colonel Korn reached for his hat.
‘Exit smiling,’ he joked, and put his arm around Yossarian’s
shoulders as they stepped outside the door.
By the time of the mission to Bologna,
Yossarian was brave enough not to go around over the target even once, and when
he found himself aloft finally in the nose of Kid Sampson’s plane, he pressed
in the button of his throat mike and asked, ‘Well? What’s wrong with the
plane?’ Kid Sampson let out a shriek. ‘Is something wrong with the plane?
What’s the matter?’ Kid Sampson’s cry turned Yossarian to ice. ‘Is something
the matter?’ he yelled in horror. ‘Are we bailing out?’
‘I don’t know!’ Kid Sampson shot back in anguish, wailing
excitedly. ‘Someone said we’re bailing out! Who is this, anyway? Who is this?’
‘This is Yossarian in the nose! Yossarian in the nose. I
heard you say there was something the matter. Didn’t you say there was
something the matter?’
‘I thought you said there was something wrong. Everything
seems okay. Everything is all right.’ Yossarian’s heart sank. Something was
terribly wrong if everything was all right and they had no excuse for turning
back. He hesitated gravely.
‘I can’t hear you,’ he said.
‘I said everything is all right.’ The sun was blinding white
on the porcelain-blue water below and on the flashing edges of the other
airplanes. Yossarian took hold of the colored wires leading into the jackbox of
the intercom system and tore them loose.
‘I still can’t hear you,’ he said.
He heard nothing. Slowly he collected his map case and his
three flak suits and crawled back to the main compartment. Nately, sitting
stiffly in the co-pilot’s seat, spied him through the corner of his eye as he
stepped up on the flight deck behind Kid Sampson. He smiled at Yossarian wanly,
looking frail and exceptionally young and bashful in the bulky dungeon of his
earphones, hat, throat mike, flak suit and parachute. Yossarian bent close to
Kid Sampson’s ear.
‘I still can’t hear you,’ he shouted above the even drone of
the engines.
Kid Sampson glanced back at him with surprise. Kid Sampson
had an angular, comical face with arched eyebrows and a scrawny blond mustache.
‘What?’ he called out over his shoulder.
‘I still can’t hear you,’ Yossarian repeated.
‘You’ll have to talk louder,’ Kid Sampson said. ‘I still
can’t hear you.’
‘I said I still can’t hear you!’ Yossarian yelled.
‘I can’t help it,’ Kid Sampson yelled back at him. ‘I’m
shouting as loud as I can.’
‘I couldn’t hear you over my intercom,’ Yossarian bellowed in
mounting helplessness. ‘You’ll have to turn back.’
‘For an intercom?’ asked Kid Sampson incredulously.
‘Turn back,’ said Yossarian, ‘before I break your head.’ Kid
Sampson looked for moral support toward Nately, who stared away from him
pointedly. Yossarian outranked them both. Kid Sampson resisted doubtfully for
another moment and then capitulated eagerly with a triumphant whoop.
‘That’s just fine with me,’ he announced gladly, and blew out
a shrill series of whistles up into his mustache. ‘Yes sirree, that’s just fine
with old Kid Sampson.’ He whistled again and shouted over the intercom, ‘Now
hear this, my little chickadees. This is Admiral Kid Sampson talking. This is
Admiral Kid Sampson squawking, the pride of the Queen’s marines. Yessiree.
We’re turning back, boys, by crackee, we’re turning back!’ Nately ripped off
his hat and earphones in one jubilant sweep and began rocking back and forth
happily like a handsome child in a high chair. Sergeant Knight came plummeting
down from the top gun turret and began pounding them all on the back with
delirious enthusiasm. Kid Sampson turned the plane away from the formation in a
wide, graceful arc and headed toward the airfield. When Yossarian plugged his
headset into one of the auxiliary jackboxes, the two gunners in the rear
section of the plane were both singing ‘La Cucaracha.’ Back at the field, the
party fizzled out abruptly. An uneasy silence replaced it, and Yossarian was
sober and self-conscious as he climbed down from the plane and took his place
in the jeep that was already waiting for them. None of the men spoke at all on
the drive back through the heavy, mesmerizing quiet blanketing mountains, sea
and forests. The feeling of desolation persisted when they turned off the road
at the squadron. Yossarian got out of the car last. After a minute, Yossarian
and a gentle warm wind were the only things stirring in the haunting
tranquillity that hung like a drug over the vacated tents. The squadron stood
insensate, bereft of everything human but Doc Daneeka, who roosted dolorously
like a shivering turkey buzzard beside the closed door of the medical tent, his
stuffed nose jabbing away in thirsting futility at the hazy sunlight streaming
down around him. Yossarian knew Doc Daneeka would not go swimming with him. Doc
Daneeka would never go swimming again; a person could swoon or suffer a mild
coronary occlusion in an inch or two of water and drown to death, be carried
out to sea by an undertow, or made vulnerable to poliomyelitis or meningococcus
infection through chilling or over-exertion. The threat of Bologna to others
had instilled in Doc Daneeka an even more poignant solicitude for his own
safety. At night now, he heard burglars.
Through the lavender gloom clouding the entrance of the
operations tent, Yossarian glimpsed Chief White Halfoat, diligently embezzling
whiskey rations, forging the signatures of nondrinkers and pouring off the
alcohol with which he was poisoning himself into separate bottles rapidly in
order to steal as much as he could before Captain Black roused himself with
recollection and came hurrying over indolently to steal the rest himself.
The jeep started up again softly. Kid Sampson, Nately and the
others wandered apart in a noiseless eddy of motion and were sucked away into
the cloying yellow stillness. The jeep vanished with a cough. Yossarian was
alone in a ponderous, primeval lull in which everything green looked black and
everything else was imbued with the color of pus. The breeze rustled leaves in
a dry and diaphanous distance. He was restless, scared and sleepy. The sockets
of his eyes felt grimy with exhaustion. Wearily he moved inside the parachute
tent with its long table of smoothed wood, a nagging bitch of a doubt burrowing
painlessly inside a conscience that felt perfectly clear. He left his flak suit
and parachute there and crossed back past the water wagon to the intelligence
tent to return his map case to Captain Black, who sat drowsing in his chair
with his skinny long legs up on his desk and inquired with indifferent
curiosity why Yossarian’s plane had turned back. Yossarian ignored him. He set
the map down on the counter and walked out.
Back in his own tent, he squirmed out of his parachute
harness and then out of his clothes. Orr was in Rome, due back that same
afternoon from the rest leave he had won by ditching his plane in the waters
off Genoa.
Nately would already be packing to replace him, entranced to
find himself still alive and undoubtedly impatient to resume his wasted and
heartbreaking courtship of his prostitute in Rome. When Yossarian was undressed,
he sat down on his cot to rest. He felt much better as soon as he was naked. He
never felt comfortable in clothes. In a little while he put fresh undershorts
back on and set out for the beach in his moccasins, a khaki-colored bath towel
draped over his shoulders.
The path from the squadron led him around a mysterious gun
emplacement in the woods; two of the three enlisted men stationed there lay
sleeping on the circle of sand bags and the third sat eating a purple
pomegranate, biting off large mouthfuls between his churning jaws and spewing
the ground roughage out away from him into the bushes. When he bit, red juice
ran out of his mouth. Yossarian padded ahead into the forest again, caressing
his bare, tingling belly adoringly from time to time as though to reassure
himself it was all still there. He rolled a piece of lint out of his navel.
Along the ground suddenly, on both sides of the path, he saw dozens of new
mushrooms the rain had spawned poking their nodular fingers up through the
clammy earth like lifeless stalks of flesh, sprouting in such necrotic
profusion everywhere he looked that they seemed to be proliferating right
before his eyes. There were thousands of them swarming as far back into the
underbrush as he could see, and they appeared to swell in size and multiply in
number as he spied them. He hurried away from them with a shiver of eerie alarm
and did not slacken his pace until the soil crumbled to dry sand beneath his
feet and they had been left behind. He glanced back apprehensively, half
expecting to find the limp white things crawling after him in sightless pursuit
or snaking up through the treetops in a writhing and ungovernable mutative
mass.
The beach was deserted. The only sounds were hushed ones, the
bloated gurgle of the stream, the respirating hum of the tall grass and shrubs
behind him, the apathetic moaning of the dumb, translucent waves. The surf was
always small, the water clear and cool. Yossarian left his things on the sand
and moved through the knee-high waves 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.