Authors: Joseph Heller
‘When I’m not here.’
‘Yes, sir. And what should I do?’
‘Whatever I tell you to.’
‘But you won’t be here to tell me. Will you?’
‘No.’
‘Then what should I do?’
‘Whatever has to be done.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That will be all,’ said Major Major.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the orderly. ‘Will that be all?’
‘No,’ said Major Major. ‘Don’t come in to clean, either.
Don’t come in for anything unless you’re sure I’m not here.’
‘Yes, sir. But how can I always be sure?’
‘If you’re not sure, just assume that I am here and go away
until you are sure. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m sorry to have to talk to you in this way, but I have to.
Goodbye.’
‘Goodbye, sir.’
‘And thank you. For everything.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘From now on,’ Major Major said to Milo Minderbinder, ‘I’m
not going to come to the mess hall any more. I’ll have all my meals brought to
me in my trailer.’
‘I think that’s a good idea, sir,’ Milo answered. ‘Now I’ll
be able to serve you special dishes that the others will never know about. I’m
sure you’ll enjoy them. Colonel Cathcart always does.’
‘I don’t want any special dishes. I want exactly what you
serve all the other officers. Just have whoever brings it knock once on my door
and leave the tray on the step. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Milo. ‘That’s very clear. I’ve got some live
Maine lobsters hidden away that I can serve you tonight with an excellent
Roquefort salad and two frozen éclairs that were smuggled out of
Paris only yesterday together with an important member of the French
underground. Will that do for a start?’
‘No.’
‘Yes, sir. I understand.’ For dinner that night Milo served
him broiled Maine lobster with excellent Roquefort salad and two frozen
éclairs. Major Major was annoyed. If he sent it back, though, it
would only go to waste or to somebody else, and Major Major had a weakness for
broiled lobster. He ate with a guilty conscience. The next day for lunch there
was terrapin Maryland with a whole quart of Dom Pérignon 1937, and
Major Major gulped it down without a thought.
After Milo, there remained only the men in the orderly room,
and Major Major avoided them by entering and leaving every time through the
dingy celluloid window of his office. The window unbuttoned and was low and
large and easy to jump through from either side. He managed the distance
between the orderly room and his trailer by darting around the corner of the
tent when the coast was clear, leaping down into the railroad ditch and dashing
along with head bowed until he attained the sanctuary of the forest. Abreast of
his trailer, he left the ditch and wove his way speedily toward home through
the dense underbrush, in which the only person he ever encountered was Captain
Flume, who, drawn and ghostly, frightened him half to death one twilight by
materializing without warning out of a patch of dewberry bushes to complain
that Chief White Halfoat had threatened to slit his throat open from ear to
ear.
‘If you ever frighten me like that again,’ Major Major told
him, ‘I’ll slit your throat open from ear to ear.’ Captain Flume gasped and
dissolved right back into the patch of dewberry bushes, and Major Major never
set eyes on him again.
When Major Major looked back on what he had accomplished, he
was pleased. In the midst of a few foreign acres teeming with more than two
hundred people, he had succeeded in becoming a recluse. With a little ingenuity
and vision, he had made it all but impossible for anyone in the squadron to
talk to him, which was just fine with everyone, he noticed, since no one wanted
to talk to him anyway. No one, it turned out, but that madman Yossarian, who brought
him down with a flying tackle one day as he was scooting along the bottom of
the ditch to his trailer for lunch.
The last person in the squadron Major Major wanted to be
brought down with a flying tackle by was Yossarian. There was something inherently
disreputable about Yossarian, always carrying on so disgracefully about that
dead man in his tent who wasn’t even there and then taking off all his clothes
after the Avignon mission and going around without them right up to the day
General Dreedle stepped up to pin a medal on him for his heroism over Ferrara
and found him standing in formation stark naked. No one in the world had the
power to remove the dead man’s disorganized effects from Yossarian’s tent.
Major Major had forfeited the authority when he permitted Sergeant Towser to
report the lieutenant who had been killed over Orvieto less than two hours
after he arrived in the squadron as never having arrived in the squadron at
all. The only one with any right to remove his belongings from Yossarian’s
tent, it seemed to Major Major, was Yossarian himself, and Yossarian, it seemed
to Major Major, had no right.
Major Major groaned after Yossarian brought him down with a
flying tackle, and tried to wiggle to his feet. Yossarian wouldn’t let him.
‘Captain Yossarian,’ Yossarian said, ‘requests permission to
speak to the major at once about a matter of life or death.’
‘Let me up, please,’ Major Major bid him in cranky
discomfort. ‘I can’t return your salute while I’m lying on my arm.’ Yossarian
released him. They stood up slowly. Yossarian saluted again and repeated his
request.
‘Let’s go to my office,’ Major Major said. ‘I don’t think
this is the best place to talk.’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered Yossarian.
They smacked the gravel from their clothing and walked in
constrained silence to the entrance of the orderly room.
‘Give me a minute or two to put some mercurochrome on these
cuts. Then have Sergeant Towser send you in.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Major Major strode with dignity to the rear of
the orderly room without glancing at any of the clerks and typists working at
the desks and filing cabinets. He let the flap leading to his office fall
closed behind him. As soon as he was alone in his office, he raced across the
room to the window and jumped outside to dash away. He found Yossarian blocking
his path. Yossarian was waiting at attention and saluted again.
‘Captain Yossarian requests permission to speak to the major
at once about a matter of life or death,’ he repeated determinedly.
‘Permission denied,’ Major Major snapped.
‘That won’t do it.’ Major Major gave in. ‘All right,’ he
conceded wearily. ‘I’ll talk to you. Please jump inside my office.’
‘After you.’ They jumped inside the office. Major Major sat
down, and Yossarian moved around in front of his desk and told him that he did
not want to fly any more combat missions. What could he do? Major Major asked
himself. All he could do was what he had been instructed to do by Colonel Korn
and hope for the best.
‘Why not?’ he asked.
‘I’m afraid.’
‘That’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ Major Major counseled him
kindly. ‘We’re all afraid.’
‘I’m not ashamed,’ Yossarian said. ‘I’m just afraid.’
‘You wouldn’t be normal if you were never afraid. Even the
bravest men experience fear. One of the biggest jobs we all face in combat is
to overcome our fear.’
‘Oh, come on, Major. Can’t we do without that horseshit?’
Major Major lowered his gaze sheepishly and fiddled with his fingers. ‘What do
you want me to tell you?’
‘That I’ve flown enough missions and can go home.’
‘How many have you flown?’
‘Fifty-one.’
‘You’ve only got four more to fly.’
‘He’ll raise them. Every time I get close he raises them.’
‘Perhaps he won’t this time.’
‘He never sends anyone home, anyway. He just keeps them
around waiting for rotation orders until he doesn’t have enough men left for
the crews, and then raises the number of missions and throws them all back on
combat status. He’s been doing that ever since he got here.’
‘You mustn’t blame Colonel Cathcart for any delay with the
orders,’ Major Major advised. ‘It’s Twenty-seventh Air Force’s responsibility
to process the orders promptly once they get them from us.’
‘He could still ask for replacements and send us home when
the orders did come back. Anyway, I’ve been told that Twenty-seventh Air Force
wants only forty missions and that it’s only his own idea to get us to fly
fifty-five.’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ Major Major answered.
‘Colonel Cathcart is our commanding officer and we must obey him. Why don’t you
fly the four more missions and see what happens?’
‘I don’t want to.’ What could you do? Major Major asked
himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye
and said he would rather die than be killed in combat, a man who was at least
as mature and intelligent as you were and who you had to pretend was not? What
could you say to him?
‘Suppose we let you pick your missions and fly milk runs,’
Major Major said. ‘That way you can fly the four missions and not run any
risks.’
‘I don’t want to fly milk runs. I don’t want to be in the war
any more.’
‘Would you like to see our country lose?’ Major Major asked.
‘We won’t lose. We’ve got more men, more money and more
material. There are ten million men in uniform who could replace me. Some
people are getting killed and a lot more are making money and having fun. Let
somebody else get killed.’
‘But suppose everybody on our side felt that way.’
‘Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way.
Wouldn’t I?’ What could you possibly say to him? Major Major wondered
forlornly. One thing he could not say was that there was nothing he could do.
To say there was nothing he could do would suggest he would do something if he
could and imply the existence of an error of injustice in Colonel Korn’s
policy. Colonel Korn had been most explicit about that. He must never say there
was nothing he could do.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing I can do.’
Clevinger was dead. That was the basic
flaw in his philosophy. Eighteen planes had let down through a beaming white
cloud off the coast of Elba one afternoon on the way back from the weekly milk
run to Parma; seventeen came out. No trace was ever found of the other, not in
the air or on the smooth surface of the jade waters below. There was no debris.
Helicopters circled the white cloud till sunset. During the night the cloud
blew away, and in the morning there was no more Clevinger.
The disappearance was astounding, as astounding, certainly,
as the Grand Conspiracy of Lowery Field, when all sixty-four men in a single
barrack vanished one payday and were never heard of again. Until Clevinger was
snatched from existence so adroitly, Yossarian had assumed that the men had simply
decided unanimously to go AWOL the same day. In fact, he had been so encouraged
by what appeared to be a mass desertion from sacred responsibility that he had
gone running outside in elation to carry the exciting news to ex-P.F.C.
Wintergreen.
‘What’s so exciting about it?’ ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen sneered
obnoxiously, resting his filthy GI shoe on his spade and lounging back in a
surly slouch against the wall of one of the deep, square holes it was his
military specialty to dig.
Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen was a snide little punk who enjoyed
working at cross-purposes. Each time he went AWOL, he was caught and sentenced
to dig and fill up holes six feet deep, wide and long for a specified length of
time. Each time he finished his sentence, he went AWOL again. Ex-P.F.C.
Wintergreen accepted his role of digging and filling up holes with all the
uncomplaining dedication of a true patriot.
‘It’s not a bad life,’ he would observe philosophically. ‘And
I guess somebody has to do it.’ He had wisdom enough to understand that digging
holes in Colorado was not such a bad assignment in wartime. Since the holes
were in no great demand, he could dig them and fill them up at a leisurely
pace, and he was seldom overworked. On the other hand, he was busted down to
buck private each time he was court-martialed. He regretted this loss of rank
keenly.
‘It was kind of nice being a P.F.C.,’ he reminisced
yearningly. ‘I had status—you know what I mean?—and I used to travel in the
best circles.’ His face darkened with resignation. ‘But that’s all behind me
now,’ he guessed. ‘The next time I go over the hill it will be as a buck
private, and I just know it won’t be the same.’ There was no future in digging
holes. ‘The job isn’t even steady. I lose it each time I finish serving my
sentence. Then I have to go over the hill again if I want it back. And I can’t
even keep doing that. There’s a catch. Catch-22. The next time I go over the
hill, it will mean the stockade. I don’t know what’s going to become of me. I
might even wind up overseas if I’m not careful.’ He did not want to keep
digging holes for the rest of his life, although he had no objection to doing
it as long as there was a war going on and it was part of the war effort. ‘It’s
a matter of duty,’ he observed, ‘and we each have our own to perform. My duty
is to keep digging these holes, and I’ve been doing such a good job of it that
I’ve just been recommended for the Good Conduct Medal. Your duty is to screw
around in cadet school and hope the war ends before you get out. The duty of
the men in combat is to win the war, and I just wish they were doing their duty
as well as I’ve been doing mine. It wouldn’t be fair if I had to go overseas
and do their job too, would it?’ One day ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen struck open a
water pipe while digging in one of his holes and almost drowned to death before
he was fished out nearly unconscious. Word spread that it was oil, and Chief
White Halfoat was kicked off the base. Soon every man who could find a shovel
was outside digging frenziedly for oil. Dirt flew everywhere; the scene was
almost like the morning in Pianosa seven months later after the night Milo
bombed the squadron with every plane he had accumulated in his M & M
syndicate, and the airfield, bomb dump and repair hangars as well, and all the
survivors were outside hacking cavernous shelters into the solid ground and
roofing them over with sheets of armor plate stolen from the repair sheds at
the field and with tattered squares of waterproof canvas stolen from the side
flaps of each other’s tents. Chief White Halfoat was transferred out of
Colorado at the first rumor of oil and came to rest finally in Pianosa as a
replacement for Lieutenant Coombs, who had gone out on a mission as a guest one
day just to see what combat was like and had died over Ferrara in the plane
with Kraft. Yossarian felt guilty each time he remembered Kraft, guilty because
Kraft had been killed on Yossarian’s second bomb run, and guilty because Kraft
had got mixed up innocently also in the Splendid Atabrine Insurrection that had
begun in Puerto Rico on the first leg of their flight overseas and ended in
Pianosa ten days later with Appleby striding dutifully into the orderly room
the moment he arrived to report Yossarian for refusing to take his Atabrine
tablets. The sergeant there invited him to be seated.
‘Thank you, Sergeant, I think I will,’ said Appleby. ‘About
how long will I have to wait? I’ve still got a lot to get done today so that I
can be fully prepared bright and early tomorrow morning to go into combat the
minute they want me to.’
‘Sir?’
‘What’s that, Sergeant?’
‘What was your question?’
‘About how long will I have to wait before I can go in to see
the major?’
‘Just until he goes out to lunch,’ Sergeant Towser replied.
‘Then you can go right in.’
‘But he won’t be there then. Will he?’
‘No, sir. Major Major won’t be back in his office until after
lunch.’
‘I see,’ Appleby decided uncertainly. ‘I think I’d better
come back after lunch, then.’ Appleby turned from the orderly room in secret
confusion. The moment he stepped outside, he thought he saw a tall, dark
officer who looked a little like Henry Fonda come jumping out of the window of
the orderly-room tent and go scooting out of sight around the corner. Appleby
halted and squeezed his eyes closed. An anxious doubt assailed him. He wondered
if he were suffering from malaria, or, worse, from an overdose of Atabrine
tablets. Appleby had been taking four times as many Atabrine tablets as the
amount prescribed because he wanted to be four times as good a pilot as
everyone else. His eyes were still shut when Sergeant Towser tapped him lightly
on the shoulder and told him he could go in now if he wanted to, since Major
Major had just gone out. Appleby’s confidence returned.
‘Thank you, Sergeant. Will he be back soon?’
‘He’ll be back right after lunch. Then you’ll have to go
right out and wait for him in front till he leaves for dinner. Major Major
never sees anyone in his office while he’s in his office.’
‘Sergeant, what did you just say?’
‘I said that Major Major never sees anyone in his office
while he’s in his office.’ Appleby stared at Sergeant Towser intently and
attempted a firm tone. ‘Sergeant, are you trying to make a fool out of me just
because I’m new in the squadron and you’ve been overseas a long time?’
‘Oh, no, sir,’ answered the sergeant deferentially. ‘Those
are my orders. You can ask Major Major when you see him.’
‘That’s just what I intend to do, Sergeant. When can I see
him?’
‘Never.’ Crimson with humiliation, Appleby wrote down his
report about Yossarian and the Atabrine tablets on a pad the sergeant offered
him and left quickly, wondering if perhaps Yossarian were not the only man
privileged to wear an officer’s uniform who was crazy.
By the time Colonel Cathcart had raised the number of
missions to fifty-five, Sergeant Towser had begun to suspect that perhaps every
man who wore a uniform was crazy. Sergeant Towser was lean and angular and had
fine blond hair so light it was almost without color, sunken cheeks, and teeth
like large white marshmallows. He ran the 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.
‘Terrible,’ Dr. Stubbs answered.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Sitting.’
‘I thought there was no more sick call.’
‘There ain’t.’
‘Then why are you sitting here?’
‘Where else should I sit? At the goddam officers’ club with
Colonel Cathcart and Korn? Do you know what I’m doing here?’
‘Sitting.’
‘In the squadron, I mean. Not in the tent. Don’t be such a
goddam wise guy. Can you figure out what a doctor is doing here in the
squadron?’
‘They’ve got the doors to the medical tents nailed shut in
the other squadrons,’ Dunbar remarked.
‘If anyone sick walks through my door I’m going to ground
him,’ Dr. Stubbs vowed. ‘I don’t give a damn what they say.’
‘You can’t ground anyone,’ Dunbar reminded. ‘Don’t you know
the orders?’
‘I’ll knock him flat on his ass with an injection and really
ground him.’ Dr. Stubbs laughed with sardonic amusement at the prospect. ‘They
think they can order sick call out of existence. The bastards. Ooops, there it
goes again.’ The rain began falling again, first in the trees, then in the mud
puddles, then, faintly, like a soothing murmur, on the tent top. ‘Everything’s
wet,’ Dr. Stubbs observed with revulsion. ‘Even the latrines and urinals are
backing up in protest. The whole goddam world smells like a charnel house.’ The
silence seemed bottomless when he stopped talking. Night fell. There was a
sense of vast isolation.
‘Turn on the light,’ Dunbar suggested.