How time flies! When I first heard that the Joseph Heller novel “Catch-22” is celebrating its 50th anniversary, I must say it nudged me a bit out of my comfort zone. Not that I’m the least bit surprised at the book’s shelf life. I’m just caught off guard by my own.
I close my eyes and the scene unfolds: I’m in a quorum of lowly Signal Corps electronic-repair techs bumping along some early-60s Ft. Benning byway in the back of a ¾-ton truck with a suspension system straight out of Maytag research and development. And one of them, as if to flaunt his inner gyroscope, is actually reading! And, sheepishly, grinning!
Ron had dropped out of Berkeley a few semesters back and, although somewhat of a loner, became a close confidant. So, in an effort to discover the identity of the literary work that was providing him with such obvious guilty pleasures, I leaned forward to check out the cover. It was blue with big white block letters spelling out “Catch-22.”
This was 1963, close to two years after the original release of Heller’s novel and, with the four-game sweep of the hated Yankees by my beloved Dodgers in the World Series being followed somewhat closely by President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, an emotional roller-coaster of a year.
Times, of course, would get even stranger as the decade wore on and “Catch-22” would go a long way in helping us make sense, and nonsense, of the ongoing chaos. As the book made the rounds, Yossarian, the protagonist of this wondrous World War II black comedy, became one of our first truly worthy antiheroes.
With literature and jazz forming the binary epoxy that held our particular faction together, from the beginning we all felt that, as members of the military, we had a leg up on civilian readers attempting to digest the more subtle absurdities in the plotline.
It would be the same mindset the next year when Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” opened in off-base theaters and we found that our guffaws did not necessarily coincide with those of the locals.
For the most part we had satisfied all the prerequisites for entering upon the quite surreal landscape of “Catch-22.” Kafka, Camus and Kerouac had surely done their part to prepare us for Heller’s hilarious assault on logic. As when Yossarian and his tent-mate Orr, bombardier and pilot respectively in their B-25 squadron, asked their medical officer to explain why, no matter how many missions they flew, they couldn’t get removed from flight status.
According to Doc Daneeka, “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
We got to calling our unit, the 122nd Signal Battalion, “Catch-122.”
Quoting the book became a rite of passage. Such as: “Yossarian owed his good health to exercise, fresh air, teamwork, and good sportsmanship. It was to get away from them all that he had first discovered the hospital.”
The metaphorical concept of bombing one’s own troops for profit no longer seemed like such a stretch after Milo Minderbinder’s wartime antics. Not to mention the rest of the squadron and their own survival-based mischief.
From the Chaplain, Dunbar, Nately, Hungry Joe, McWatt, ex-PFC Wintergreen, Major ______ de Coverley, Major Major Major Major, Chief White Halfoat, and Snowden, to the villainous Captain Black and Colonel Cathcart, I would meet their counterparts working on a national forest wildfire crew, in an air-freight office, unloading railroad cars, as a filing clerk in banks, bartending in saloons, in both commercial and public radio, at resorts, and in music promotion.
They are very much archetypical and have a way of sticking to your ribs. Of course, writing about “Catch-22” is a lot like, as they say, dancing about architecture. Words worthy to the occasion aren’t available. They can’t seem to get removed from flight status. Even for a 50th birthday party.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for the past 40 years.