'Why not?' was Chief White Halfoat's answer.
Each night after that, Captain Flume forced himself to keep awake as long as possible. He was aided immeasurably by Hungry Joe's nightmares. Listening so intently to Hungry Joe's maniacal howling night after night, Captain Flume grew to hate him and began wishing that Chief White Halfoat would tiptoe up to his cot one night and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear. Actually, Captain Flume slept like a log most nights and merely dreamed he was awake. So convincing were these dreams of lying awake that he woke from them each morning in complete exhaustion and fell right back to sleep.
Chief White Halfoat had grown almost fond of Captain Flume since his amazing metamorphosis. Captain Flume had entered his bed that night a buoyant extrovert and left it the next morning a brooding introvert, and Chief White Halfoat proudly regarded the new Captain Flume as his own creation. He had never intended to slit Captain Flume's throat open for him from ear to ear. Threatening to do so was merely his idea of a joke, like dying of pneumonia, busting Colonel Moodus in the nose or challenging Doc Daneeka to Indian wrestle. All Chief White Halfoat wanted to do when he staggered in drunk each night was go right to sleep, and Hungry Joe often made that impossible. Hungry Joe's nightmares gave Chief White Halfoat the heebie-jeebies, and he often wished that someone would tiptoe into Hungry Joe's tent, lift Huple's cat off his face and slit his throat open for him from ear to ear, so that everybody in the squadron but Captain Flume could get a good night's sleep.
Even though Chief White Halfoat kept busting Colonel Moodus in the nose for General Dreedle's benefit, he was still outside the pale. Also outside the pale was Major Major, the squadron commander, who had found that out the same time he found out that he was squadron commander from Colonel Cathcart, who came blasting into the squadron in his hopped-up jeep the day after Major Duluth was killed over Perugia. Colonel Cathcart slammed to a screeching stop inches short of the railroad ditch separating the nose of his jeep from the lopsided basketball court on the other side, from which Major Major was eventually driven by the kicks and shoves and stones and punches of the men who had almost become his friends.
'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
McWatt
Ordinarily, Yossarian's pilot was McWatt, who, shaving in loud red, clean pajamas outside his tent each morning, was one of the odd, ironic, incomprehensible things surrounding Yossarian. McWatt was the craziest combat man of them all probably, because he was perfectly sane and still did not mind the war. He was a short-legged, wide-shouldered, smiling young soul who whistled bouncy show tunes continuously and turned over cards with sharp snaps when he dealt at blackjack or poker until Hungry Joe disintegrated into quaking despair finally beneath their cumulative impact and began ranting at him to stop snapping the cards.
'You son of a bitch, you only do it because it hurts me,' Hungry Joe would yell furiously, as Yossarian held him back soothingly with one hand. 'That's the only reason he does it, because he likes to hear me scream--you goddam son of a bitch!' McWatt crinkled his fine, freckled nose apologetically and vowed not to snap the cards any more, but always forgot. McWatt wore fleecy bedroom slippers with his red pajamas and slept between freshly pressed colored bedsheets like the one Milo had retrieved half of for him from the grinning thief with the sweet tooth in exchange for none of the pitted dates Milo had borrowed from Yossarian. McWatt was deeply impressed with Milo, who, to the amusement of Corporal Snark, his mess sergeant, was already buying eggs for seven cents apiece and selling them for five cents. But McWatt was never as impressed with Milo as Milo had been with the letter Yossarian had obtained for his liver from Doc Daneeka.
'What's this?' Milo had cried out in alarm, when he came upon the enormous corrugated carton filled with packages of dried fruit and cans of fruit juices and desserts that two of the Italian laborers Major--de Coverley had kidnaped for his kitchen were about to carry off to Yossarian's tent.