It was a horrible joke, but Doc Daneeka didn’t laugh until Yossarian came to him one mission later and pleaded again, without any real expectation of success, to be grounded. Doc Daneeka snickered once and was soon immersed in problems of his own, which included Chief White Halfoat, who had been challenging him all that morning to Indian wrestle, and Yossarian, who decided right then and there to go crazy.
“You’re wasting your time,” Doc Daneeka was forced to tell him.
“Can’t you ground someone who’s crazy?”
“Oh, sure. I have to. There’s a rule saying I have to ground anyone who’s crazy.”
“Then why don’t you ground me? I’m crazy. Ask Clevinger.”
“Clevinger? Where is Clevinger? You find Clevinger and I’ll ask him.”
“Then ask any of the others. They’ll tell you how crazy I am.”
“They’re crazy.”
“Then why don’t you ground them?”
“Why don’t they ask me to ground them?”
“Because they’re crazy, that’s why.”
“Of course they’re crazy,” Doc Daneeka replied. “I just told you they’re crazy, didn’t I? And you can’t let crazy people decide whether you’re crazy or not, can you?”
Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. “Is Orr crazy?”
“He sure is,” Doc Daneeka said.
“Can you ground him?”
“I sure can. But first he has to ask me to. That’s part of the rule.”
“Then why doesn’t he ask you to?”
“Because he’s crazy,” Doc Daneeka said. “He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he’s had. Sure, I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.”
“That’s all he has to do to be grounded?”
“That’s all. Let him ask me.”
“And then you can ground him?” Yossarian asked.
“No. Then I can’t ground him.”
“You mean there’s a catch?”
“Sure there’s a catch,” Doc Daneeka replied. “Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.”
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. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
“That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed.
“It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn’t quite sure that he saw it all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby’s eyes. He had Orr’s word to take for the flies in Appleby’s eyes.
“Oh, they’re there, all right,” Orr had assured him about the flies in Appleby’s eyes after Yossarian’s fist fight with Appleby in the officers’ club, “although he probably doesn’t even know it. That’s why he can’t see things as they really are.”
“How come he doesn’t know it?” inquired Yossarian.
“Because he’s got flies in his eyes,” Orr explained with exaggerated patience. “How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?”
It made as much sense as anything else, and Yossarian was willing to give Orr the benefit of the doubt because Orr was from the wilderness outside New York City and knew so much more about wildlife than Yossarian did, and because Orr, unlike Yossarian’s mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, in-law, teacher, spiritual leader, legislator, neighbor and newspaper, had never lied to him about anything crucial before. Yossarian had mulled his newfound knowledge about Appleby over in private for a day or two and then decided, as a good deed, to pass the word along to Appleby himself.
“Appleby, you’ve got flies in your eyes,” he whispered helpfully as they passed by each other in the doorway of the parachute tent on the day of the weekly milk run to Parma.
“What?” Appleby responded sharply, thrown into confusion by the fact that Yossarian had spoken to him at all.
“You’ve got flies in your eyes,” Yossarian repeated. “That’s probably why you can’t see them.”
Appleby retreated from Yossarian with a look of loathing bewilderment and sulked in silence until he was in the jeep with Havermeyer riding down the long, straight road to the briefing room, where Major Danby, the fidgeting group operations officer, was waiting to conduct the preliminary briefing with all the lead pilots, bombardiers and navigators. Appleby spoke in a soft voice so that he would not be heard by the driver or by Captain Black, who was stretched out with his eyes closed in the front seat of the jeep.
“Havermeyer,” he asked hesitantly. “Have I got flies in my eyes?”
Havermeyer blinked quizzically. “Sties?” he asked.
“No, flies,” he was told.
Havermeyer blinked again. “Flies?”
“In my eyes.”
“You must be crazy,” Havermeyer said.
“No, I’m not crazy. Yossarian’s crazy. Just tell me if I’ve got flies in my eyes or not. Go ahead. I can take it.”
Havermeyer popped another piece of peanut brittle into his mouth and peered very closely into Appleby’s eyes.
“I don’t see any,” he announced.
Appleby heaved an immense sigh of relief. Havermeyer had tiny bits of peanut brittle adhering to his lips, chin and cheeks.
“You’ve got peanut brittle crumbs on your face,” Appleby remarked to him.
“I’d rather have peanut brittle crumbs on my face than flies in my eyes,” Havermeyer retorted.
The officers of the other five planes in each flight arrived in trucks for the general briefing that took place thirty minutes later. The three enlisted men in each crew were not briefed at all, but were carried directly out on the airfield to the separate planes in which they were scheduled to fly that day, where they waited around with the ground crew until the officers with whom they had been scheduled to fly swung off the rattling tailgates of the trucks delivering them and it was time to climb aboard and start up. Engines rolled over disgruntledly on lollipop-shaped hardstands, resisting first, then idling smoothly awhile, and then the planes lumbered around and nosed forward lamely over the pebbled ground like sightless, stupid, crippled things until they taxied into the line at the foot of the landing strip and took off swiftly, one behind the other, in a zooming, rising roar, banking slowly into formation over mottled treetops, and circling the field at even speed until all the flights of six had been formed and then setting course over cerulean water on the first leg of the journey to the target in northern Italy or France. The planes gained altitude steadily and were above nine thousand feet by the time they crossed into enemy territory. One of the surprising things always was the sense of calm and utter silence, broken only by the test rounds fired from the machine guns, by an occasional toneless, terse remark over the intercom, and, at last, by the sobering pronouncement of the bombardier in each plane that they were at the I.P. and about to turn toward the target. There was always sunshine, always a tiny sticking in the throat from the rarefied air.
The B-25s they flew in were stable, dependable, dull-green ships with twin rudders and engines and wide wings. Their single fault, from where Yossarian sat as a bombardier, was the tight crawlway separating the bombardier’s compartment in the Plexiglas nose from the nearest escape hatch. The crawlway was a narrow, square, cold tunnel hollowed out bene
ath the flight controls, and a large man like Yossarian could squeeze through only with difficulty. A chubby, moon-faced navigator with little reptilian eyes and a pipe like Aarfy’s had trouble, too, and Yossarian used to chase him back from the nose as they turned toward the target, now minutes away. There was a time of tension then, a time of waiting with nothing to hear and nothing to see and nothing to do but wait as the antiaircraft guns below took aim and made ready to knock them all sprawling into infinite sleep if they could.
The crawlway was Yossarian’s lifeline to outside from a plane about to fall, but Yossarian swore at it with seething antagonism, reviled it as an obstacle put there by providence as part of the plot that would destroy him. There was room for an additional escape hatch right there in the nose of a B-25, but there was no escape hatch. Instead there was the crawlway, and since the mess on the mission over Avignon he had learned to detest every mammoth inch of it, for it slung him seconds and seconds away from his parachute, which was too bulky to be taken up front with him, and seconds and seconds more after that away from the escape hatch on the floor between the rear of the elevated flight deck and the feet of the faceless top turret gunner mounted high above. Yossarian longed to be where Aarfy could be once Yossarian had chased him back from the nose; Yossarian longed to sit on the floor in a huddled ball right on top of the escape hatch inside a sheltering igloo of extra flak suits that he would have been happy to carry along with him, his parachute already hooked to his harness where it belonged, one fist clenching the red-handled rip cord, one fist gripping the emergency hatch release that would spill him earthward into air at the first dreadful squeal of destruction. That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire.
Aarfy had been no use to Yossarian as a navigator or as anything else, and Yossarian drove him back from the nose vehemently each time so that they would not clutter up each other’s way if they had to scramble suddenly for safety. Once Yossarian had driven him back from the nose, Aarfy was free to cower on the floor where Yossarian longed to cower, but he stood bolt upright instead with his stumpy arms resting comfortably on the backs of the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats, pipe in hand, making affable small talk to McWatt and whoever happened to be co-pilot and pointing out amusing trivia in the sky to the two men, who were too busy to be interested. McWatt was too busy responding at the controls to Yossarian’s strident instructions as Yossarian slipped the plane in on the bomb run and then whipped them all away violently around the ravenous pillars of exploding shells with curt, shrill, obscene commands to McWatt that were much like the anguished, entreating nightmare yelpings of Hungry Joe in the dark. Aarfy would puff reflectively on his pipe throughout the whole chaotic clash, gazing with unruffled curiosity at the war through McWatt’s window as though it were a remote disturbance that could not affect him. Aarfy was a dedicated fraternity man who loved cheerleading and class reunions and did not have brains enough to be afraid. Yossarian did have brains enough and was, and the only thing that stopped him from abandoning his post under fire and scurrying back through the crawlway like a yellow-bellied rat was his unwillingness to entrust the evasive action out of the target area to anybody else. There was nobody else in the world he would honor with so great a responsibility. There was nobody else he knew who was as big a coward. Yossarian was the best man in the group at evasive action, but had no idea why.
There was no established procedure for evasive action. All you needed was fear, and Yossarian had plenty of that, more fear than Orr or Hungry Joe, more fear even than Dunbar, who had resigned himself submissively to the idea that he must die someday. Yossarian had not resigned himself to that idea, and he bolted for his life wildly on each mission the instant his bombs were away, hollering, “Hard, hard, hard, hard, you bastard, hard!” at McWatt and hating McWatt viciously all the time as though McWatt were to blame for their being up there at all to be rubbed out by strangers, and everybody else in the plane kept off the intercom, except for the pitiful time of the mess on the mission to Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and began weeping pathetically for help.
“Help him, help him,” Dobbs sobbed. “Help him, help him.”
“Help who? Help who?” called back Yossarian, once he had plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully only a moment before. Oh, God! Oh, God, Oh, God, Yossarian had been pleading wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of the ship by the top of his head, unable to move.
“The bombardier, the bombardier,” Dobbs answered in a cry when Yossarian spoke. “He doesn’t answer, he doesn’t answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier.”
“I’m the bombardier,” Yossarian cried back at him. “I’m the bombardier. I’m all right. I’m all right.”
“Then help him, help him,” Dobbs begged. “Help him, help him.”
And Snowden lay dying in back.
HELL OVER
GERMANY
FROM BOMBER
by LEN DEIGHTON
When a master of characterization, action, and suspense tries his hand at a flying story, the result can be astounding. Len Deighton usually writes spy thrillers. He has written over two dozen books, including The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin, and An Expensive Place to Die. Two of his books are superb flying novels, Goodbye Mickey Mouse, a story of American World War II P-51 pilots, and Bomber, which is a tale of a British night raid on an industrial city in the Ruhr valley gone awry. The RAF marks the wrong town. The bombers pulverize an inoffensive rural village, Altgarden, and slaughter most of the inhabitants.
Bomber is often cited as a powerful anti-war book. Every honest depiction of war is a voice against it, a despairing, futile one. Writers have been accurately describing wars since Thucydides gave it a go and have not yet made a detectable dent. One doubts they ever will. Describing cancer doesn’t cure it.
Bomber is my favorite Deighton book, which is saying a lot. All of his books are terrific; Bomber is in a class by itself. But enough . . . it is time to fly.
Night has fallen over Europe on the 30th day of June, 1943. Bomber crews in Lancasters and Stirlings and pathfinders in Mosquitos are on their way to Germany. They are dodging flak, searching for their target, and they are being stalked by merciless killers in invisible night fighters. . . .
“Levator labii superioris aloequae nasi.” For no reason at all Pilot Officer Fleming, at the controls of The Volkswagen, intoned the words like grace. He had in fact once said it as grace in the Officers’ Mess and had got by unchallenged, but he’d taken care not to do it when the Medical Officer was at table.
“What’s that, sir?” said Bertie, the flight engineer, who thought it might be a technical matter he’d neglected.
Fleming closed his eyes and tilted his head. “It’s the longest name of any muscle in the human body.”
“What’s the name of the shortest one?” said the mid-upper gunner and was promptly answered insultingly, accusingly and unscientifically by the wireless operator.
“O.K., chaps,” said Fleming. “Let’s have a bit of hush.”
Four of the Leiden searchlights had been on for some time but now another six were switch
ed on. “Look at that,” said Fleming.
“Searchlights,” said the flight engineer. In every group of lights there was one that remained vertical. That one was controlled by a Würzburg radar; it was called the master searchlight.
“I’m going to steer a bit to the north, Mac,” Fleming told his navigator. “No sense in heading straight toward that muck.”
“Don’t let’s even head for the fringe of it,” said the flight engineer.
Fleming laughed; perhaps the boy wasn’t such an idiot after all. It was a bad system, training an engineer apart from the crew. Fleming had known the rest of them for weeks, but he’d flown only a few hours with this child, his assistant pilot. Fleming wondered if the boy could handle the controls sufficiently well for him to go back to the lavatory. Next trip he would take that tin can he’d been offered and be grateful for it. Was it fear that did it? He’d noticed that the engineer and the bomb aimer had already been back there. It was easy for them, but he was strapped into the pilot’s seat and getting out of it was a struggle.
Fear should tighten the rectum and bladder, not loosen them, or so his medical training told him. In the Briefing Room he had watched his fellowmen grow pale as fear diverted their newly thinned blood from the skin and the viscera to the brain. That’s why so many had been unable to eat their supper. He’d felt his own heart begin to beat faster as his blood—now red-corpuscle dominated, sugar-rich and laden with adrenalin—rose in pressure. He handled the heavy controls with newly found strength and knew that fear had supplied blood to his muscles and his liver had released carbohydrate into his veins. His lungs benefited too, taking more oxygen in breaths that were both deeper and faster.
The first sight of the searchlights had provided him with further physiological evidence of his fear: loss of peristalsis and gastric juice had turned his supper into a hard knot and his saliva had gone, so that his tongue was rough against his mouth. Lastly, his scrotum had constricted tight against his body. Resulting from these changes Fleming believed he could detect a rise in body temperature as a result of the increased basal metabolic rate. To confirm his theory a trickle of sweat rolled down his spine. His father—a truly dedicated physician—would be interested to hear of these observations.
On Glorious Wings Page 24
