SOURCE: Pratt, John Clark. “Yossarian's Legacy: Catch-22 and the Vietnam War.” In Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, pp. 88-110. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

[In the following essay, Pratt explores parallels between Catch-22 and the experience of fighting in the Vietnam War.]

At the outset, I must confess to some unintentional skullduggery. When going to Vietnam in the summer of 1969, I took with me a copy of Catch-22. From what I knew then about the war, I suspected that reviewing the plight of Yossarian from time to time might provide some continued reassurance that my world at war would not really be any more insane than Joseph Heller's.

I could not know, of course, that the colonel seated next to me throughout that long, ominous flight would comment on my choice of fiction and provide me with some early material for my novel, The Laotian Fragments. In Fragments, Major Bill Blake also reads Catch-22 on the flight over, and when the colonel asks about the book (obviously not having heard of it), Blake tells him only that it is “a novel about World War II.” Returning for his second tour, the colonel observes, “That was a real war … not like this one” (9). Later, Blake signs many of his official memos “Love, Yossarian.”

Naturally, those of us who knew Catch-22 could not help but see some obvious parallels to Vietnam, and almost all of them involved the fact of conflicting realities that lie at the core of Heller's vision of the modern world. Vietnam was a “conflict” that was neither a war nor a Korean “police action.” In Vietnam, many of us became involved in operations that we could not talk about, even to people who were also involved in often contiguous operations that they couldn't talk about either. We discovered that the war had been going on longer than even many of the senior commanders knew and that it was being fought in and by countries that professed neutrality and noninvolvement. What FNG (Fucking New Guy) who knew Catch-22 could help but wonder, when visiting either the Saigon exchanges or the stalls in Cholon, where Milo Minderbinder might be? And who of us can ever forget the sense of incredible irony when we exited the aircraft that had brought us to Vietnam and heard the phrase that only Heller could have written, spoken perfunctorily by an obviously veteran stewardess: “Hope you enjoyed your flight. See you in a year.”

General comparisons are one thing, but the unreal reality, the actuality of Catch-22 provided specifics as well to all of us who knew the novel—so many, so often, and so incredibly true that the book should properly be seen as a paradigm for the Vietnam War itself. When looking at the “facts” as well as at the fiction written about the war, to ignore what Heller has written is to obfuscate, misunderstand, and more dangerously, I think, distort what the Vietnam experience really was.

Let us look first at the “fact,” then at the fiction. In Dispatches, Michael Herr said it best: “You couldn't avoid the way in which things got mixed, the war itself with those parts of the war that were just like the movies, just like The Quiet American or Catch-22 (a Nam standard because it said that in a war everybody thinks that everybody else is crazy) …” (210). It's Yossarian, of course, who tells the chaplain, “Everybody is crazy but us” (14), a feeling that I know was held by many of the pilots who flew north from Thailand (a country not at war) into the Red River Valley or against the Thanh Hoa bridge, taking the same routes at the same times day after day, experiencing ever-increasing flak from antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missile sites that had been off-limits for enough time to allow the North Vietnamese to make them operational. Still classified, for instance, are the details about a senior officer's being relieved of command because he authorized and planned an attack against SAM sites under construction, but just as the armed aircraft were readying for takeoff, the mission was canceled from Washington. In all this, one recalls Milo's having alerted the German antiaircraft artillery in order to “be fair to both sides” during the attack on the highway bridge at Orvieto (261).

There were the medals, too. In Catch-22, “men went mad and were rewarded with medals” (16), often for deeds they never did. So too in Vietnam, where a Bronze Star was practically assured, especially to Saigon desk soldiers who had typewriters, and many of the medals, even though deserved, were awarded for fictional heroics because the actual sites of the events were not officially admitted to be in the war zone. Even today, many heroes cannot reveal that the citations on their truly deserved awards are invented. Similarly, and more paradoxical, is the fact of the missing names from the Vietnam War Memorial, names of those Americans killed in action while in combat against the VC, North Vietnamese, or Pathet Lao before the “official” date of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Any one of these men would have made a fitting tentmate for Yossarian, like “Mudd the unknown soldier who had never had a chance.” As was Mudd, these men are “really unknown” (112) and should be recognized.

The parallels continue. Although few pilots were privy to the facts of the regular “Tuesday lunch” in Washington where all missions into North Vietnam were approved personally by the president, some of the fighter pilots' songs such as “Mañana” showed that someone, at least, understood:

Before we fly a mission
And everything's o.k.
Mac[namara] has to get permission from
Flight Leader LBJ.

(Pratt, Voices 248)

One is reminded of Clevinger's quivering rationalization, “But it's not for us to determine what targets must be destroyed or who's to destroy them. … There are men entrusted with winning the war who are in a much better position than we are to decide what targets have to be bombed” (127). A major target in North Vietnam was, of course, the Thanh Hoa bridge, which was not destroyed until the last days of the war despite ingenious attempts such as Project “Carolina Moon” on May 30, 1966. A specially modified C-130 was to drop 5,000-pound “pancake” bombs about 8 feet in diameter. At night, at 400 feet and 150 knots, the C-130 delivered five bombs near the bridge, then returned to base despite heavy groundfire. The next day's reconnaissance revealed no sign of damage or exploded bombs. One wonders if Yossarian would have returned to the target that night, as another C-130 did “with only slight modification in its route of flight.” This aircraft disappeared and was never heard from again (LaValle 52-55). Yossarian made his second bombing run over the bridge on the river Po, and when asked why, he replies, “We'd have had to go back there again. … And maybe there would have been more losses, with the bridge still left standing” (142).

Not only bridges but mountain passes too provide irony for both Catch-22 and the Vietnam War. In Catch-22, an attempt is made to interdict a road in order to block two armored divisions coming down from Austria. The plan is to destroy a small mountain village that “will certainly tumble right down and pile up on the road.” Dunbar objects: “What the hell difference will it make? … It will only take them a couple of days to clear it” (335). Colonel Korn refuses to listen. “We don't care about the roadblock,” he says. “Colonel Cathcart wants to come out of this mission with a good, clean aerial photograph he won't be ashamed to send through channels” (337). The hundreds of air force and navy pilots who flew missions against Vietnam's Mu Gia or Ban Karai passes may see some real truth here.

There are many more episodes in Catch-22 that seemed to prefigure the facts of aerial combat in Vietnam, not the least of which is the question of the number of missions, the basis of the concept of the phrase “Catch-22” itself. To document the various Vietnam War mission requirements for awards and decorations and for rotation home would require a book-length computer printout; it is enough to say that some missions counted, others did not, depending upon the dates they were flown, the country to which they were directed, and the Rules of Engagement at the time. I often heard pilots say “Catch-22” when these rules were changed, but thanks to their understanding of Heller's concept, most of them accepted with grace what they knew was craziness. As one F-4 pilot put it:

Flew on Dave Connett's wing on his final mission. It was a spectacular display for his finale. The night was moonless and we were using napalm and CBU's on a storage area. The above mission turned out to be my final one also. I completed 102 in all but, because of a ruling halfway through the tour, some of the missions into Laos didn't count after 1 February 1966.

(Pratt, Voices 239)

Other events of note are the sad prefiguring of fragging in the plot to kill Colonel Cathcart, and the unpublicized, but severe infighting among and within the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, and Department of Defense as well as among the services, as can be seen in General Peckem's plan to grab control of all commands. There is also the frightening rationality of Ex-PFC Wintergreen when we first meet him in the novel. He has no objection to digging holes at Lowry field “as long as there was a war going on.” His reason: “It's a matter of duty, … 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” (108-109). It is a recorded fact that candidates for admission to the service academies presented higher and higher test scores as the Vietnam War progressed, and that when the draft was rescinded in 1972, resignations of cadets suddenly increased. While teaching Catch-22 during this period at the United States Air Force Academy, I heard many slightly embarrassed laughs from my draft-exempt students when I highlighted Wintergreen's credo. One cannot argue with reason—or with Ex-PFC Wintergreen, wherever he may be today.

It's quite apparent, then, that in both general and specific areas, Catch-22 did indeed provide a paradigm for many aspects of the Vietnam War. And as those just starting in the military during the mid-1950s snidely called some commanders Captain Queeg, so did the names Colonel Cathcart and Major Major pass often from the lips of the Vietnam-era military men. Catch-22 as novel had influenced our thinking, but Vietnam as Catch-22 itself affected our immediate existence.

I believe, too, that knowing Heller's work, seeing such irony and paradox come alive, made many of us more able to cope with the unreal reality of Vietnam. Nothing but Catch-22 could have prepared us, for instance, for the initially unreported firing of General John D. LaVelle, Commander of Seventh Air Force, Saigon. His testimony before Congress in June 1972 has dialogue that could have been written by Heller himself. Having authorized “protective reaction” (a Helleresque term) air strikes against a buildup of North Vietnamese missiles and equipment in an area near the Laos-North Vietnam border, LaVelle explained his actions. A questioner (Mr. Pike) asked:

Were you concerned that the bomb damage report showed damage to trucks or a SAM transporter or to POL, rather than to something [the missiles themselves] that you were allowed to hit?
GENERAL Lavelle:
No, Sir.
MR. Pike:
Tell us why. You said they were missile-related equipment. Is that it?
GENERAL Lavelle:
Yes, sir.
MR. Pike:
Did you feel that under the rules of engagement, as you interpreted them, your right to attack missiles would include a missile on a transporter?
GENERAL Lavelle:
Yes, sir.
MR. Pike:
When you say these trucks were missile-related equipment, how were they missile-related equipment?
GENERAL Lavelle:
We had picked up, or identified by reconnaissance, missiles on transporters parked along-side the road, waiting for the bad weather, to come through the pass, to come into Laos. They were never alone. The missiles had associated equipment, generator, vans, fuel, or just equipment for the personnel. But we never found a missile on a transporter by itself. We found missiles and trucks with them. …
MR. Pike:
Would it have been permissible for you to have hit those targets between the 26th and the 31st of December?
GENERAL Lavelle:
26th and 31st; yes, sir.
MR. Pike:
Would it have been permissible for you to have hit those targets on the 17th and 18th of February?
GENERAL Lavelle:
No, sir, because of their location.

(Pratt, Voices 521-522)

These incidents, taken primarily from air force experiences, show the pervasive quality of Catch-22ness in Vietnam, but there are so many more examples. Perhaps some future article will portray the colonel, in charge of a classified research project in Saigon, who would stride like Cathcart up and down the aisle between two rows of diligent writers, screaming, “Do not say that an F-4 cannot hit a truck. Do not say …” I hope, too, that someone, sometime will find, declassify, and write the story about the discovery during the height of the bombing of a yacht being transported down the Ho Chi Minh trail as a gift from the Chinese government to the leader of Cambodia, Prince Sihanouk, or about the episode of the seeding of a wetting agent on the same trail complex to create continuous mud, leading one high official to comment that it was “better to make mud, not war.” Unfortunately, the rains washed out the experiment. Or the time a pilot who was not supposed to be stationed in Vientiane, Laos, had an affair with the daughter of the North Vietnamese ambassador. There are so many of these stories, and they are all sadly and wonderfully ironic. So Catch-22.

Many fiction writers have, however, attempted to apply Catch-22 to the Vietnam War by direct reference, analogy, echo, and in a few instances parody. In the vast literature of the war (more than four hundred novels, hundreds of poems, short stories, and plays), the existence of Catch-22 appears to be a given, but some writers believe that Heller did not go far enough. In Charles Durden's No Bugles, No Drums, for example, PFC Jamie Hawkins begins to feel “like I was ODing on absurdity. … Things get so outa hand that nothin' makes sense. … Alice in Wonderland was gettin' to be timid shit next to this.” He remembers “readin' a book called Catch-22” and believing that “this dude's gotta be crazy. He was. But he wasn't crazy enough” (207). Similarly, Ward Just, in To What End, reflects on “the similarity of the soldier and the war correspondent, the basic text for which comes from Joseph Heller's novel, Catch-22. On the one hand, no one wants to get ambushed or to be where bullets are fired in anger. On the other, if nothing happens there is no story. If the patrol does meet the enemy you are likely to be killed or wounded, or at the very least scared to death. Catch-23” (181).

Critic and veteran Philip Beidler (who first identified the above Catch-22 references) believes that writers had difficulty portraying post-Catch-22 Vietnam because they could not write “a Catch-22 about Catch-22.” “At best,” Beidler says, “Catch-22, with its almost sublime spirit of absurd apocalypse, seemed to bear on the attempt to make literary sense of Vietnam only insofar as it suggested something like a set of mathematical upper limits” (11). Because Vietnam became “Catch-22 come giddily real” (145), Beidler feels that those who wrote about the war as Heller had done for World War II produced works that were only “Catch-21 1/2 or 3/4 or 7/8” (63).

It is certainly true that Heller's chaplain had already seemed to set the Vietnam experience in concrete: “So many monstrous events were occurring that he was no longer positive which events were monstrous and which were really taking place” (287). But I think that Beidler's assessment needs emending. Many writers did try to equal Heller, and some, I think, succeeded, simply by writing about the war as they saw it. Of the nine major novels that would probably not have been written without Catch-22 as a model, five are essentially realistic (with Catch-22 situations, characters, and overtones), while only four use Pianosalike settings and characters that, in Heller's words, “could obviously not accommodate all of the actions described” (5). These four are the fanciful Ears of the Jungle, 1972, by Pierre Boule; Gangland, 1982, by David Winn; Brandywine's War, 1971, by Robert Vaughn and Monroe Lynch; and the remarkable novel Bridge Fall Down, 1985, by Nicholas Rinaldi. The other novels, listed in order of their internally dateable realism, are The Land of a Million Elephants, 1970, by Asa Baber (1960-1961); Parthian Shot, 1975, by Lloyd Little (1964); Incident at Muc Wa, 1967, by Daniel Ford (1964), The Only War We've Got, 1970, by Derek Maitland (1967); and The Bamboo Bed, 1969, by William Eastlake (1967-1968). Each of these novels moves so deftly from the real to the surreal and back again that a reader not versed in many of the facts of the Vietnam War does not know when he or she is reading fiction or when the events are real—an effect the writers intended. As a result, these books succeed differently than does Catch-22 and become particularly representative of the real unreality of the Vietnam War.

In any of these nine novels, however, one needs only to meet the characters to recognize whose world—Joseph Heller's—they are entering. In Baber's The Land of a Million Elephants, for instance, a U.S. colonel spends most of his time in Chanda (Laos) on a roof watching the beautiful Wampoon, mistress to the king; Nadolsky, the Russian agent, gets excited by listening on his electronic device to his CIA counterpart make love; M/Sgt Campo keeps looking for the nonexistent PX; and Coakley, the effeminate State Department clerk, prances throughout the novel. There are also Indian, North Vietnamese, American, and Laotian characters who constantly protest each other's truce violations. Many of these characters, however, are thinly veiled satires of actual participants in the unbelievable events of 1960-1961 Laos, and if one knows the history, one will recognize the little Captain Kong Le playing himself.

Parthian Shot begins with Special Forces Team A-376 being notified that it has been shipped home two weeks earlier; thus it is no longer in Vietnam. The team contains a second lieutenant who can't be promoted, he suspects, because his voice is too high and a sergeant who starts Hoa Hoa Unlimited, Ltd., first to make VC flags, then to manufacture fake AK-47s. Hoa Hoa Unlimited, Ltd., later branches out into brassieres and blouses, sells stock, receives a Small Business Administration loan, and finally commissions a RAND Corporation study that advises them to cooperate with both the VC and the U.S. commands. Eventually, their enterprise becomes international in scope.

Similarly, Incident at Muc Wa, a novel that was billed as “The Catch-22 of the War in Southeast Asia,” introduces a general who has no unit patch on his shoulder but who chews everyone out for not wearing one, a Christian Scientist medic who juices vegetables and even field grass for his health, and a captain who will do anything to get a combat infantryman's badge. In this novel, the Americans shoot most of the Vietnamese they encounter, in part because the major has ordered them to report two enemy casualties for every one of their own, while in sector headquarters everyone keeps watching the “master mosquito-control chart.”

Although called by the Times Literary Supplement “The Catch-22 of the 1970's,” Maitland's The Only War We've Got becomes Helleresque more from its selection of fact-based targets of satire than from the inventiveness of its author. Commanding General Windy asks his secretary to spy on his second-in-command, General Cretan, “to find out what he's plot … I mean thinking” (34), while General Cretan's secretary is doing the same thing to him. There are two U.S. ambassadors to Saigon, each of whom thinks he is in charge. One of them devises a plan to dress everyone in VC pajamas for security reasons and trumpets his intention to defoliate the entire country. Also appearing are an NVA unit that loves the Hershey bars left behind by Americans; a soldier named Leaping Prick Smith who, because of his few drops of Sioux blood, keeps cheering the outcome of Custer movie reruns; and the great “Happy Hour Shutdown” when no American aircraft are available for combat.

Of these realistically centered novels, Eastlake's The Bamboo Bed is probably the most like Catch-22. The title refers both to the underground love nest of the mysterious and beautiful Madame Dieudonné and to the helicopter in which Captain Knightbridge and the nurse keep setting altitude records for having sex. Captain Clancy goes into battle wearing a plumed helmet and sword, marching to the beat of his drummerboy. B-52 crews drink martinis on their way to a mission, while below, the hippies Bethany and Pike are on their “way to the front to give flowers to the troops” (73-74). There is also a black sergeant who wants to surrender all the white men in his company to the VC; and Captain Knightbridge's crew consists of men named Disraeli Pong, Lavender the Purple Negro, and Ozz, his copilot, who like his Catch-22 namesake Orr, has a “secret dream.” Only the location is different. Ozz wants “to fly to Katmandu and declare himself neutral” (132).

Although the fanciful Catch-22 follow-on novels are patently unrealistic in setting as well as character, each shares a common subject: the use and impact of U.S. technology not only in the war but also (often by not too subtle association) on the future of the world as well. These novels are all darkly prophetic, and each is really a warning more about the future (as is Catch-22 itself) than it is about the war in which it is supposedly set.

Pierre Boule's Ears of the Jungle, for instance, while probably the most simplistic, inaccurate, and juvenile of any of the novels, does offer an apocalyptic vision of technology defeating itself. Based loosely on Task Force Alpha, the electronic nerve center of the Air Force's Laotian bombing efforts, Boule's novel shows what can happen when a beautiful NVA spy manages to compromise the electronic targeting system by placing audiotapes beside truck-spotting sensors. Madame Ngha also manages to reprogram the center's computer to call in airstrikes on itself, but she manages to get herself blown up as well. In this novel, U.S. air raids kill enough water buffalo to feed the North Vietnamese, an American officer waits to destroy a hamlet until his tanks can have their carburetors adjusted to reduce air pollution, and Air Force pilots read detective stories while flying missions.

Much more incisive (although patently derivative) is Vaughn and Lynch's Brandywine's War, which is really Catch-22 set in Vietnam and which perfectly exemplifies what Beidler has cited as the difficulty of writing Catch-22 about Catch-22. CWO Brandywine, a helicopter pilot, generates insane memos and telephone calls that everyone believes. Characters include Sgt. Percival, NCOIC of Defecation Elimination, and the hippie “unsoldier” who is in Vietnam by mistake and has an “unfile” that he can't inspect. The “unsoldier” eventually expands his marijuana business into an international cartel, but can never be sent home because he's not officially assigned to Vietnam. There are also General Deegle, who is obsessed with his rashes and keeps sprinkling baby powder in his crotch, and Lt. Soverign, the chaplain misassigned as a helicopter pilot who, like Yossarian, runs away in the end. An indictment of practically everything about the Vietnam War, this novel lacks Catch-22's overwhelming sense of humanity and merely stops, implying the endlessness of the war and the authors' conviction that nothing will change.

The last two novels to be noted here go far beyond the Vietnam War. They are to the war what the war was to Catch-22; in other words, they show that the absurdity and craziness seen in Vietnam have become a part of the present and, alarmingly, the future as well. Most of Winn's Gangland takes place in post-Vietnam War California, where the Women's Defense League patrols the streets with M-16s, the Fast-food Marxists are everywhere, and the lotzl's (young female medical students) give the men backrubs and, flaunting their sexuality, live chaste lives while eating only health food. As it conducted (rather imperfectly) the Vietnam War, so does the master computer ANIMA still control the present as it sends personal LED messages to Dunkle, the protagonist, on any available video screen. No one except Dunkle appreciates what the Vietnam experience, referred to again and again as “the greatest adventure of our generation,” really means. In the Vietnam scenes, ANIMA is linked with the Weary Weasel box in the company compound, and because of this black box, the men are able to take pictures and “interpret” the meaning of the war's development. Unfortunately, power outages and faulty data predominate, so no one really knows anything, not even how Dunkle's friend has died. Two of the significant characters are Madame Verrukteswerke, who is in Vietnam writing a “series on the children of the Americans left in the military” (104), and the Green Man, “who looks like a disease-wasted gas station mechanic.” Everyone knows, however, that he is really a colonel (99). By the end of the novel, Dunkle has admitted that “things are hopeless” and that any change will “probably be for the worse, so the best thing to do is mind your own business as best you can” (221).

Finally, it seems entirely appropriate that the ultimate Catch-22 novel about the Vietnam War is actually, despite many reviewers' attributions, not about the Vietnam War at all—but it has to be, even if it isn't. Bridge Fall Down, author Rinaldi tells us carefully in phrases scattered throughout the novel, is not set in Africa, but it does take place somewhere near the equator in a tropical, Asiatic country where the “monkeys from the North” are trying, with the help of all Communist countries, to conquer the “monkeys from the South,” assisted by the Americans. One character mentions that some time ago, “the French were here” (92), and the mad general who leads the patrol is about fifty and had served during the Korean War when he was twenty-seven years old. Nowhere is Vietnam ever mentioned—but the subject is really the Vietnam War made timeless, much like Joe Haldeman's use of Vietnam as paradigm in his futuristic novel The Forever War, published in 1974.

In Bridge Fall Down, a patrol that includes two women, one of whom is the group's sharpshooter, is on a mission to blow up a vital enemy bridge (one immediately thinks of Thanh Hoa). Their meals are delivered by air, cooked by the pilot-chef Sugarman who apologizes for not bringing caviar to supplement his gourmet offerings of steak, swordfish, or scallopini. Under continual but sporadic attack from friend and foe, the patrol is being constantly filmed by Meyerbeer, who many suspect is actually running the war from his rainbow-painted helicopter. More randomly than in Incident at Muc Wa, these American soldiers kill even the friendly “monkeys” indiscriminately, and every time they pass a village, the brutal Sugg rapes someone. Central to their mission is the “black box,” a small computer carried by a man known only as Merlin, who uses it to communicate with headquarters, to navigate, to forecast the weather, to spot the enemy (but like the Weary Weasel box of Gangland this one doesn't always work), and to carry on a running chess game with a Russian master. When Merlin is killed, no one else knows how to use the box—so the patrol is forced to complete its mission on its own. During a journey that often resembles a mad Odyssey set in Wonderland, the patrol passes a symbolic tree covered with hanging skeletons, meets the Queen of Skulls, escapes from the Falling Down disease, is tracked by a UFO, and has a battle at the Resort on the Lake, where vacationers from all parts of the world have come to swim, sunbathe, water ski, and relax. One might say that Bridge Fall Down, like The Forever War, concerns what might have happened if the U.S. had remained in Vietnam—but unlike Haldeman's book, Rinaldi's novel contains all the ingredients of both Catch-22 and the Vietnam War and also presents characters (like Heller's) who really matter.

Other Vietnam novels also contain references to and echoes of Catch-22, but these nine seem to me to be the most obvious in their derivation. The first five differ most, though, in their realistic bases. Often, such as in Baber's The Land of a Million Elephants or in Maitland's The Only War We've Got, one can recognize the real people being satirized. In Elephants, for instance, Colonel Kelly is based on Colonel “Bull” Simons who commanded the clandestine “White Star” teams in Laos, whose mission was to train the Lao against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao. Also, much of the apparent madness such as Russians and Americans both training the same people or Kong Le's vacillating politics and actions actually did happen. Maitland's General Windy is based on General “Westy” Westmoreland, and Windy's deputy and successor, General Cretan, is a parody of General Creighton Abrams, who succeeded Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. Also, there actually were two U.S. ambassadors in Saigon, and Maitland's portrait of Ambassador Risher satirizes Special Ambassador Komer who initiated and directed the controversial CORDS project for revolutionary development. Likewise in Parthian Shot, the base camp in the delta is entirely realistic, and many of the unit's activities ring true. The camp at Muc Wa, too, derives from actual plans for such outposts, and the relationships between the American advisers and their Montagnard raiders are poignantly accurate. Even in The Bamboo Bed, as many Vietnam veterans will attest, much of the apparent madness is real, especially the ground combat scenes.

What one sees, I think, in the best Vietnam novels is precisely what Beidler identifies as “Catch-22 come giddily real.” Consider this interchange in Incident at Muc Wa. Two officers are discussing the impending attack against the recently built outpost. Says Major Barber, “Charlie's thrown a whole battalion against Muc Wa—would he be doing that if it wasn't important to him?” Captain Olivetti replies, “Well, sir, maybe he's thinking the same thing. Maybe he's throwing men in there because he thinks it's important to us” (146). As in an earlier novel, Jonathan Rubin's The Barking Deer (1974), one side is reacting to what it sees the other side doing—the effect becomes the cause—and the real reason for the action does not exist. Catch-22, verily.

There are many other examples of Catch-22 dilemmas in the fiction, usually expressed in equally authentic Catch-22 dialogue. In The Land of a Million Elephants, as they watch the entire population of the capital of Chanda (Laos) flee to the countryside, the king, U.S. Colonel Kelly, and the Russian Nadolsky reflect on their respective predicaments. Says the king, “How can I be king without my people?” Complains Colonel Kelly, “How can we advise an army we haven't got?” Reflects Nadolsky, “How can the confrontation of the Twentieth Century be brought to conclusion in dialectical terms, if we have no people to sway?” (208). The answers are identical, of course, but each will continue trying to succeed, even if he knows he can't.

Beidler notes one of the most obvious examples of Catch-22 dialogue in The Bamboo Bed. Two characters talk:

“Why are you shooting at them?”

“Because they are shooting at us.”

“Who is shooting at whom?”

“Everyone is shooting at each other.”

“Why?”

“War.”

(Beidler 54)

My favorite passage in the same novel is this interchange which, like so many of Heller's, sets up a comic perspective, develops it, and then abruptly presents a horrible resolution. Two soldiers discuss the news:

“I heard on the radio transmitter this morning that Clancy's outfit got wiped out,” Oliver said.

“You mean all killed? Not Clancy too?”

“We reckon.”

“Did you report this to Captain Knightbridge?”

“No.”

“That's supposed to be our job.”

“I didn't want him to feel bad,” Oliver said.

“Our job is to report what we hear on the transmitter.”

“I didn't want to make the captain feel bad,” Oliver said.

“How is Search and Rescue going to rescue people if you don't report who needs to be rescued?”

“They don't need to be rescued.”

“Explain. Explain.”

“They're all dead,” Oliver said.

(Eastlake 41)

Likewise in Brandywine's War, the following discussion involves Lt. Soverign, the chaplain who has been mistakenly sent to Vietnam as a pilot:

“I'm not a pilot,” Soverign told the check-out pilot that afternoon as they started their ascent.

“He's not a pilot,” the check-out pilot told Major Casey after he had barely managed to recover the aircraft from a near-crash landing.

“He's not a pilot,” Major Casey told General Deegle after he had talked to the check-out pilot.

General Deegle had the Department of the Army TWX'd. They pulled Soverign's data card … and inserted it into their UNIVAC.

“He's a pilot,” DA told General Deegle.

“You will fly,” Major Casey told Lieutenant Soverign.

“I'll get killed!” Soverign protested.

“A lot of pilots are getting killed,” Major Casey said. …

“I'm afraid to fly.”

“A lot of pilots are afraid to fly.”

(22-23)

Hardly afraid, but just as derivative, is North Vietnamese Colonel Khanh in Maitland's The Only War We've Got. Having been smuggled into Saigon in a coffin, Khanh is told by his local cadre commander, “We read in the newspaper that your regiment had been wiped out in the Central Highlands.” Khanh replies:

“My dear sir … If we took the time to add up all the Communists the Americans claimed to have killed so far in this war, South Vietnam would be a nation of ghosts.”

“Colonel,” said Tran, “I would like to introduce you to Nguyen Hue, who is directing the funerals. Nguyen Hue's various, er enterprises in Saigon have served us well.” Nguyen Hue stepped forward and bowed low.

“It is an honor to …”

“Shoot him,” Colonel Khanh snapped.

“What?”

“Shoot him. He knows too much. We cannot risk jeopardizing our mission.”

“But we cannot shoot him,” Tran protested. “Not yet. …”

“Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” Khanh breathed. “O.K. We'll shoot him in the morning.”

(233)

In the same novel, General Windy is upset when two American platoons are wiped out by the enemy while only four NVA are reported killed. He is relieved, however, when he is told:

“It's like this, sir. The official body count was only four, the intelligence officer said that unofficially it could be as high as four hundred and seventy-five—you know, blood trails, fire ratio, allowances for wounded and all that.”

The General's color rushed back into his cheeks, and he sighed with relief. “Phew. That's better. Then it's not really a defeat, is it?”

“I guess not, sir.”

“And if it's not really a defeat, it must be victory.”

“I guess you're right, sir.”

(79)

Such conflicting realities are seen often in the Catch-22-influenced fiction. Perhaps the most ironic occurs in Parthian Shot, where an American general meets a North Vietnamese general at the invitation of Hoa Hoa Unlimited, Ltd. Both generals are interested in investing in the enterprise, and both have been told that the other is a defector to his cause. They talk about the “enemy,” and NVA General Phat asks, “Between us, Arlington [a rather funereal name], how soon do you think we can defeat them?” The American replies, “To be honest, Phat, I don't know. We can win, but the enemy is tough. And persistent. They're a lot tougher than we figured.” Thinking that Arlington the “defector” is on his side, General Phat replies, “You're right there. Our original timetable to win this war was five years. We never thought they would commit as many men and supplies as they have” (270). The bottom line, however, turns out to be profit when the Communist and capitalist generals both buy stock in Hoa Hoa Unlimited, Ltd., because of the same, convincingly apolitical sales pitch: “All of this … was built and paid for by the people themselves. And the people get the profits” (268). Everybody, as Milo Minderbinder would say, gets a share.

Similarly, in Bridge Fall Down, Meyerbeer is officially filming the attempt to blow up the bridge for the Corps and has established interlocking corporations in Hollywood, West Berlin, and Tokyo to produce and distribute his movie. He sells stock to everyone but plans to liquidate the companies at the war's end and force his stockholders into bankruptcy. His sales pitch: “When you get back to the states, you can retire and live off the dividends” (45).

Likewise in Brandywine's War, Sergeant Coty, who has requisitioned thousands of yards of Astroturf for one of his ventures, trades his Vietnamese real-estate holdings for a half share of the “unsoldier's” marijuana business, and together they form the Greater East Asian Company Prosperity Sphere conglomerate, which rents a Saigon villa to the local VC commander. And like the business ventures of Parthian Shot, one unit in this novel also makes VC flags for extra money.

At least one outfit has problems that even Milo Minderbinder might not be able to solve. In The Bamboo Bed, the SAR unit has been issued two bridges for one river, so it sells one to the VC, who have none. Because of political considerations, the VC want to sell their bridge back to the Americans so that they can have a bridge to blow up, because they've blown up all the other ones around.

As did the real war, the fiction of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam presents startling individual echoes of Catch-22. In addition to the dialogue, the emphasis on “business,” and the obvious character echoes, one should consider the following parallels. On the war in general: “The problem with this war is that it is out of human control” (Eastlake 251). On the bombing of one's own troops, like Milo's attack on his own base: in Incident at Muc Wa, Corporal Conney leads his Montagnard raiders on a fake attack against Muc Wa in order to impress the visiting U.S. General Hardnetz, but they find themselves a part of a real NVA attack on the base, thus disrupting the statistics of the Saigon-based “Incident-Flow-Priority-Indicator.” In Bridge Fall Down, even General Trask cannot call off a programmed B-52 strike (which Meyerbeer films) against his own troops. The only casualty—reminding one of Elpenor, the lost sailor in the Odyssey—is a man named Polymer, from Plastic, Idaho.

As for promotion problems similar to those of Major Major, that of the tenor lieutenant in Parthian Shot has already been noted. In addition, Captain Carmondy in Brandywine's War will never make major because General Deegle likes “the alliteration of the phrase. … Captain Carmondy was doomed to remain a captain forever, trapped by the poetry of his name” (49).

Echoing the old Italian's view in Catch-22 of eventual victory by losing is the village chief in Bridge Fall Down, who claims that his people are “friendly with anybody who's willing to be friends. They're even friendly with their enemies [the northern ‘monkeys’]. They have no guns and know they'd lose any war they got involved in, so for them … war is a bad idea” (93).

Even the inquisition of Catch-22's chaplain is echoed in the trial of Brandywine's War's B. Dowling Mudd (one suspects dual derivation here), and what Heller presents as one naked man at war becomes a full-scale battle in Parthian Shot when a VC unit strips in order better to be able to identify its enemy, but then the South Vietnamese unit does likewise. Brandywine's War, too, has an important PFC, but unlike Ex-PFC Wintergreen, PFC Hill operates in the foreground and, claiming to be the son of the secretary of defense, controls General Deegle and as result the whole Vietnam War.

What permeates all of these Vietnam novels is the Catch-22 concept of craziness, mentioned earlier as Yossarian's belief that “everyone is crazy but us.” To Simon in Bridge Fall Down, the war becomes a “madness, a wild, blistering insanity that he didn't understand, and wanted desperately to get away from” (104). In The Bamboo Bed, Captain Knightbridge thinks “he must be going crazy.” Except for the Asians in his helicopter unit (all of whom are actually VC agents), he believes that “all the rest are after me. Picture a naked man being chased by seventy-eight million Asians” (147). Yossarian, at least, could take refuge in a tree. Most derivative, however, is the craziness of Weintraub, the former war protester in the same novel, who says that he feels “fine” after dropping napalm:

“That is why I want to check and see if I'm going crazy,” Weintraub said.

“You're not going crazy, Weintraub,” Appelfinger said.

“Sure?”

“Yes. I know enough about evolution to know that man adapts.”

“You mean that if he adapts to insanity he's not going crazy?”

“Yes,” Appelfinger said.

“But he's crazy if he doesn't become crazy? If everyone else is crazy?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that?”

“Because we have to set a norm,” Appelfinger said.

“Even if that norm is crazy, it's called a mean. …”

“It's an interesting theory. That I am not crazy.”

“It's not a theory, it's a fact. … I promise you it's a fact.”

“Why did everybody laugh when I said the Bamboo Bed was our conscience?”

“Because,” Appelfinger said, “those guys in the Bamboo Bed are crazy. They are against both sides and they are for both sides. In any book, that's crazy.”

“Yes, I guess it is,” Weintraub said.

(296)

Says Philip Beidler, writing about Ward Just's “real” vision of the Vietnam War as expressed in To What End, “Joseph Heller could have written it, but he could not have written it better, because it was already true” (62). Well, Heller did foresee the major contradictions of the Vietnam War, but he built better than perhaps he knew, and he also presented a protagonist, Yossarian, with a final choice that is denied his fictional legatees. In the majority of the novels not mentioned in this essay, many of the characters do embark on a quest similar to Yossarian's—and for much the same reason—“to survive” (Heller 30). In Tim O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, for instance, Private Paul Berlin has but one goal: “to live long enough to establish goals worth living still longer for” (27); and in many of the Vietnam War novels that do not use Catch-22 as a point of departure, the major characters engage in the same quest for survival as does Yossarian.

Not so in the novels discussed above. If any of the characters survive, they do so by chance, and their main objectives are to exist within the madness, not escape it. Even if they do survive the war, they will encounter a similar environment at home. For them, no Swedish sanctuary exists. Although Yossarian's initial goal is only to get to Rome, he like his alter ego Chief Bromden in Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, still is able to get out. Not so fortunate are their fictional heirs.

One need only to compare the endings of the novels discussed in this essay to see how different their authors' visions are from Heller's vision. In The Bamboo Bed, for instance, everyone dies in a surrealistic assimilation of the helicopter with nature: “When the Bamboo Bed came out on the other side there was nothing left … forever lost, disappeared, eaten by tigers, enveloped in the gentle, tomblike Asian night” (350). In Parthian Shot, the entire village, including the Americans who have stayed to run Hoa Hoa Unlimited, Ltd., which has so improved the local conditions, is obliterated by a misdirected American bombing strike. Brandywine's War, as noted earlier, merely stops, its truncated ending showing that nothing will change. In the final scene of Incident at Muc Wa, all die, including the American adviser who might have escaped but chooses to return to see if any of his indigenous friends are still alive. In The Land of a Million Elephants, the American solution, a nuclear airstrike, is thwarted only by the local “phi,” the spirits of the land and the country, and instead of destruction, the bombs create only flowers and little mushrooms. The people of Ears of the Jungle destroy themselves, and the protagonist of Gangland, one of the few survivors in these apocalyptic novels, wants only to be let alone in a crazy world that is bound to get even worse.

Another main character survives, too, but at tremendous cost. Jonathan Wilkinson of The Only War We've Got leaves Vietnam for his native England (note that he is not an American), but the horror of the war has come home:

Where was the rabid Socialist who'd stomped up and down the country, wild-eyed and frothing forth dissent, disgust, revulsion at what the Americans were doing? Where was the brave soul who'd stood by the strength of his own convictions at the point of Capt. Beau Hinkle's pistol? Wilkinson could summon up many reasons for leaving—disgust, revulsion, extreme cynicism, escapism, were some of them. But his real nemesis was fear, Wilkinson was scared; and he was scared because on the night of Chua Ben, war had suddenly become real—as real as the crimson tracers that poured into the rice paddy; as real as the horrible death dance of the trapped Viet Cong; the artillery blasts and boiling napalm that all but leveled the little hamlet of Chua Ben. All that had gone before now meant nothing. War meant death and destruction, and no amount of brave moral argument could change that. Words went in one ear and out the other, but bullets killed and shrapnel maimed and napalm left hideous burns. And there was no room for talk.

(261)

The two “lovers,” Tess and Simon, of Bridge Fall Down also survive the massacre of their patrol after first blowing up the bridge, then discovering that their entire mission has been a diversionary action for another attack on a munitions factory. It is Meyerbeer the filmmaker who rescues them, and in an ending similar to but more hopeless than that of Gangland, Simon realizes that the madness will continue: he understands at last that Meyerbeer “wasn't just filming the war, recording it, but inventing it, creating it, or at least co-creating it with the ones who had the detonators and knew how to blow things up” (275). A few moments later, Meyerbeer speaks:

I'll give it to you straight. It's film, folks. Film and videotape are remaking the world. Haven't you simpletons noticed? Image. Appearance. What you see. It's here to stay, so you might as well get used to it. … It makes and remakes, twists and turns, shapes and reshapes. It's the divine energy—pulse and power. It gives life and takes it away. Film is God.

(277)

Ex-PFC Wintergreen has indeed left a legacy to Meyerbeer, but the latter's control is much more inclusive. Accordingly, close inspection of the Vietnam War fiction that evolved from Catch-22 does indeed show a darkening vision and growing despair over the progress of the modern world. Primarily, I think, the authors despair in our ability to perceive what we are doing to ourselves, especially with our dependence upon technology and media. Like Heller, these novelists point toward a future that is indeed Catch-22 come real. In almost everything that has happened in the past twenty-five years, Heller was really quite prophetic, even to his remarkable insight (developed in greater depth by Rinaldi) into why Americans in particular elevate people to higher office. One has only to look at 1980s' politics from Carmel, California, to the highest office in Washington, D.C., and remember that Major Major is promoted in Catch-22 only because he either looks like or actually is—movie star Henry Fonda. Nurtured by, derived from, and dependent upon the greatness of Catch-22, the subsequent fiction about the Vietnam War shows that there is no longer an equivalent to Yossarian and Orr's World War II Sweden, no place left for Americans to escape even from themselves.

Works Cited

Baber, Asa. The Land of a Million Elephants. New York: Morrow, 1970.

Beidler, Philip. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Boule, Pierre. Ears of the Jungle. New York: Vanguard, 1972.

Durden, Charles. No Bugles, No Drums. New York: Viking, 1976.

Eastlake, William. The Bamboo Bed. New York: Simon, 1969.

Ford, Daniel. Incident at Muc Wa. 1967. New York: Pyramid, 1968.

Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. New York: Ballantine, 1974.

Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. 1961. New York: Dell, 1974.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Just, Ward. To What End. Boston: Houghton, 1968.

LaValle, Major A. J. C., ed. The Tale of Two Bridges. Vol. 1, USAF Southeast Asia Monograph Series. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976.

Little, Lloyd. Parthian Shot. New York: Viking, 1975.

Maitland, Derek. The Only War We've Got. New York: Morrow, 1970.

O'Brien, Tim. Going after Cacciato. New York: Delacorte, 1978.

Pratt, John Clark. The Laotian Fragments. 1974. New York: Avon, 1985.

———. Vietnam Voices. New York: Viking, 1984.

Rinaldi, Nicholas. Bridge Fall Down. New York: Marek-St. Martins, 1985.

Rubin, Jonathan. The Barking Deer. New York: Braziller, 1974.

Vaughn, Robert, and Monroe Lynch. Brandywine's War. New York: Bartholomew House, 1971.

Winn, David. Gangland. New York: Knopf, 1982.