Catch-22 Review

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I don’t recall exactly when I read Catch-22 for the first time but my ballpoint-penned symbols in the margins indicate it was during or shortly after college in the late eighties or early nineties. Most significantly, it was before America’s reconciliation with what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation” and it was before September 11, 2001.

Those of us who were born and grew up in the Vietnam War era remember an America often ambivalent toward traditional displays of patriotism, the military and war itself. In the seventies and early eighties, World War II veterans were often one-dimensionally portrayed on television and in movies as the ones hurling insults at anti-Vietnam protesters while shoving draftees into planes fueled up to take them to their deaths in Southeast Asia.

Catch-22 was published in 1961, a year in which we tripled the relatively small number of troops we had in Vietnam (Wikipedia). While the author, Joseph Heller, based his novel on his own experiences as a bombardier in World War II, his cynicism and sarcasm was directed at post-war America. In the years after it was published, of course, its anti-war message was applied to the Vietnam War. The film version premiered in 1970, the same year as the movie M.A.S.H., a movie about the Korean War most easily applied, again to Vietnam. Anyone who grew up watching the M.A.S.H. television series heard absurd conversations between Hawkeye, Hunnicutt, Major Houlihan and Major Burns that could have been pulled straight from the pages of Catch-22.

That was the milieu in which I read Catch-22 the first time. Since then, America has become reacquainted with the Greatest Generation and its service in World War II specifically, through Tom Brokaw’s book, HBO’s 2001 mini-series Band of Brothers, Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan and our own friends and families as WWII veterans have passed and their lives have been celebrated. And we were attacked.

Afghanistan is as righteous a war as World War II and America has responded accordingly. Rereading Catch-22 now is an entirely different experience. All Americans now have friends and/or family members who are serving, have served, were wounded or were tragically killed in Afghanistan, fighting the people responsible for attacking America. The story of a man doing everything humanly possible to avoid going back into combat doesn’t resonate the same way it did immediately after the Vietnam War. With that said, how many tours of Iraq and/or Afghanistan should any single man or woman be subjected to? Members of the armed forces serve as they are ordered to, but we civilians enjoying the freedoms secured by their sacrifices must give a damn about how those sacrifices are distributed.

Catch-22 should still be required reading. Heller was a genius. His writing is extraordinary. He rails against the horrors of war and the horrors of existence with volcanic farcical and absurdist intensity. We are currently in what appears to be a perpetual war with terrorism and so the question of who must sacrifice how often is still entirely pertinent. The farcical elements of the novel are tiresome at times, like watching three uninterrupted hours of Hawkeye’s silliness, but that is a matter of taste and is a small price to pay for experiencing a true masterpiece.




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