HELLER, Joseph

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When I grow up I want to be a little boy.

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Catch 22

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Colonel Cargill was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war, he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so bad a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work himself down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

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The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights into his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endorinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald pendanic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him.

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"Men," he began his address to the officers, measuring his pauses carefully. "You're American officers. The officers of no other country in the world can make that statement. Think about it." He waited a moment to permit them to think about it. "These people are your guests!" he shouted suddenly. "They've traveled over three thousand miles to entertain you. How are they going to feel if nobody wants to go out and watch them? What's going to happen to their morale? Now, men, it's no skin off my behind. But that girl that wants to play the accordion for you today is old enough to be my mother. How would you feel if your own mother traveled over three thousand miles to play the accordion to some troops that didn't want to watch her? How is that kid whose mother that accordion player is old enough to be going to feel when he grows up and learns about it? We all know the answer to that one. Now, men, don't misunderstand me. This is all voluntary, of course. I'd be the last colonel in the world to order you to go to that U.S.O show and have a good time, but I want every one of you who isn't sick enough to be in hospital to go to that U.S.O. show right now and have a good time, and that's an order!"

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