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Chapters 17-21

Things are better at the hospital, Yossarian decides, than they are on a bomb run with Snowden dying in the back whispering "I'm cold." At the hospital, Death is orderly and polite, and there is no inexplicable violence. Dunbar is in the hospital with Yossarian, and they are both perplexed by the soldier in white, a man completely covered in plaster bandages. The men in the hospital discuss the injustice of mortality--some men are killed and some aren't, some men get sick and some don't, with no reference to who deserves what. Some time earlier Clevinger saw justice in it, but Yossarian was too busy keeping track of all the forces trying to kill him to listen. Later, he and Hungry Joe collect lists of fatal diseases with which they worry Doc Daneeka, who is the only person who can ground Yossarian, according to Major Major. Doc Daneeka tells Yossarian to fly his fifty-five missions, and he'll think about helping him.

The first time Yossarian ever goes to the hospital, he is still a private. He feigns an abdominal pain, then mimics the mysterious ailment of the soldier who saw everything twice. He spends Thanksgiving in the hospital, and vows to spend all future Thanksgivings there; but he spends the next Thanksgiving in bed with Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife, arguing about God. Once Yossarian is "cured" of seeing everything twice, he is asked to pretend to be a dying soldier for a mother and father who have traveled to see their son, who died that morning. Yossarian allows them to bandage his face, and pretends to be the soldier.

The ambitious Colonel Cathcart browbeats the chaplain, demanding prayer before each bombing run, then abandons the idea when he realizes that the Saturday Evening Post, where he got the idea, probably wouldn't give him any publicity for it. The chaplain timidly mentions that some of the men have complained about Colonel Cathcart's habit of raising the number of missions required every few weeks, but Colonel Cathcart ignores him. On his way home, the chaplain meets Colonel Korn, Colonel Cathcart's wily, cynical sidekick, who mocks Colonel Cathcart in front of the chaplain and is highly suspicious of the plum tomato Colonel Cathcart gave the chaplain. At his tent in the woods, the chaplain encounters the hostile Corporal Whitcomb, his atheist assistant, who resents him deeply for holding back his career. Corporal Whitcomb tells the chaplain that a C.I.D. man suspects him of signing Washington Irving's name to official papers, and of stealing plum tomatoes. The poor chaplain is very unhappy, helpless to improve anyone's life.

Colonel Cathcart is preoccupied with the problem of Yossarian, who has become a real black eye for him, most recently by complaining about the number of missions, but previously by appearing naked at his own medal ceremony shortly after Snowden's death. Colonel Cathcart wishes he knew how to solve the problem and impress General Dreedle, his commanding officer. General Dreedle doesn't care what his men do, as long as they remain reliable military quantities. He travels everywhere with a buxom nurse, and worries mostly about Colonel Moodus, his despised son in law, whom he occasionally asks Chief White Halfoat to punch in the nose. Once Colonel Korn tried to undercut Colonel Cathcart by giving a flamboyant briefing to impress General Dreedle; General Dreedle told Colonel Cathcart that Colonel Korn made him sick.

Chapters 22-26

Yossarian loses his nerve on the mission that follows Colonel Korn's extravagant briefing, the mission where Snowden is killed and spattered all over Yossarian's uniform when Dobbs goes crazy and seizes the plane's controls from Huple. As he dies, Snowden pleads with Yossarian to help him; he says he is cold. Dobbs is a terrible pilot and a wreck of a man, and he later tells Yossarian he plans to kill Colonel Cathcart before he raises the mission total again; he asks Yossarian to give him the go-ahead, but Yossarian is unable to do so, so Dobbs abandons his plan. Yossarian thinks that Dobbs is almost as bad as Orr, with whom Yossarian and Milo recently took a trip to stock up on supplies. As they travel, Orr and Yossarian gradually realize the extent of Milo's control over the black market and vast international influence: he is the mayor of Palermo, the Assistant Governor-General of Malta, the Vice-Shah of Oran, the Caliph of Baghdad, the Imam of Damascus, the Sheik of Araby, and is worshipped as a god in parts of Africa. Each region has embraced him because he revitalized their economy with his syndicate, in which everybody has a share. Nevertheless, throughout their trip, Orr and Yossarian are forced to sleep in the plane while Milo enjoys lavish palaces, and they are finally awakened in the middle of the night so that Milo can rush his shipment of red bananas to their next stop.

One evening Nately finds his whore in Rome again after a long search. He tries to convince Yossarian and Aarfy to take two of her friends for thirty dollars each. Aarfy objects that he has never had to pay for sex. Nately's whore is sick of Nately, and begins to swear at him; then Hungry Joe arrives, and the group abandons Aarfy and goes to the apartment building where the girls live. Here they find a seemingly endless flow of naked young women; Hungry Joe is torn between taking in the scene and rushing back for his camera. Nately argues with an old man who lives at the building about nationalism and moral duty--the old man claims Italy is doing better than America in the war because it has already been occupied, so Italian boys are no longer being killed. He gleefully admits to swearing loyalty to whatever nation happens to be in power. The patriotic, idealistic Nately cannot believe his ears, and argues somewhat haltingly for America's international supremacy and the values it represents. But he is troubled because, though they are absolutely nothing alike, the old man reminds him of his father.

By April, Milo's influence is massive. The mess officer controls the international black market, plays a major role in the world economy, and uses Air Force planes from countries all over the world to carry shipments of his supplies; the planes are repainted with an "M & M Enterprises" logo, but Milo continues to insist that everybody has a share in his syndicate. Milo contracts with the Germans to bomb the Americans, and with the Americans to shoot down German planes. German anti-aircraft guns contracted by Milo even shot down Mudd, the dead man in Yossarian's tent, for which Yossarian holds a grudge against Milo. Milo wants Yossarian's help concocting a solution for unloading his massive holdings of Egyptian cotton, which he cannot sell and which threatens to ruin his entire operation. One evening after dinner, Milo's planes begin to bomb Milo's own camp: He has landed another contract with the Germans, and dozens of men are wounded and killed during the attack. Almost everyone wants to end M & M Enterprises right then, but Milo shows them how much money they have all made, and the survivors almost all forgive him. While Yossarian sits naked in a tree watching Snowden's funeral, Milo seeks him out to talk to him about the cotton; he gives Yossarian some chocolate-covered cotton and tries to convince him it is really candy. Yossarian tells Milo to ask the government to buy his cotton, and Milo is struck by the intelligence behind the idea.

The chaplain is troubled. No one seems to treat him as a regular human being; everyone is uncomfortable in his presence, he is intimidated by the soldiers--especially Colonel Cathcart--and he is generally ineffectual as a religious leader. He grows increasingly miserable, and is sustained solely by the thought of the religious visions he has seen since his arrival, such as the vision of the naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral. Of course, the naked man was Yossarian. He dreams of his wife and children dying horribly in his absence. He tries to see Major Major about the number of missions the men are asked to fly, but, like everyone else, finds that Major Major will not allow him into his office except when he is out. On the way to see Major Major a second time, the chaplain encounters Flume, Chief White Halfoat's old roommate who is so afraid of having his throat slit while he sleeps that he has taken to living in the forest. The chaplain then learns that Corporal Whitcomb has been promoted to sergeant by Colonel Cathcart for an idea that the colonel believes will land him in the Saturday Evening Post. The chaplain tries to mingle with the men at the officers' club, but Colonel Cathcart periodically throws him out. The chaplain takes to doubting everything, even God.

The night Nately falls in love with his whore, she sits naked from the waist down in a room full of enlisted men playing blackjack. She is already sick of Nately, and tries to interest one of the enlisted men, but none of them notice her. Nately follows her out, then to the officers' apartments in Rome, where she tries the same trick on Nately's friends. Aarfy calls her a slut, and Nately is deeply offended. Aarfy is the navigator of the flight on which Yossarian is finally hit by flak; he is wounded in the leg and taken to the hospital, where he and Dunbar change identities by ordering lower-ranking men to trade beds with them. Dunbar pretends to be A. Fortiori. Finally they are caught by Nurse Cramer and Nurse Duckett, who takes Yossarian by the ear and puts him back to bed.

Chapters 27-31

The next morning, while Nurse Duckett is smoothing the sheets at the foot of his bed, Yossarian thrusts his hand up her skirt. She shrieks and rushes away, and Dunbar grabs her bosom from behind. When she is finally rescued by a furious doctor, Yossarian tries to plead insanity--he says he has a recurring dream about a fish--so he is assigned an appointment with Major Sanderson, the hospital psychiatrist. Sanderson is more interested in discussing his own problems than his patient's. Yossarian's friends visit him in the hospital--Dobbs offers again to kill Colonel Cathcart--and finally, after Yossarian admits that he thinks people are trying to kill him and that he has not adjusted to the war, Major Sanderson decides that Yossarian really is crazy and decides to send him home. But because of the identity mixup perpetrated by Yossarian and Dunbar earlier in their hospital stay, there is a mistake, and A. Fortiori is sent home instead. Furiously, Yossarian goes to see Doc Daneeka, but Doc Daneeka will not ground Yossarian for reasons of insanity. Who else but a crazy man, he asks, would go out to fight?

Yossarian goes to see Dobbs, and tells him to go ahead and kill Colonel Cathcart. But Dobbs has finished his sixty missions, and is waiting to be sent home; he no longer needs to kill Colonel Cathcart. When Yossarian says that Colonel Cathcart will simply raise the number of missions again, Dobbs says he'll wait and see, but that perhaps Orr would help Yossarian kill the colonel. Orr crashed his plane again while Yossarian was in the hospital and was fished out of the ocean--none of the life jackets in his plane worked, because Milo took out the carbon dioxide tanks to use for making ice-cream sodas. Now, Orr is tinkering with the stove he is trying to build in his and Yossarian's tent; he suggests that Yossarian should try flying a mission with him for practice in case he ever has to make a crash landing. Yossarian broods about the rumored second mission to Bologna. Orr is making noise and irritating him, and Yossarian imagines killing him, which Yossarian finds a relaxing thought. They talk about women--Orr says they don't like Yossarian, and Yossarian replies that they're crazy. Orr tells Yossarian that he knows Yossarian has asked not to fly with him, and offers to tell Yossarian the story of why that naked girl was hitting him with her shoe outside Nately's whore's kid sister's room in Rome. Yossarian laughingly declines, and the next time Orr goes up he again crashes his plane into the ocean. This time, his survival raft drifts away from the others and disappears.

The men are dismayed when they learn that General Peckem has had Scheisskopf, now a colonel, transferred onto his staff. Peckem is pleased because he thinks the move will increase his strength compared to that of his rival General Dreedle. Colonel Scheisskopf is dismayed by the news that he will no longer be able to conduct parades every afternoon. Scheisskopf immediately irritates his colleagues in Group Headquarters, and Peckem takes him along for an inspection of Colonel Cathcart's squadron briefing. At the preliminary briefing, the men are displeased to learn they will be bombing an undefended village into rubble simply so that Colonel Cathcart can impress General Peckem with the clean aerial photography their bomb patterns will allow. When Peckem and Scheisskopf arrive, Cathcart is angry that another colonel has appeared to rival him. He gives the briefing himself, and though he feels shaky and unconfident, he makes it through, and congratulates himself on a job well done under pressure.

On the bombing run, Yossarian flashes back to the mission when Snowden died, and he snaps. During evasive action, he threatens to kill McWatt if he doesn't follow orders. He is worried that McWatt will hold a grudge, but after the mission McWatt only seems concerned about Yossarian. Yossarian has begun seeing Nurse Duckett, and he enjoys making love to her on the beach. Sometimes, while they sit looking at the ocean, Yossarian thinks about all the people who have died underwater, including Orr and Clevinger. One day, McWatt is buzzing the beach in his plane as a joke, when a gust of wind causes the plane to drop for a split second--just long enough for the propellor to slice Kid Sampson in half. Kid Samson's body splatters all over the beach. Back at the base, everyone is occupied with the disaster; McWatt will not land his plane, but keeps flying higher and higher. Yossarian runs down the runway yelling at McWatt to come down, but he knows what McWatt is going to do, and McWatt does it, crashing his plane into the side of a mountain, killing himself. Colonel Cathcart is so upset that he raises the number of missions to sixty-five.

When Colonel Cathcart learns that Doc Daneeka was also killed in the crash, he raises the number of missions to seventy. Actually, Doc Daneeka was not killed in the crash, but the records--which Doc Daneeka, hating to fly, bribed Yossarian to alter--maintain that the doctor was in the plane with McWatt, collecting some flight time. Doc Daneeka is startled to hear that he is dead, but Doc Daneeka's wife in America, who receives a letter to that effect from the military, is shattered. Heroically, she finds the strength to carry on, and is cheered to learn that she will be receiving a number of monthly payments from various military departments for the rest of her life, as well as sizable life insurance payments from her husband's insurance company. Husbands of her friends begin to flirt with her, and she dies her hair. In Pianosa, Doc Daneeka finds himself ostracized by the men, who blame him for the raise in the number of missions they are required to fly. He is no longer allowed to practice medicine and realizes that, in one sense, he really is dead. He sends a passionate letter to his wife begging her to alert the authorities that he is still alive. She considers the possibility, but after receiving a form letter from Colonel Cathcart expressing regret over her husband's death, she moves her children to Lansing, Michigan and leaves no forwarding address.

Chapters 32-37

The cold weather comes, and Kid Sampson's legs are left on the beach; no one will retrieve them. The first things Yossarian remembers when he wakes up each morning are Kid Sampson's legs and Snowden. When Orr never returns, Yossarian is given four new roommates, a group of shiny-faced twenty- one year-olds who have never seen combat. They clown around, calling Yossarian "Yo-Yo" and rousing in him a murderous hatred. Yossarian tries to convince Chief White Halfoat to move in with them and scare the new officers away, but Halfoat has decided to move into the hospital to die of pneumonia. Slowly, Yossarian begins to feel more protective toward the men, but then they burn Orr's birch logs and suddenly move Mudd's belongings out of the tent--the dead man who has lived there for so long is abruptly gone. Yossarian panics and flees to Rome with Hungry Joe the night before Nately's whore finally gets a good night's sleep and wakes up in love.

In Rome, Yossarian misses Nurse Duckett and goes searching in vain for Luciana. Nately languishes in bed with his whore, when suddenly Nately's whore's kid sister dives into bed with them. Nately begins to cherish wild fantasies of moving his whore and her sister back to America and bringing the sister up like his own child, but when his whore hears that he no longer wants her to go out hustling she becomes furious, and an argument ensues. The other men try to intervene, and Nately tries to convince them that they can all move to the same suburb and work for his father. He tries to forbid his whore from ever speaking again to the old man in the whores' hotel, and she becomes even angrier, but she still misses Nately when he leaves and is furious with Yossarian when he punches Nately in the face, breaking his nose.

Yossarian breaks Nately's nose on Thansksgiving, after Milo gets all the men drunk on bottles of cheap whiskey. Yossarian goes to bed early, but wakes up to the sound of machine gun fire. At first he is terrified, but he quickly realizes that a group of men are firing machine guns as a prank. He is furious, and takes his .45 in pursuit of revenge. Nately tries to stop him, and Yossarian breaks his nose. He fires at someone in the darkness, but when a return shot comes Yossarian recognizes it as Dunbar's. He and Dunbar call out to each other, and go back to help Nately. They cannot find him, and discover him in the hospital the next morning. Yossarian feels terribly guilty for having broken Nately's nose. They encounter the chaplain in the hospital; he has lied to get in, claiming to have a disease called Wisconsin shingles, and feels wonderful--he has learned how to rationalize vice into virtue. Suddenly the soldier in white is wheeled into the room, and Dunbar panics; he begins screaming, and soon everyone in the ward joins in. Nurse Duckett warns Yossarian that she overheard some doctors talking about how they planned to "disappear" Dunbar. Yossarian goes to warn his friend, but cannot find him.

When Chief White Halfoat finally dies of pneumonia and Nately finishes his seventy missions, Yossarian prays for the first time in his life, asking God to keep Nately from volunteering to fly more than seventy missions. But Nately does not want to be sent home until he can take his whore with him. Yossarian goes for help from Milo, who immediately goes to see Colonel Cathcart about having himself assigned to more combat missions. Milo has finally been exposed as the tyrannical fraud he is; he has no intention of giving anyone a real share of the syndicate--but his power and influence are at their peak and everyone admires him. He feels guilty for not doing his duty and flying missions, and asks the deferential Colonel Cathcart to assign him to more dangerous combat duties. Milo tells Colonel Cathcart that someone else will have to run the syndicate, and Colonel Cathcart volunteers himself and Colonel Korn. When Milo explains the complex operations of the business to Cathcart, the colonel declares Milo the only man who could possibly run it, and forbids Milo from flying another combat mission. He suggests that he might make the other men fly Milo's missions for him, and if one of those men wins a medal, Milo will get the medal. To enable this, he says, he will ratchet the number of required missions up to eighty. The next morning the alarm sounds and the men fly off on a mission that turns out to be particularly deadly. Twelve men are killed, including Dobbs and Nately.

The chaplain is devastated by Nately's death. When he learns that twelve men have been killed, he prays that Yossarian, Hungry Joe, Nately, and his other friends will not be among them. But when he rides out to the field, he understands from the despairing look on Yossarian's face that Nately is dead. Suddenly, the Chaplain is dragged away by a group of military police who accuse him of an unspecified crime. He is interrogated by a colonel who claims the chaplain has forged his name in letters--his only evidence is a letter Yossarian forged in the hospital and signed with the chaplain's name some time ago. Then he accuses the chaplain of stealing the plum tomato from Colonel Cathcart and of being Washington Irving. The men in the room idiotically find him guilty of unspecified crimes they assume he has committed, then order him to go about his business while they think of a way to punish him. The chaplain leaves and furiously goes to confront Colonel Korn about the number of missions the men are required to fly. He tells Colonel Korn he plans to bring the matter directly to General Dreedle's attention, but the colonel replies gleefully that General Dreedle has been replaced with General Peckem as wing commander. He then tells the chaplain that he and Colonel Cathcart can make the men fly as many missions as they want to make them fly--they've even transferred Dr. Stubbs, who had offerred to ground any man with seventy missions, to the Pacific.

General Peckem's victory sours quickly. On his first day in charge of General Dreedle's old operation, he learns that Scheisskopf has been promoted to lieutenant general and is now the commanding officer for all combat operations: He is in charge of General Peckem and his entire group. And he intends to make every single man present march in parades.

Chapters 38-42

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