Flying Birthday Salute to ‘Catch-22’ : Air Force Academy Celebrates Book’s 25th Anniversary

It may have been the ultimate Catch-22, throwing a 25th birthday party for the book that blasts the absurdities of war and the madness of the military bureaucracy at the U.S. Air Force Academy here.

“I was surprised,” Joseph Heller said, when he got a call from Col. Jack Shuttleworth, chairman of the academy’s English department, suggesting that the academy honor Heller and what Shuttleworth calls “the Air Force’s favorite book.”

But then Heller arrived at the huge facility, turning up on Friday just in time to see “something like 4,000 cadets spend an hour and a half marching into a lunch room to eat a meal they had to finish in 15 minutes.”

At that point, Heller said, “I couldn’t think of anyone other than the Air Force Academy celebrating the birthday of ‘Catch-22.’ ”

“Anybody who has been in a bureaucracy sees people like the people in this book,” Shuttleworth said of the novel that is required reading in three separate courses at the academy. “It’s not just the military.

“We think the young people ought to have some perception of the way things can go wrong,” he continued, “of the perversion of power, and of the need for individual responsibility.”

And so there was birthday cake (lemon, with white icing) for Capt. John Yossarian, protagonist of the book Heller wrote while churning out advertising and promotion copy for Time, Look and McCall’s magazines. There was a screening of Mike Nichols’ film version of “Catch-22.” “Naturally,” Shuttleworth said, “to celebrate the novel, we showed the film. You’ll understand that if you’ve read the book.”

Trio of Academicians

For two intense hours Saturday morning, a panel of scholars scrutinized the theological and ideological aspects of the novel. Next, a trio of academicians (all named John, a fact the organizers of “Yossarian at the Academy” insisted had nothing to do with the subject) talked about the book’s critical reception and literary impact. “ ‘Catch-22’ is a Marxist novel,” American studies Prof. John Raeburn of the University of Iowa declared. “Those Marxists being Groucho, Chico and Harpo.”

By mid-afternoon, a third seminar was looking into the implications of “ ‘Catch-22’ in the Popular Culture.” Downstairs, meanwhile, in the academy’s television studio, Heller was undergoing videotaped cross-examination by a group of academy cadets and local high school students.

“Isn’t this crazy?” Heller asked, as he heard his novel likened to such enduring cultural symbols as the statues on Easter Island, and heard himself nominated to the elite literary country club inhabited by the likes of Sophocles, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Pascal, Eliot, Hobbes, Twain, William James, Swift, Nathanael West, Seneca, Melville, Gogol and, yes, Ecclesiastes.

“They think more of the novel than I do.”

Later, Heller insisted he had intended the comment facetiously. His purpose in spending close to eight years writing “Catch-22,” he said over and over during the weekend’s festivities, was “primarily to write an impressive piece of fiction.”

“I thought it would be significant as a novel,” Heller told one of his youthful interrogators. And obviously, he added, “any author writing a novel hopes his book will have universal appeal.”

But even the imagination that created a Henry Fonda look-alike called Major Major Major Major, the capitalistic Lt. Milo Minderbinder (who turned war into a profit-making experience), Gen. P. P. Peckem, WAC Dori Duz (who did, for anyone who asked) and the now-fabled Yossarian could scarcely have envisioned his book selling 8 million copies and vaulting into the arena of American literary classics.

He was writing a book, Heller said, not planning to add a phrase to America’s cultural lexicon. How could he have foreseen, for example, the emergence of the following Trivial Pursuit question: “Which came first, the term ‘Catch-22,’ or the novel?”

Heller received just $1,500: half upon signing the contract, and half upon completion of the manuscript, when Simon & Schuster agreed to publish “Catch-22” more than a quarter of a century ago. His editor was a 25-year-old publishing neophyte named Robert Gottlieb, now head of Knopf.

“It’s astonishing to me still that people who were not even born then are reading this book,” Heller said, “and finding things of relevance. It does make me extremely proud.”

Interpreting the Message

Tammy Thayer, 17, is reading Joseph Heller--along with Homer and Shakespeare--this semester as part of her advanced placement senior English class at Smokey Hills High School in Aurora, Colo. “To me, it was kind of like life is full of loops that you have to really follow your principles to break out of,” Thayer said of the message of “Catch-22.”

But, she added as she rushed into one of Saturday afternoon’s seminars on the book, “I find it really ironic that they’re holding something like this here. This is the last place I would expect to find it. To me, the book is kind of condescending to the Air Force.”

On the contrary, Lt. Col. Steve Staley said he had read “Catch-22” on five separate occasions. “It’s kind of a Bible around here,” Staley said.

Presenting a paper on the role of women in “Catch-22,” Capt. Joan Robertson said she had read the book three times since July alone. “It’s timeless,” she said. “It’s funny, and at the same time it’s very serious.”

Robertson even tried to include a reference to “Catch-22” in her doctoral dissertation on Latin and Greek poets, but lost out when her adviser “argued against it as slangy.”

While Brig. Gen. Jesse C. Gatlin, professor emeritus of English at the academy, said he had read “Catch-22” “at least” 10 times, his friend Frederick T. Kiley remembered the first time he took on the novel.

“I was down in the Delta, at Binh Thuy--that was a Vietnamese air force base--and I was seeing a friend of mine.” Directly above Kiley’s friend, in the upper bunk, “there was an older guy lying in his bunk, and he was reading something. It was ‘Catch-22.’ That was in 1968.

Read It in Vietnam

“I read it over there, in Vietnam,” said Kiley, now the director of research at Washington, D.C.’s National Defense University and co-author of “A Catch-22 Casebook” (T. Y. Crowell). “That was where it made sense. That was what it was all about, that asylum we were all in.”

For his part, Heller is vehement in maintaining that “Catch-22” is neither anti-war nor anti-military. “My own experience in World War II, I am almost ashamed to say, was extremely beneficial, very orderly,” former bombardier Heller said. “I can’t recall a single unpleasant experience with any superior officer.”

But to conference director Lt. Col. Thomas P. Coakley, Heller’s novel clearly has special significance to members of the United States armed forces.

“Those of us who have been in the military have known our Col. Cathcarts and our Col. Korns,” Coakley said, “and have seen the kind of absurdities that you run into when the mechanisms that are supposed to operate the bureaucracy start to operate on their own.”

“If it’s anti-war and anti-military,” Capt. Cordell Kyllo said of the book, “then why the hell would the military put on a production of it? The answer is that it explains how we are, how we can exist in an organization, taking orders and seeing them as ludicrous at the same time.”

The book transcends the sphere of the military, Frederick Kiley said--”Try to get a telephone installed”--but, he agreed, “I think it appeals particularly to the military, because the military are the guys who go out after the politicians have screwed things up.”

Indeed, Colorado State University English Prof. John Clark Pratt, formerly an English instructor at the Air Force Academy, noted the splendid acting-out of the message of the book when “we were paid by the United States government to teach ‘Catch-22’ to cadets during the Vietnam War.”

The novel, he contends, “should be seen as a paradigm for the Vietnam War.” For example, “the medals: many of which--a great number of which--were awarded for fictitious events. The real reasons were too classified to be revealed.”

Or, said Pratt, “there were the missions in Laos that didn’t count.” Because “we were not officially at war with Laos, there were a lot of people who came home with 150 flights who only got credit for 100.”

Using the Book

Scheduled to teach “Catch-22” to freshmen cadets at the Air Force Academy three weeks from now, Capt. Mark Braley was troubled by Pratt’s comments. How, he asked, “can I use this book to build better officers within the system?”

Easy, said Pratt: “With ‘Catch-22’ you teach future officers to be productively schizophrenic: that is, to take orders and to question them at the same time.

“Treat ‘Catch-22’ as a realistic novel,” Pratt advised. “It’s a good text.”

Which was, after all, what prompted the Air Force Academy to join with its Assn. of Graduates and the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities in throwing this birthday shindig for “Catch-22.” Certainly the event was not without its public relations appeal, Lt. Col. Tom Coakley conceded, but “for us, essentially, it started as a way of getting together some people and enjoying the fact that it has been a book we have been enjoying for 25 years.”