3 of 3 members found this review helpful.
“Reading this in 2008 it is almost impossible to not connect the plight of Heller's reluctant WWII bombadier Yossarian, whose superior officers keep raising the number of missions he has to fly to get sent home, with soldiers' tours in Afghanistan and Iraq being extended via stop-lossing. Yossarian is a sane man caught in an insane situation, where each layer peels back only to reveal some new madness that threatens to engulf him. Crazy generals, doctors, chaplains, pilots, prostitutes and their kid sisters inhabit Heller's hilarious and frightening story of the lunacy of war, where only the insane can be sent home - but wanting to go home proves that you're not insane. So says Catch-22.
Heller's novel skewers every piece of the myth that war is at all noble or just; the look at how greed and self-interest and blind unquestioning obedience perpetuate and intensify the damages of war could easily be based on companies like Haliburton and Blackwater -
"When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven, or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and human tragedy"
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