NARRATOR
When Studs Terkel published his interviews with veterans of World War II, he put the title, The Good War, in quotation marks. He was recognizing that in the perspective of history there were questions raised about the “good war,” about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about Dresden and Tokyo, about the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, about the ultimate value of any war, however noble the cause. War was always the killing of innocents—civilians and soldiers. And the military, however “good” the war, was always corrupt, and contained, in the best of situations, elements of fascism. In his novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller captured the absurdity and cruelty that pervades military life. In this passage, Yossarian’s friend Clevinger is facing military justice.
FROM CATCH-22
“Justice?” The colonel was astounded. “What is justice.”
“Justice, sir….”
“That’s not what justice is,” the colonel jeered and began pounding the table again with his big fat hand. “That’s what Karl Marx is. I’ll tell you what justice is. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship and sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That’s what justice is when we’ve all got to be tough enough and rough enough to fight Billy Petrolle. From the hip. Get it?…”
Clevinger was guilty, of course, or he would not have been accused, and since the only way to prove it was to find him guilty, it was their patriotic duty to do so….
It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board…. They were three grown men and he was a boy, and they hated him and wished him dead….
Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before. “You haven’t got a chance, kid,” he had told him glumly. “They hate Jews.”
“But I’m not Jewish,” answered Clevinger.
“It will make no difference,” Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. “They’re after everybody.”
Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines…not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.