To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz wonders why James Webb—a graduate of the Naval Academy, a decorated hero of the Vietnam war, and a former Secretary of the Navy—and the cadets at the Air Force Academy admire Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 [“Looking Back at Catch-22,” February]. The explanation is quite simple. Like Mr. Podhoretz himself, they appreciate the truth. The fact that the truth about military life is often ludicrously comical—as Heller shows with his hyperbolic, satirical prose—diminishes not one whit the courage and patriotism of either Heller or his enthusiasts among our military officers. Nor should we be surprised that radical leftists misuse Catch-22. Do they not deconstruct and disfigure everything virtuous?
I first read Catch-22 shortly after graduating from the Naval Academy in 1962, and, like James Webb, I discovered in Heller a soul-mate—an evaluation unchanged by a recent rereading of his book The service academies train future officers to function amid the foibles, ambiguities, and contradictions of war. This is necessary not only because the military has its share of latent and actual asses, fools, psychos, and egoists, but because war itself often requires men to act in ways opposed to their primal instinct for survival and their most elevated sense of morality.
These are paradoxes with which an officer must cope, and Heller learned them, presumably, on the battlefields of World War II. In Catch-22, he provided a magnificent textbook for trainee patriots, a ready reference work for experienced patriots, and an eternal memorial to the self-abnegation of fallen patriots. Let us praise him for it.
Charles W. Clardy
Decherd, Tennessee
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz is determined to condemn Catch-22 as an attack on the altruistic effort to destroy the Third Reich and, more broadly, as a damnable deterrent to legitimate patriotism in the event that war again poses a threat to our way of life.
But Mr. Podhoretz is mistaken to assume that the American troops who fought on European soil were imbued with the belief that fascism had to be destroyed. Those who were in the killing fields were rarely, if ever, told why, or where they were, or where they were going. To conscripted soldiers in combat, the war was a succession of rain, snow, shelling, ambush, fear, and death; it did not look the same to them as it did to ambitious generals, the purveyors of materiel, or wives and mothers divested of their precious kin. To see their war, I would highly recommend Catch-22.
Aaron Jacobson
Cleveland, Ohio
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz’s cogent clarification of Catch-22‘s message and his challenge to Joseph Heller’s view of World War II were overdue. During many years of counseling conscientious objectors and war-resisters, I experienced the change of “consciousness” that Catch-22 helped produce. The “pacifists” among them had just begun to sort out the moral and political choices involved in participation in war. Many had no sense of what could be lost in a refusal to go to war. Even fewer understood war’s utility: it settles an argument until the groundwork can be laid for institutions that make a shared political community a feasible alternative to conflict.
More thoughtful pacifists—among whom I count myself—understand why democratic governance in America is an important milestone in human history, and that simplistic opposition to American militarism is no road to peace. Absent America, we would have to forget about progress toward an end to war.
Robert Pickus
Berkeley, California
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To the Editor:
In 1967, when my son was sixteen years old, I was desperate to get him involved in books, so I offered him Catch-22, a novel I had read a few years earlier and laughed uproariously over. Magically, my prescription worked. He loved the book. Those were the Vietnam years, and one of my thoughts was to keep my son safe: Heller’s cynicism had great appeal.
As the years passed and I grew older and wiser, I was nagged by Heller’s insouciant message. World War II was not Vietnam, nor was it like any prior conflict.
There was a murderous nation on the loose that had to be stopped, and all the sophistry in Heller’s arsenal could not lessen the evil of the Germans. As a Jew, Heller should have been sensitive to the slaughter of his people. Instead, he fashioned a novel about the war as if it involved no moral imperative.
Judith Hirsch
Boca Raton, Florida
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To the Editor:
I was startled and delighted finally to run across someone who agrees with me about Catch-22. I thought I stood alone in my distaste. As a combat veteran who served in Europe (as a gunner on a B-24), I get no pleasure from those who use World War II for low comedy or to air their grievances.
My daughter was entranced by Catch-22, so I had to explain to her that there have been all sorts of wars, most of them deserving of our contempt. World War II was not among them.
Louis S. Lyons
Woodland Hills, California
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To the Editor:
Hurrah to Norman Podhoretz for pinning the tail on Joseph Heller. If most American fighting men in World War II had had the advanced sensibilities of Heller’s “hero” Yossarian, forces far meaner and more real than Colonel Cathcart would have prevailed.
Larry Thornberry
Tampa, Florida
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To the Editor:
Norman Podhoretz has written a brilliant essay on Joseph Heller. But while I would like to agree that “the anti-military ethos . . . has grown weaker and less pervasive,” I suspect that it will return in force as soon as an American military adventure requires more from the public than high television ratings. As President Clinton has demonstrated, the Left has no objections to the use of force, even if it is used clumsily and indiscriminately as in Sudan or Kosovo, so long as the other side does all the bleeding. Lord help us if we ever have to fight, instead of kill.
Thomas F. Berner
New York City
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Norman Podhoretz writes:
Instead of replying to the arguments of Charles W. Clardy myself, I would rather refer him to the excellent letters following his from Robert Pickus, Judith Hirsch, Larry Thornberry, and Thomas F. Berner.
I will add only this: having served in the army for two years as an enlisted man, I know very well (perhaps even better than an officer might) how absurd military life can be. But as I tried to point out in my article, that is far from the whole story.
Never having been sent into combat, though, let me suggest that Aaron Jacobson turn to Louis S. Lyons, who had first-hand experience, for a more authoritative answer than I could supply. Like Mr. Clardy, Mr. Jacobson is not wrong in what he says, but he too gives us an incomplete picture. (By the way, some of the writings of Stephen Ambrose do much to fill out the picture without denying or obscuring the partial truth of the Jacobson account of how conscripted soldiers felt on the front lines in World War II.)
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