“…there was the educated Texan from Texas who looked like someone in Technicolor and felt, patriotically, that people of means—decent folk—should be given more votes than drifters, whores, criminals, degenerates, atheists and indecent folk—people without means… The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

The people you serve with in the military aren’t really any different than the people you work with in any other place of employment. There are the over-achievers and the slackers, the creative thinkers and the conformists, the control freaks and the contrarians. At its core, the folks at USN and USMC are virtually indistinguishable from the folks at IBM and AT&T. The key dissimilarity is in the distribution of ineptitude. Unlike most civilian workplaces, incompetent individuals cannot be easily terminated and the competent individuals, in the presence of arduous ineptitude, cannot just quit and walk away.

The Peter Principal [Laurence J. Peter, 1969] theorizes that a competent person will be promoted until they reach a level where they are no longer competent and there they will stay. Thus complete equilibrium would be reached when all parties are promoted to their uniquely individual levels of incompetence—enter Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

“You see? You have no respect for excessive authority or obsolete traditions. You’re dangerous and depraved, and you ought to be taken outside and shot!”

Heller is a genius. He raises sophistry to an elegant art form. I don’t think I have ever encountered a novel which better illustrates the frustrating and degrading elements of military service. Sure it’s exaggerated and circular and often repetitive, but that is all part Heller’s panorama-of-paradox, his symphony-of-satire. This is complex brilliance put forth in simple paper & ink.