Unmaking Sense and Unsticking Time
The Literature of Army Veterans and America's Sense of Self. Part II.
“The quietly tragic moments of death, on the bombing runs and again on the tranquil, protected beaches of their home base when an aircraft goes astray. One can debate many issues regarding the novel and the war it portrayed, but its lasting greatness is beyond dispute.” - James Webb, Vietnam veteran, Secretary of the Navy, and U.S. Senator (2007-2013)
War is sacred. It makes tangible the notion of what we are willing to die for and brings us to the extremes of existence. Nietzsche’s abyss is a constant presence, yet so too is the miraculous. It forces us to grapple with questions of divine will and purpose. Even if soldiers have answered these questions differently over time, there is a common sense of life being stripped to its most essential elements.
But it is also absurd. There’s something absurd at the highest level that humans, with our exceptional gifts of intellect, capacity for collaboration, and innate sense of right and wrong, would channel our energy towards the destruction of others. As William Tecumseh Sherman told us, “[w]ar is hell”; to willingly enter hell, however necessary and just, is to grapple with the absurd in some sense.
It’s also absurd in the details: the paperwork, excessive bureaucracies, and poor decision-making that color any conflict. The soldiers of antiquity did not have powerpoint slides or email, but if we traveled back to the siege of Syracuse à la Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, I am sure we would find no shortage of gripes from soldiers on the line about inane regulations and impossible-to-fathom orders from above.
In Americans’ collective memory, we tend to bifurcate wars as exemplifying one theme or the other. World War II is sacred while the Vietnam War is absurd, for example. This a false binary. Almost all wars have elements of both. What our collective memories reflect is more of a comparative assessment across wars. But here again, the dialogue is more complex than we often appreciate.
Consider that two of the most powerful depictions of the absurdity of war emerged from World War II. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five provoke their readers with depictions of war at its most tragic and ridiculous. And while both authors were commenting more on the post-World War II era, each drew heavily on his personal experience in the U.S. Army in World War II.
Those experiences also give the books a weight greater than what might have been the case had they focused purely on dark comedy. There is a sense that while their enduring place in American culture—Catch-22 first came out in 1961 and Slaughterhouse Five in 1969—stems primarily from their treatment of the absurd, they also deal with the sacred nature of the war. This is evidenced by the quote from James Webb at the opening of this article.
Both books also proved controversial at times. This is particularly true of Slaughterhouse Five. But whatever your feelings about the books, their influence on American culture is undeniable.
Our purpose here is not to describe the books at great length or analyze them as pieces of literature. I encourage you to read them and form your own opinion. Rather, our intent is to highlight the impact these books had on the nation and to explore the authors’ backgrounds in the Army.
Source: Author’s photo.
Sane or Insane
Joseph Heller once told a reader, “I had only two ideas for a novel in twenty-one years…”. One of those ideas was Catch-22. And behind this was was Heller’s experience as a bombardier with the Army Air Force (488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group) in World War II.
Enlisting in 1942, Heller flew 60 missions over Europe before completing his tour in 1944. While Heller faced intense anti-aircraft fire and missions that involved large-scale death and destruction, he felt invigorated by his service. In a letter to a scholar working on a compilation of Heller’s works, he described his war time feelings with the following: “In truth I enjoyed it and so did just about everyone else I served with, in training and even in combat.”
By the 1950s, however, as Heller was writing what would become Catch-22, his focus was not on war’s adventures, but on what historian and World War II veteran Paul Fussell would call its “chickenshit”: the perverse demonstrations of pettiness and absurdity. Thus while the book is set in World War II and the main character, Yossarian, is a bombardier like Heller, the book is not about that war. It is aimed at what Heller felt was happening in the Korean War and the Cold War more generally, which he described as a “a perversion of all codes of honor that are being taught at Annapolis or in American military justice.”
The core absurdity in the book, the original “Catch-22”, goes something like this: you would have to be insane to fly more combat missions and since Army Air Force regulations established insanity as a reason for pilots to be grounded, a pilot need only ask to avoid flight duty. BUT, if a pilot asked to be grounded, he was demonstrating his sanity and thus had to keep flying. This deadly loop played with no end other than a pilot’s demise.1
Released in 1961, Catch-22 was not an immediate hit. It had notable champions, including Stephen Ambrose, one of the 20th century’s most influential public historians. Ambrose wrote Heller a letter saying, “For 16 years, I have been waiting for the great anti-war book which I knew World War II must produce. I rather doubted, however, that it would come out of America; I would have guessed Germany. I am happy to have been wrong.” Over time, however, the book’s sales started taking off.
As professor Stephen J. Whitfield has noted, Catch-22’s commercial success stemmed in large part from public backlash to the Vietnam War and the broader “counterculture” movement that took off. It would go on to rank as one of the highest-selling novels of all time, with sales topping 10 million copies. It also earned its place in the dictionary, with “catch-22” used to describe painful, circular situations.
Catch-22 has had its detractors. In the 1970s it was banned in one school district in Ohio, for example. The ban was later overturned by a judge following a lawsuit from a group of students. It was similarly, briefly, part of a book ban in an Alaskan district in 2020. But the much more widespread response has been to consider the book a landmark in American literature.
Catch-22 continues to influence American culture today. Just a few years ago, in 2019, Hulu produced a six-episode miniseries based on the book. And in 2021, Simon & Schuster published a fiftieth anniversary edition. With every generation it seems Heller’s work is discovered anew, with readers wrestling, crying, laughing, and puzzling over its tragic, comic, and zany story.2
Source: Author’s photo.
“too damned much to say”3
In Catch-22 we are in the sky, following those who drop bombs below; in Army veteran Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, also set in World War II, we are in the dirt, buried underground as bombs fall around us. We are trapped between life and death, or as James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, “There but not there, midair but buried—suspended underground.” And Vonnegut is there with us.
Deployed to Le Havre, France in December 1944 as part of the 106th Infantry Division, Private First Class Vonnegut was soon captured, along with thousands of his brothers-in-arms, during the Battle of the Bulge. Sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war (POW), Vonnegut was housed in a slaughterhouse with the address Schlachthof 5, or “Slaughterhouse Five”. In February 1945, Allied Forces firebombed Dresden. As the flames engulfed the city, Vonnegut and his fellow huddled in a meat locker. They survived, only to be tasked with collecting bodies for burial.
Slaughterhouse-Five is set in the fires of Dresden, but its story is constantly in flux. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, a chaplain’s assistant in the Army, travels through time and gets taken into outer space.4 Death and tragedy are constant features throughout the book and it contains numerous sections with sexually-explicit content (one of the reasons cited across the many instances when the book has been banned). And there is the constant blurring of reality, fact and fiction, as reflected in the book’s opening line: “[a]ll this happened, more or less.”
Notably, Slaughterhouse Five was not Vonnegut’s first book. He was a well-established writer by 1969. His first novel, Player Piano, came out in 1952 and Cat’s Cradle was published in 1963, among others. But Slaughterhouse Five was a massive hit, becoming a best-seller right out of the gate and continuing to reach huge audiences every decade since. Well into the 21st century, it was selling over 100,000 copies a year.
The book gained immediate traction with a nation engulfed in war and protest. The 1960’s and early 1970’s witnessed the largest antiwar protests in the America’s history. The book seemed to speak directly to the antiwar movement—the review in the New York Times noted that the book’s introduction “should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees…” But to categorize the book as antiwar is not quite right nor is it accurate to attribute it’s enduring appeal to the way it resonated with the Vietnam generation.
One reader described the book’s stance towards war by noting, “[i]ts unique premise does not explicitly condemn war, it just says “this is how it is” — bad things just happen.” Writing in Vox on the book’s fiftieth anniversary, Constance Grady argues Slaughterhouse Five continues to pull readers in because it “tries to talk honestly and intelligently about war and about death, and finds that they are both impossible to talk about.”
Or as Billy Pilgrim would say, “so it goes.”
Additional Resources:
Joseph Heller gave an interesting interview in the 1990s, as he was publishing his sequel to Catch-22.
You can learn more about Kurt Vonnegut, his life and work, at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.
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One of the other threads in the book is that the number of missions pilots have to go on to complete their tour keeps getting raised.
Currently-serving veteran author, Matthew Komatsu, wrote a piece on Catch-22 that included a contemporary example of catch-22 logic from his own military experience, including the following: “Major Major Major Major, the absurdist: 1999-present. I’m told I cannot have a computer without first doing the computer-based training. When I ask where to do the training, I am told to complete the training on my computer.”
As a POW, Vonnegut wrote a letter to his family which ended with the line, “I’ve too damned much to say, the rest will have to wait…”
Vonnegut writes that “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time”.
You raise an interesting point about some of these anti-war WWII books gaining steam around the Vietnam era. I cannot help but wonder how much this has tilted public favor away from both the military in general and America's involvement in overseas endeavors - both those that are questionable and those that are noble. Much to chew on here.