Not even Clevinger understood how Milo could do that, and Clevinger knew everything. Clevinger kneweverything about the war except why Yossarian had to die while Corporal Snark was allowed to live, or whyCorporal Snark had to die while Yossarian was allowed to live. It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossariancould have lived without it—lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their livesto win it, and it was not his ambition to be among them. To die or not to die, that was the question, and Clevingergrew limp trying to answer it. History did not demand Yossarian’s premature demise, justice could be satisfied without it, progress did not hinge upon it, victory did not depend on it. That men would die was a matter ofnecessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be thevictim of anything but circumstance. But that was war. Just about all he could find in its favor was that it paidwell and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents.

　　Clevinger knew so much because Clevinger was a genius with a pounding heart and blanching face. He was agangling, gawky, feverish, famish-eyed brain. As a Harvard undergraduate he had won prizes in scholarship forjust about everything, and the only reason he had not won prizes in scholarship for everything else was that hewas too busy signing petitions, circulating petitions and challenging petitions, joining discussion groups andresigning from discussion groups, attending youth congresses, picketing other youth congresses and organizingstudent committees in defense of dismissed faculty members. Everyone agreed that Clevinger was certain to gofar in the academic world. In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, andeveryone knew it except those who soon found it out.

　　In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museumswith both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilectionfor staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was ahumanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantlydefending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communistenemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because theythought he was a dope.

　　He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with himwithout getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and theobligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until thefirst intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found outat once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He kneweverything about literature except how to enjoy it.

　　Yossarian tried to help him. “Don’t be a dope,” he had counseled Clevinger when they were both at cadet schoolin Santa Ana, California.

　　“I’m going to tell him,” Clevinger insisted, as the two of them sat high in the reviewing stands looking down onthe auxiliary paradeground at Lieutenant Scheisskopf raging back and forth like a beardless Lear.

　　“Why me?” Lieutenant Scheisskopf wailed.

　　“Keep still, idiot,” Yossarian advised Clevinger avuncularly.

　　“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Clevinger objected.

　　“I know enough to keep still, idiot.”

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf tore his hair and gnashed his teeth. His rubbery cheeks shook with gusts of anguish. Hisproblem was a squadron of aviation cadets with low morale who marched atrociously in the parade competitionthat took place every Sunday afternoon. Their morale was low because they did not want to march in paradesevery Sunday afternoon and because Lieutenant Scheisskopf had appointed cadet officers from their ranksinstead of permitting them to elect their own.

　　“I want someone to tell me,” Lieutenant Scheisskopf beseeched them all prayerfully. “If any of it is my fault, Iwant to be told.”

　　“He wants someone to tell him,” Clevinger said.

　　“He wants everyone to keep still, idiot,” Yossarian answered.

　　“Didn’t you hear him?” Clevinger argued.

　　“I heard him,” Yossarian replied. “I heard him say very loudly and very distinctly that he wants every one of usto keep our mouths shut if we know what’s good for us.”

　　“I won’t punish you,” Lieutenant Scheisskopf swore.

　　“He says he won’t punish me,” said Clevinger.

　　“He’ll castrate you,” said Yossarian.

　　“I swear I won’t punish you,” said Lieutenant Scheisskopf. “I’ll be grateful to the man who tells me the truth.”

　　“He’ll hate you,” said Yossarian. “To his dying day he’ll hate you.”

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf was an R.O.T.C. graduate who was rather glad that war had broken out, since it gave himan opportunity to wear an officer’s uniform every day and say “Men” in a clipped, military voice to the bunchesof kids who fell into his clutches every eight weeks on their way to the butcher’s block. He was an ambitious andhumorless Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who confronted his responsibilities soberly and smiled only when some rivalofficer at the Santa Ana Army Air Force Base came down with a lingering disease. He had poor eyesight andchronic sinus trouble, which made war especially exciting for him, since he was in no danger of going overseas.

　　The best thing about him was his wife and the best thing about his wife was a girl friend named Dori Duz whodid whenever she could and had a Wac uniform that Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife put on every weekend andtook off every weekend for every cadet in her husband’s squadron who wanted to creep into her.

　　Dori Duz was a lively little tart of copper-green and gold who loved doing it best in toolsheds, phone booths,field houses and bus kiosks. There was little she hadn’t tried and less she wouldn’t. She was shameless, slim,nineteen and aggressive. She destroyed egos by the score and made men hate themselves in the morning for theway she found them, used them and tossed them aside. Yossarian loved her. She was a marvelous piece of asswho found him only fair. He loved the feel of springy muscle beneath her skin everywhere he touched her the only time she’d let him. Yossarian loved Dori Duz so much that he couldn’t help flinging himself downpassionately on top of Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife every week to revenge himself upon LieutenantScheisskopf for the way Lieutenant Scheisskopf was revenging himself upon Clevinger.

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife was revenging herself upon Lieutenant Scheisskopf for some unforgettable crimeof his she couldn’t recall. She was a plump, pink, sluggish girl who read good books and kept urging Yossariannot to be so bourgeois without the r. She was never without a good book close by, not even when she was lyingin bed with nothing on her but Yossarian and Dori Duz’s dog tags. She bored Yossarian, but he was in love withher, too. She was a crazy mathematics major from the Wharton School of Business who could not count totwenty-eight each month without getting into trouble.

　　“Darling, we’re going to have a baby again,” she would say to Yossarian every month.

　　“You’re out of your goddam head,” he would reply.

　　“I mean it, baby,” she insisted.

　　“So do I.”

　　“Darling, we’re going to have a baby again,” she would say to her husband.

　　“I haven’t the time,” Lieutenant Scheisskopf would grumble petulantly. “Don’t you know there’s a parade goingon?”

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf cared very deeply about winning parades and about bringing Clevinger up on chargesbefore the Action Board for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the cadet officers Lieutenant Scheisskopfhad appointed. Clevinger was a troublemaker and a wise guy. Lieutenant Scheisskopf knew that Clevinger mightcause even more trouble if he wasn’t watched. Yesterday it was the cadet officers; tomorrow it might be theworld. Clevinger had a mind, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf had noticed that people with minds tended to get prettysmart at times. Such men were dangerous, and even the new cadet officers whom Clevinger had helped intooffice were eager to give damning testimony against him. The case against Clevinger was open and shut. Theonly thing missing was something to charge him with.

　　It could not be anything to do with parades, for Clevinger took the parades almost as seriously as LieutenantScheisskopf himself. The men fell out for the parades early each Sunday afternoon and groped their way intoranks of twelve outside the barracks. Groaning with hangovers, they limped in step to their station on the mainparadeground, where they stood motionless in the heat for an hour or two with the men from the sixty or seventyother cadet squadrons until enough of them had collapsed to call it a day. On the edge of the field stood a row ofambulances and teams of trained stretcher bearers with walkie-talkies. On the roofs of the ambulances werespotters with binoculars. A tally clerk kept score. Supervising this entire phase of the operation was a medicalofficer with a flair for accounting who okayed pulses and checked the figures of the tally clerk. As soon asenough unconscious men had been collected in the ambulances, the medical officer signaled the bandmaster tostrike up the band and end the parade. One behind the other, the squadrons marched up the field, executed a cumbersome turn around the reviewing stand and marched down the field and back to their barracks.

　　Each of the parading squadrons was graded as it marched past the reviewing stand, where a bloated colonel witha big fat mustache sat with the other officers. The best squadron in each wing won a yellow pennant on a polethat was utterly worthless. The best squadron on the base won a red pennant on a longer pole that was wortheven less, since the pole was heavier and was that much more of a nuisance to lug around all week until someother squadron won it the following Sunday. To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No moneywent with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that theowner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.

　　The parades themselves seemed equally absurd. Yossarian hated a parade. Parades were so martial. He hatedhearing them, hated seeing them, hated being tied up in traffic by them. He hated being made to take part inthem. It was bad enough being an aviation cadet without having to act like a soldier in the blistering heat everySunday afternoon. It was bad enough being an aviation cadet because it was obvious now that the war would notbe over before he had finished his training. That was the only reason he had volunteered for cadet training in thefirst place. As a soldier who had qualified for aviation cadet training, he had weeks and weeks of waiting forassignment to a class, weeks and weeks more to become a bombardier-navigator, weeks and weeks more ofoperational training after that to prepare him for overseas duty. It seemed inconceivable then that the war couldlast that long, for God was on his side, he had been told, and God, he had also been told, could do whatever Hewanted to. But the war was not nearly over, and his training was almost complete.

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf longed desperately to win parades and sat up half the night working on it while his wifewaited amorously for him in bed thumbing through Krafft-Ebing to her favorite passages. He read books onmarching. He manipulated boxes of chocolate soldiers until they melted in his hands and then maneuvered inranks of twelve a set of plastic cowboys he had bought from a mail-order house under an assumed name and keptlocked away from everyone’s eyes during the day. Leonardo’s exercises in anatomy proved indispensable. Oneevening he felt the need for a live model and directed his wife to march around the room.

　　“Naked?” she asked hopefully.

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf smacked his hands over his eyes in exasperation. It was the despair of LieutenantScheisskopf’s life to be chained to a woman who was incapable of looking beyond her own dirty, sexual desiresto the titanic struggles for the unattainable in which noble man could become heroically engaged.

　　“Why don’t you ever whip me?” she pouted one night.

　　“Because I haven’t the time,” he snapped at her impatiently. “I haven’t the time. Don’t you know there’s aparade going on?”

　　And he really did not have the time. There it was Sunday already, with only seven days left in the week to getready for the next parade. He had no idea where the hours went. Finishing last in three successive parades hadgiven Lieutenant Scheisskopf an unsavory reputation, and he considered every means of improvement, evennailing the twelve men in each rank to a long two-by-four beam of seasoned oak to keep them in line. The plan was not feasible, for making a ninety-degree turn would have been impossible without nickel-alloy swivelsinserted in the small of every man’s back, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf was not sanguine at all about obtainingthat many nickel-alloy swivels from Quartermaster or enlisting the cooperation of the surgeons at the hospital.

　　The week after Lieutenant Scheisskopf followed Clevinger’s recommendation and let the men elect their owncadet officers, the squadron won the yellow pennant. Lieutenant Scheisskopf was so elated by his unexpectedachievement that he gave his wife a sharp crack over the head with the pole when she tried to drag him into bedto celebrate by showing their contempt for the sexual mores of the lower middle classes in Western civilization.

　　The next week the squadron won the red flag, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf was beside himself with rapture. Andthe week after that his squadron made history by winning the red pennant two weeks in a row! Now LieutenantScheisskopf had confidence enough in his powers to spring his big surprise. Lieutenant Scheisskopf haddiscovered in his extensive research that the hands of marchers, instead of swinging freely, as was then thepopular fashion, ought never to be moved more than three inches from the center of the thigh, which meant, ineffect, that they were scarcely to be swung at all.

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s preparations were elaborate and clandestine. All the cadets in his squadron were swornto secrecy and rehearsed in the dead of night on the auxiliary parade-ground. They marched in darkness that waspitch and bumped into each other blindly, but they did not panic, and they were learning to march withoutswinging their hands. Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s first thought had been to have a friend of his in the sheet metalshop sink pegs of nickel alloy into each man’s thighbones and link them to the wrists by strands of copper wirewith exactly three inches of play, but there wasn’t time—there was never enough time—and good copper wirewas hard to come by in wartime. He remembered also that the men, so hampered, would be unable to fallproperly during the impressive fainting ceremony preceding the marching and that an inability to faint properlymight affect the unit’s rating as a whole.

　　And all week long he chortled with repressed delight at the officers’ club. Speculation grew rampant among hisclosest friends.

　　“I wonder what that Shithead is up to,” Lieutenant Engle said.

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf responded with a knowing smile to the queries of his colleagues. “You’ll find outSunday,” he promised. “You’ll find out.”

　　Lieutenant Scheisskopf unveiled his epochal surprise that Sunday with all the aplomb of an experiencedimpresario. He said nothing while the other squadrons ambled past the reviewing stand crookedly in theircustomary manner. He gave no sign even when the first ranks of his own squadron hove into sight with theirswingless marching and the first stricken gasps of alarm were hissing from his startled fellow officers. He heldback even then until the bloated colonel with the big fat mustache whirled upon him savagely with a purplingface, and then he offered the explanation tha............