April had been the best month of all for Milo. Lilacs bloomed in April and fruit ripened on the vine. Heartbeatsquickened and old appetites were renewed. In April a livelier iris gleamed upon the burnished dove. April wasspring, and in the spring Milo Minderbinder’s fancy had lightly turned to thoughts of tangerines.
“Tangerines?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My men would love tangerines,” admitted the colonel in Sardinia who commanded four squadrons of B-26s.
“There’ll be all the tangerines they can eat that you’re able to pay for with money from your mess fund,” Miloassured him.
“Casaba melons?”
“Are going for a song in Damascus.”
“I have a weakness for casaba melons. I’ve always had a weakness for casaba melons.”
“Just lend me one plane from each squadron, just one plane, and you’ll have all the casabas you can eat thatyou’ve money to pay for.”
“We buy from the syndicate?”
“And everybody has a share.”
“It’s amazing, positively amazing. How can you do it?”
“Mass purchasing power makes the big difference. For example, breaded veal cutlets.”
“I’m not so crazy about breaded veal cutlets,” grumbled the skeptical B-25 commander in the north of Corsica.
“Breaded veal cutlets are very nutritious,” Milo admonished him piously. “They contain egg yolk and breadcrumbs. And so are lamb chops.”
“Ah, lamb chops,” echoed the B-25 commander. “Good lamb chops?”
“The best,” said Milo, “that the black market has to offer.”
“Baby lamb chops?”
“In the cutest little pink paper panties you ever saw. Are going for a song in Portugal.”
“I can’t send a plane to Portugal. I haven’t the authority.”
“I can, once you lend the plane to me. With a pilot to fly it. And don’t forget—you’ll get General Dreedle.”
“Will General Dreedle eat in my mess hall again?”
“Like a pig, once you start feeding him my best white fresh eggs fried in my pure creamery butter. There’ll betangerines too, and casaba melons, honeydews, filet of Dover sole, baked Alaska, and cockles and mussels.”
“And everybody has a share?”
“That,” said Milo, “is the most beautiful part of it.”
“I don’t like it,” growled the unco-operative fighter-plane commander, who didn’t like Milo either.
“There’s an unco-operative fighter-plane commander up north who’s got it in for me,” Milo complained toGeneral Dreedle. “It takes just one person to ruin the whole thing, and then you wouldn’t have your fresh eggsfried in my pure creamery butter any more.”
General Dreedle had the unco-operative fighter-plane commander transferred to the Solomon Islands to diggraves and replaced him with a senile colonel with bursitis and a craving for litchi nuts who introduced Milo tothe B-17 general on the mainland with a yearning for Polish sausage.
“Polish sausage is going for peanuts in Cracow,” Milo informed him.
“Polish sausage,” sighed the general nostalgically. “You know, I’d give just about anything for a good hunk ofPolish sausage. Just about anything.”
“You don’t have to give anything. Just give me one plane for each mess hall and a pilot who will do what he’stold. And a small down payment on your initial order as a token of good faith.”
“But Cracow is hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines. How will you get to the sausage?”
“There’s an international Polish sausage exchange in Geneva. I’ll just fly the peanuts into Switzerland andexchange them for Polish sausage at the open market rate. They’ll fly the peanuts back to Cracow and I’ll fly thePolish sausage back to you. You buy only as much Polish sausage as you want through the syndicate. There’ll betangerines too, with only a little artificial coloring added. And eggs from Malta and Scotch from Sicily. You’ll bepaying the money to yourself when you buy from the syndicate, since you’ll own a share, so you’ll really begetting everything you buy for nothing. Doesn’t that makes sense?”
“Sheer genius. How in the world did you ever think of it?”
“My name is Milo Minderbinder. I am twenty-seven years old.”
Milo Minderbinder’s planes flew in from everywhere, the pursuit planes, bombers, and cargo ships streaminginto Colonel Cathcart’s field with pilots at the controls who would do what they were told. The planes were decorated with flamboyant squadron emblems illustrating such laudable ideals as Courage, Might, Justice, Truth,Liberty, Love, Honor and Patriotism that were painted out at once by Milo’s mechanics with a double coat of flatwhite and replaced in garish purple with the stenciled name M & M ENTERPRISES, FINE FRUITS ANDPRODUCE. The ‘M & M’ In ‘M & M ENTERPRISES’ stood for Milo & Minderbinder, and the & was inserted,Milo revealed candidly, to nullify any impression that the syndicate was a one-man operation. Planes arrived forMilo from airfields in Italy, North Africa and England, and from Air Transport Command stations in Liberia,Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi. Pursuit planes were traded for additional cargo ships or retained foremergency invoice duty and small-parcel service; trucks and tanks were procured from the ground forces andused for short-distance road hauling. Everybody had a share, and men got fat and moved about tamely withtoothpicks in their greasy lips. Milo supervised the whole expanding operation by himself. Deep otter-brownlines of preoccupation etched themselves permanently into his careworn face and gave him a harried look ofsobriety and mistrust. Everybody but Yossarian thought Milo was a jerk, first for volunteering for the job ofmess officer and next for taking it so seriously. Yossarian also thought that Milo was a jerk; but he also knewthat Milo was a genius.
One day Milo flew away to England to pick up a load of Turkish halvah and came flying back from Madagascarleading four German bombers filled with yams, collards, mustard greens and black-eyed Georgia peas. Milo wasdumbfounded when he stepped down to the ground and found a contingent of armed M.P.s waiting to imprisonthe German pilots and confiscate their planes. Confiscate! The mere word was anathema to him, and he stormedback and forth in excoriating condemnation, shaking a piercing finger of rebuke in the guilt-ridden faces ofColonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn and the poor battle-scarred captain with the submachine gun who commandedthe M.P.s.
“Is this Russia?” Milo assailed them incredulously at the top of his voice. “Confiscate?” he shrieked, as thoughhe could not believe his own ears. “Since when is it the policy of the American government to confiscate theprivate property of its citizens? Shame on you! Shame on all of you for even thinking such a horrible thought.”
“But Milo,” Major Danby interrupted timidly, “we’re at war with Germany, and those are German planes.”
“They are no such thing!” Milo retorted furiously. “Those planes belong to the syndicate, and everybody has ashare. Confiscate? How can you possibly confiscate your own private property? Confiscate, indeed! I’ve neverheard anything so depraved in my whole life.”
And sure enough, Milo was right, for when they looked, his mechanics had painted out the German swastikas onthe wings, tails and fuselages with double coats of flat white and stenciled in the words M & M ENTERPRISES,FINE FRUITS AND PRODUCE. Right before their eyes he had transformed his syndicate into an internationalcartel.
Milo’s argosies of plenty now filled the air. Planes poured in from Norway, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria,Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Sweden, Finland, Poland—from everywhere in Europe, in fact, butRussia, with whom Milo refused to do business. When everybody who was going to had signed up with M & MEnterprises, Fine Fruits and Produce, Milo created a wholly owned subsidiary, M & M Fancy Pastry, andobtained more airplanes and more money from the mess funds for scones and crumpets from the British Isles, prune and cheese Danish from Copenhagen, éclairs, cream puffs, Napoleons and petits fours from Paris, Reimsand Grenoble, Kugelhopf, pumpernickel and Pfefferkuchen from Berlin, Linzer and Dobos Torten from Vienna,Strudel from Hungary and baklava from Ankara. Each morning Milo sent planes aloft all over Europe and NorthAfrica hauling long red tow signs advertising the day’s specials in large square letters: “EYEROUND, 79￠...
WHITING, 21￠.” He boosted cash income for the syndicate by leasing tow signs to Pet Milk, Gaines DogFood, and Noxzema. In a spirit of civic enterprise, he regularly allotted a certain amount of free aerial advertisingspace to General Peckem for the propagation of such messages in the public interest as NEATNESS COUNTS,HASTE MAKES WASTE, and THE FAMILY THAT PRAYS TOGETHER STAYS TOGETHER. Milopurchased spot radio announcements on Axis Sally’s and Lord Haw Haw’s daily propaganda broadcasts fromBerlin to keep things moving. Business boomed on every battlefront.
Milo’s planes were a familiar sight. They had freedom of passage everywhere, and one day Milo contracted withthe American military authorities to bomb the German-held highway bridge at Orvieto and with the Germanmilitary authorities to defend the highway bridge at Orvieto with antiaircraft fire against his own attack. His feefor attacking the bridge for America was the total cost of the operation plus six per cent and his fee fromGermany for defending the bridge was the same cost-plus-six agreement augmented by a merit bonus of athousand dollars for every American plane he shot down. The consummation of these deals represented animportant victory for private enterprise, he pointed out, since the armies of both countries were socializedinstitutions. Once the contracts were signed, there seemed to be no point in using the resources of the syndicateto bomb and defend the bridge, inasmuch as both governments had ample men and material right there to do soand were perfectly happy to contribute them, and in the end Milo realized a fantastic profit from both halves ofhis project for doing nothing more than signing his name twice.
The arrangements were fair to both sides. Since Milo did have freedom of passage everywhere, his planes wereable to steal over in a sneak attack without alerting the German antiaircraft gunners; and since Milo knew aboutthe attack, he was able to alert the German antiaircraft gunners in sufficient time for them to begin firingaccurately the moment the planes came into range. It was an ideal arrangement for everyone but the dead man inYossarian’s tent, who was killed over the target the day he arrived.
“I didn’t kill him!” Milo kept replying passionately to Yossarian’s angry protest. “I wasn’t even there that day, Itell you. Do you think I was down there on the ground firing an antiaircraft gun when the planes came over?”
“But you organized the whole thing, didn’t you?” Yossarian shouted back at him in the velvet darkness cloakingthe path leading past the still vehicles of the motor pool to the open-air movie theater.
“And I didn’t organize anything,” Milo answered indignantly, drawing great agitated sniffs of air in through hishissing, pale, twitching nose. “The Germans have the bridge, and we were going to bomb it, whether I steppedinto the picture or not. I just saw a wonderful opportunity to make some profit out of the mission, and I took it.
What’s so terrible about that?”
“What’s so terrible about it? Milo, a man in my tent was killed on that mission before he could even unpack hisbags.”
“But I didn’t kill him.”
“You got a thousand dollars extra for it.”
“But I didn’t kill him. I wasn’t even there, I tell you. I was in Barcelona buying olive oil and skinless andboneless sardines, and I’ve got the purchase orders to prove it. And I didn’t get the thousand dollars. Thatthousand dollars went to the syndicate, and everybody got a share, even you.” Milo was appealing to Yossarianfrom the bottom of his soul. “Look, I didn’t start this war, Yossarian, no matter what that lousy Wintergreen issaying. I’m just trying to put it on a businesslike basis. Is anything wrong with that? You know, a thousanddollars ain’t such a bad price for a medium bomber and a crew. If I can persuade the Germans to pay me athousand dollars for every plane they shoot down, why shouldn’t I take it?”
“Because you’re dealing with the enemy, that’s why. Can’t you understand that we’re fighting a war? People aredying. Look around you, for Christ’s sake!”
Milo shook his head with weary forbearance. “And the Germans are not our enemies,” he declared. “Oh I knowwhat you’re going to say. Sure, we’re at war with them. But the Germans are also members in good standing ofthe syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders. Maybe they did start the war, and maybethey are killing millions of people, but they pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I couldname. Don’t you understand that I have to respect the sanctity of my contract with Germany? Can’t you see itfrom my point of view?”
“No,” Yossarian rebuffed him harshly.
Milo was stung and made no effort to disguise his wounded feelings. It was a muggy, moonlit night filled withgnats, moths, and mosquitoes. Milo lifted his arm suddenly and pointed toward the open-air theater, where themilky, dust-filled beam bursting horizontally from the projector slashed a conelike swath in the blackness anddraped in a fluorescent membrane of light the audience tilted on the seats there in hypnotic sags, their facesfocused upward toward the aluminized movie screen. Milo’s eyes were liquid with integrity, and his artless anduncorrupted face was lustrous with a shining mixture of sweat and insect repellent.
“Look at them,” he exclaimed in a voice choked with emotion. “They’re my friends, my countrymen, mycomrades in arms. A fellow never had a better bunch of buddies. Do you think I’d do a single thing to harm themif I didn’t have to? Haven’t I got enough on my mind? Can’t you see how upset I am already about all that cottonpiling up on those piers in Egypt?” Milo’s voice splintered into fragments, and he clutched at Yossarian’s shirtfront as though drowning. His eyes were throbbing visibly like brown caterpillars. “Yossarian, what am I goingto do with so much cotton? It’s all your fault for letting me buy it.”
The cotton was piling up on the piers in Egypt, and nobody wanted any. Milo had never dreamed that the NileValley could be so fertile or that there would be no market at all for the crop he had bought. The mess halls in hissyndicate would not help; they rose up in uncompromising rebellion against his proposal to tax them on a percapita basis in order to enable each man to own his own share of the Egyptian cotton crop. Even his reliablefriends the Germans failed him in this crisis: they preferred ersatz. Milo’s mess halls would not even help him store the cotton, and his warehousing costs skyrocketed and contributed to the devastating drain upon his cashreserves. The profits from the Orvieto mission were sucked away. He began writing home for the money he hadsent back in better days; soon that was almost gone. And new bales of cotton kept arriving on the wharves atAlexandria every day. Each time he succeeded in dumping some on the world market for a loss it was snappedup by canny Egyptian brokers in the Levant, who sold it back to him at the original price, so that he was reallyworse off than before.
M & M Enterprises verged on collapse. Milo cursed himself hourly for his monumental greed and stupidity inpurchasing the entire Egyptian cotton crop, but a contract was a contract and had to be honored, and one night,after a sumptuous evening meal, all Milo’s fighters and bombers took off, joined in formation directly overheadand began dropping bombs on the group. He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bombhis own outfit. Milo’s planes separated in a well co-ordinated attack and bombed the fuel stocks and theordnance dump, the repair hangars and the B-25 bombers resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field.
His crews spared the landing strip and the mess halls so that they could land safely when their work was doneand enjoy a hot snack before retiring. They bombed with their landing lights on, since no one was shooting back.
They bombed all four squadrons, the officers’ club and the Group Headquarters building. Men bolted from theirtents in sheer terror and did not know in which direction to turn. Wounded soon lay screaming everywhere. Acluster of fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of the officers’ club and punched jagged holes in the side ofthe wooden building and in the bellies and backs of a row of lieutenants and captains standing at the bar. Theydoubled over in agony and dropped. The rest of the officers fled toward the two exits in panic and jammed up thedoorways like a dense, howling dam of human flesh as they shrank from going farther.
Colonel Cathcart clawed and elbowed his way through the unruly, bewildered mass until he stood outside byhimself. He stared up at the sky in stark astonishment and horror. Milo’s planes, ballooning serenely in over theblossoming treetops with their bomb bay doors open and wing flaps down and with their monstrous, bug-eyed,blinding, fiercely flickering, eerie landing lights on, were the most apocalyptic sight he had ever beheld. ColonelCathcart let go a stricken gasp of dismay and hurled himself headlong into his jeep, almost sobbing. He found thegas pedal and the ignition and sped toward the airfield as fast as the rocking car would carry him, his huge flabbyhands clenched and bloodless on the wheel or blaring his horn tormentedly. Once he almost killed himself whenhe swerved with a banshee screech of tires to avoid plowing into a bunch of men running crazily toward the hillsin their underwear with their stunned faces down and their thin arms pressed high around their temples as punyshields. Yellow, orange and red fires were burning on both sides of the road. Tents and trees were in flames, andMilo’s planes kept coming around interminably with their blinking white landing lights on and their bomb baydoors open. Colonel Cathcart almost turned the jeep over when he slammed the brakes on at the control tower.
He leaped from the car while it was still skidding dangerously and hurtled up the flight of steps inside, wherethree men were busy at the instruments and the controls. He bowled two of them aside in his lunge for the nickel-plated microphone, his eyes glittering wildly and his beefy face contorted with stress. He squeezed themicrophone in a bestial grip and began shouting hysterically at the top of his voice.
“Milo, you son of a bitch! Are you crazy? What the hell are you doing? Come down! Come down!”
“Stop hollering so much, will you?” answered Milo, who was standing there right beside him in the controltower with a microphone of his own. “I’m right here.” Milo looked at him with reproof and turned back to his work. “Very good, men, very good,” he chanted into his microphone. “But I see one supply shed still standing.
That will never do, Purvis—I’ve spoken to you about that kind of shoddy work before. Now, you go right backthere this minute and try i............