Chapter 8 6. Hungry Joe

It was true that Hungry Joe had already flown fifty missions, but it was of no use to him, and he packed up and waited to go home.At night, he would have terrible nightmares, screaming and roaring, making all the officers and soldiers of the squadron unable to sleep, except for Huple. Heple was only fifteen years old, he was a pilot, and he had lied about his age before joining the army.He and his precious cat shared a tent with Hungry Joe.Hupple, who had always been prone to awakenings in his sleep, claimed that he had never heard Hungry Joe screaming.Hungry Joe felt bad. "So what?" roared Dr. Daneeka resentfully, "I used to be rich, to tell you the truth, netting $50,000 a year, almost tax-free, because I asked to come. All patients pay in cash. Besides, I'm backed by the most powerful trade association in the world. But lo and behold, what happened next. Just as I was getting ready and starting to save some money, They concocted some fascism and started a horrible war that didn't even escape me. Every night when a guy like Hungry Joe yells hysterically, I can't stop thinking about it Laughing. I really can't help but want to laugh. Does he feel bad? How does he know what I feel?"

Hungry Joe had so many troubles himself that he really couldn't control what Dr. Daneeka was feeling.Take the noises, for example, even the slightest, which set him off into a rage.Whenever Alfred was spitting and smacking his pipe, or Aldingdin was doing some tinkering, or McWatt was playing blackjack or poker, every card would always fall. and Hungry Joe would yell at them till he was hoarse when Dobbs was running clumsily and stumbling about and chattering his teeth. .Hungry Joe suffered from hyperactivity of the motor imagery type, and had a violent and violent temper.In the quiet room, the watch ticked regularly, like torture, hitting his unprotected head hard.

"Listen, little one," Hungry Joe said gruffly to Huple late one night, "if you want to live in this tent, you've got to do what I like to do: every night, You have to wrap your own watch in a wool sock and put it on the bottom shelf of your own footer chest across the tent." Huple raised his chin in disbelief, letting Hungry Joe understand that he was not at the mercy of others, so he followed Hungry Joe's orders to the letter. Hungry Joe was very nervous. He was very thin, with a pitiful appearance, his face was haggard and yellow, and on the black temples on both sides, there were twitching veins, which seemed to be cut into several snakes. Creeping under the skin.The face was thin with sunken cheeks, lonely and desolate, sullen with long-term worry, completely dull, like an abandoned miners' town.Hungry Joe eats voraciously, always gnaws on his fingertips, stutters when he speaks, and sometimes gets choked up because of emotion, he can't speak half a sentence, his body is itchy, he sweats a lot, and the corners of his mouth often Drooling.He often carries a complex black camera on his back, running around like a maniac, always wanting to take some nude photos of women.But a photo was never taken.He kept forgetting to load film, turn on lights, or open the lens cap.It was no easy task persuading naked women to pose, but Hungry Joe had a knack for it.

"I'm a big celebrity," he'd always say out loud, "I'm a big-name photojournalist for Life magazine, and I'm trying to get a top-of-the-line shot for the big cover. Yes, yes, yes! Big Hollywood star. Inexhaustible money, endless marriage, having fun with men all day long." In this world, there are probably very few women who can resist the temptation of such sweet words.Whores always jump up impatiently, and when Hungry Joe tells them to, no matter how strange the pose, they will definitely throw themselves into it.Women simply drive Hungry Joe head-to-head.Women are his idols.To him, a woman is a miracle in the world, beautiful, pleasing to the eye, and ecstatic; a tool for pleasure, whose power is immeasurable, and whose desire is so strong that it cannot be resisted. Men are not entitled to enjoy it.It seemed to him that a woman's naked body was at his disposal a gross negligence - one that would be quickly corrected.Therefore, he always had to do everything possible to make full use of their bodies in a very short time before others learned the inside story and hurriedly took them away.Whether to play with them or take pictures of them, he has been hesitant, because he found that the two things can not be done at the same time.In fact, he was beginning to feel that he could hardly do either of these things.The reason is that he couldn't get rid of the old habit of acting hastily and sloppily from beginning to end, which resulted in his extremely low ability to handle affairs, and he always had a head in one direction and a stick in another.None of the photos were taken, and none of the women who got it were played.Oddly enough, Hungry Joe did work as a photojournalist for Life magazine before his military service.

Today, he is a hero.In Yossarian's eyes, he was the greatest Air Force hero because he flew more combat missions than any other hero in the Air Force.He has completed six combat missions.When Hungry Joe completed his first combat mission, the regulations at the time required each man to complete twenty-five missions.As long as he completed these twenty-five missions, he could pack his bags, happily write home the good news, and then start pestering Sergeant Towser enthusiastically, asking if the order to return to the United States on a rotation basis had been issued.During the standby period, he danced a very rhythmic shuffling dance around the door of the combat command room every day.Whenever anyone passed, he would speak loudly and make endless wisecracks, and would jokingly call Sergeant Towser a nasty bastard whenever he saw him hurrying out of the squadron office.

Within a week of being stationed at the Tun Salerno beachhead, Hungry Joe completed his original twenty-five missions.At the time, Yossarian was hospitalized with gonorrhea. He'd picked up this venereal disease once—he was on a low-altitude flight to Marrakech to airlift supplies—when he was wild in the bush with a member of the Army Women's Corps.Then Yossarian went after Hungry Joe with all his might and nearly let him catch up, flying six missions in six days.His twenty-third mission, however, was to Arezzo, where Colonel Nevers had been killed.After that mission is completed, he will be able to go home after flying two more times.But on the second day, Colonel Cathcart came to the squadron in a new uniform and looked arrogant and domineering.He celebrated his assumption of the command of the group by raising the required number of flights from twenty-five to thirty.Hungry Joe unpacked and rewrote his happy letter home.He stopped pestering Sergeant Towser with gusto.He began to hate Sergeant Towser, and blamed Sergeant Towser with great viciousness, even though he knew that the arrival of Colonel Cathcart, or the order to send them home had been postponed-which could have been made. Sergeant Towser had nothing to do with him coming home seven days early and skipping five additional missions.

Hungry Joe could no longer bear the extreme tension of waiting for the order to return home, and his physical and mental health rapidly collapsed every time he completed another flight mission.Every time he was withdrawn from combat missions, he would hold a large-scale reception and invite his small group of friends to gather together.He cracked open bottles of bourbon—which he had managed to buy while flying the mail four days a week on the Army Express—for friends.Then he laughed and sang and shuffled and yelled, festively intoxicated and ecstatic, until sleep came over him and he couldn't hold on any longer, and he fell peacefully to sleep.No sooner had Yossarian, Nately, and Dunbar put him to bed than he started screaming.The next morning, he walked out of the tent, haggard, with an expression of fear and guilt. The whole person looked like a hollowed-out building, leaving only an empty skeleton, which was crumbling and would collapse if touched.

Every time Hungry Joe stopped flying combat missions and waited for the never-ending order to return home, he suffered a lot.During the period, every night he spent in the squadron, the nightmares always appeared in his dreamland on time, just like the movement of the celestial bodies, without the difference of minutes and seconds.Hungry Joe always screamed hysterically in his nightmares, disturbing the nerves of the squadron like Dobbs and Captain Flume, so that they too started having nightmares and screaming hysterically.So, every night, from different corners of the squadron, they spit all kinds of sharp obscenities into the air, which echoed in the night, with some fun, like the joyful cries of rutting birds when they mating.From Colonel Korn's point of view, this was a bad tendency in Major Major's squadron, and he took decisive action to put an end to it.His solution was to order Hungry Joe to fly the postal service once a week on a mail circuit so that for four nights he would not be able to spend the night in the squadron.This remedy, like all of Colonel Korn's, did indeed work.

Every time Colonel Cathcart increased the number of missions and returned Hungry Joe to combat duty, Hungry Joe ceased to be a nightmare.He just smiled reassuringly, and returned to his usual state of fear.Yossarian studied Hungry Joe's shrunken face as if he were reading a newspaper headline.Whenever Hungry Joe was gloomy, it meant everything was all right, but when he was in high spirits, something was wrong.Hungry Joe's yin and yang disordered reaction was indeed a strange phenomenon in the eyes of everyone, and only he himself categorically denied it. "Who dreams?" Hungry Joe asked back when Yossarian asked him what dreams he had.

"Joe, why don't you go see Dr. Daneeka?" Yossarian persuaded. "Why should I go to Dr. Daneeka? I'm fine." "Don't you always have nightmares?" "I didn't have a nightmare." Hungry Joe lied. "Maybe Dr. Daneeka has a cure for those nightmares." "There's nothing wrong with having nightmares," replied Hungry Joe. "Who doesn't have nightmares?" Now, Yossarian thought, he was being tricked. "Do you have nightmares every night?" he asked. "Isn't it okay to have nightmares every night?" Hungry Joe asked rhetorically.

Hungry Joe's rhetorical question made Yossarian Mosey suddenly enlightened.He was right to ask, why can't he have nightmares every night?In this way, it is understandable to scream in pain every night when I have nightmares.This is easier to understand than Appleby.Appleby has always adhered to the rules and regulations.On one of his overseas missions, he had ordered Kraft to order Yossarian to take Altipine tablets, even though he and Yossarian had long since stopped talking to each other.Hungry Joe was far more sensible than Kraft.Kraft is no longer alive.At Ferrara, when Yossarian directed his team of six planes over the target again, an engine exploded, killing Kraft.The Flying Group had bombed for seven days without bombing the bridge over Ferrara, even though they used bomb sights so fine that they could drop bomb after bomb into a pickle bucket at forty thousand feet.A week earlier, Colonel Cathcart had volunteered to have his men blow up the bridge within twenty-four hours.Kraft was a native of Pennsylvania, a very thin young man with no evil intentions.His only hope was to be liked, and yet even this degrading and base wish was doomed in the end.He died without being loved by others, just like a bloody cinder on a burning fire, he passed away without a sound.No one heard what he said in the last precious moments of his life when the plane with only one wing was falling rapidly.For a little while Kraft lived in contention with the world, and then, on the seventh day, died in flames over Ferrara.At that time, God was resting, McWatt turned the plane around, Yossarian guided him to fly over the target, and made another bombing flight, because Aarfy panicked during the first bombing flight, and Yossarian Even failed to drop the bomb. "I guess we'll just have to fly back again, don't we?" McWhorter murmured over the intercom. "I suppose so," Yossarian said. "Really?" McWatt asked. "yes." "Well then," McWhorter said, "that's the way it is." They flew back over the target, and the other team's planes circled in the distance and flew away safely.At this time, every artillery piece of Hermann Göring's division on the ground fired at the two of them fiercely. Colonel Kaska was a man of the utmost courage.As long as there is a ready-made bombing target, he has never hesitated to ask his subordinates to destroy it.In the eyes of his flying squadron, any target, no matter how dangerous, was invincible, just as to Appleby, there was no dangerous shot on the ping-pong table that could not be saved.Appleby was an excellent pilot and a superb ping-pong player who, despite having flies in his eyes, never dropped a ball.For Appleby, twenty-one serves were enough to embarrass an opponent.His table tennis skills are really superb.As long as there are ball games, he must win every game.Then, one night, after drinking gin and whiskey, Al went drunk to find Appleby to play ping-pong.Appleby slammed all of his first five shots in a row to start the opening, so he picked up the racket and smashed Applebee across the forehead.Al dropped his racket and leapt onto the ping-pong table, followed by a quick long jump and slammed down the other end of the table; his feet landed on Appleby's face, and chaos ensued.It took Appleby almost a full minute to break free from Al's punches and kicks. He groped to get up, grabbed Al's shirt front with one hand, lifted him up, and clenched his other hand into a fist. He retracted, and was about to hit him violently, killing him.At that moment Yossarian stepped forward and pulled Orr away from him.This night was a night full of surprises for Appleby.Appleby, as big and stocky as Yossarian, threw his fist and hit Yossarian hard.First Warrant Officer White Halfoat was so delighted with the punch that he turned around and aimed for Colonel Moodus to hit the nose hard as well.General Dreedle was so delighted that he had Colonel Cathcart eject the chaplain from the officers' club and ordered Chief White Halfoat to move into Dr. Daneeka's tent so that he would be available twenty-four hours a day. With access to a doctor's attention and security of health, he would be ready to deal with it whenever General Dreedle asked him to punch Colonel Moodus in the nose.There were times when General Dreedle came down from Wing Headquarters with Colonel Moodus and the nurse just to get Chief White Halfoat to punch his son-in-law hard on the nose. First Warrant Officer White Halfoat was more than willing to stay in the trailer he shared with Captain Flume.Captain Flume, the squadron's press officer, was not joking and bored.Every night, he spends more than half of his time developing the photos he took during the day, and then sending them out with his promotional release.He tried to work in the darkroom every night, and then lay on his cot, with his index and middle fingers crossed, and a rabbit's hind foot wrapped around his neck, trying to keep himself from falling asleep.Shared with Warrant Officer 1st White Halfoat, he was in constant terror.He was always haunted by the idea that one night, Chief White Halfoat would sneak up to his bed while he was sound asleep, and slit his throat open.The reason why he had such an idea was also because of First Warrant Officer White Halfoat himself.Chief White Halfoat did tiptoe up to Captain Flume's bed one night while he was dozing off, and threatened with hissing menacingly that one night, while he , Captain Flume, in his sleep, he, Chief Warrant Officer White Halfoat, would slit his throat.Capt. Flume, sweating coldly with terror, opened his eyes wide and looked up, staring blankly into the drunken eyes of Chief White Halfoat, who were only inches away from him. "Why?" Captain Flume finally asked in a low, hoarse voice. "Why not?" Chief Warrant Officer White Halfoat replied simply. Every night after that, Captain Flume tried to keep himself awake.Hungry Joe's nightmares had really done him a great favor.Night after night he listened intently to Hungry Joe's frantic howls, and grew to hate him, wishing that one night Chief White Halfoat would slip up to his bed and cut him. Open his throat.In fact, Captain Flume slept soundly most nights, only dreaming that he was awake.These dreams were so real that, as a result, every morning when he awoke from his sleep, he was exhausted and fell back asleep in no time. After Captain Flume's startling transformation, Chief White Halfoat has grown to like him.Captain Flume, who had gone to bed that night rather lively and cheerful, rose the next morning morose and withdrawn.1st Warrant Officer White Halfoat proudly regards this new Captain Flume as his own creation.It had never been his intention to slit Captain Flume's throat.He was threatening to do it like he was just kidding when he said he was going to die of pneumonia, or punch Colonel Moodus in the nose, or wrestle Dr. Daneeka.Sleep was the first thing he wanted to do every night when he staggered into the tent drunk, and Hungry Joe often kept him awake.Hungry Joe screamed hysterically during his nightmares, making him restless.So he often wished someone would sneak into Hungry Joe's tent, take Huple's cat from his face, and slit his throat.In this way, everyone in the squadron, except Captain Flume, can sleep soundly. Even though First Class White Halfoat punched Colonel Moodus hard on the nose for General Dreedle, he was still an outsider.The squadron leader, Major Major, was also an outsider.Major Major found himself an outsider when he learned from Colonel Cathcart that he had been promoted to squadron leader.The day after Major Duluth was killed over Perugia, Colonel Cathcart sped into the squadron quarters in his overpowered jeep.Colonel Cathcart slammed to a halt a few inches from the railroad ditch.The trench ran between the jeep and the sloping basketball court. Upon Colonel Cathcart's arrival, Major Major was punched, kicked, shoved, and stoned by his fellow golfers--whom he had almost befriended--and was eventually ejected from the court; "You're the new squadron leader now," Colonel Cathcart called to Major Major over the trench, "but don't think it's a big deal, because it's nothing. It's just that you are the new squadron leader. " Colonel Cathcart came as suddenly as he went.After saying that, he turned the car around sharply, the wheels whirled, and a cloud of fine gravel was thrown up, blowing Major Major's face, and the car rumbled away.The news stunned Major Major.He stood there dumbfounded, unable to utter a word, his slender body becoming more and more ugly, holding a worn-out basketball in his two long hands, watching the hatred that Colonel Cathcart so quickly sowed. The seeds took root in the hearts of the soldiers around him.And these guys kept playing basketball with him and allowed him to befriend them as anyone would have liked before.Major Major's eyes were dull, the whites of his eyes were enlarged and blurred, his mouth was moving, and he wanted to say something, but he couldn't make a sound. The familiar and inescapable loneliness floated over again, which seemed to make him feel uncomfortable. The suffocating smoke trapped him. Like all the other officers at Group Headquarters—except Major Danby—Colonel Cathcart was deeply democratic: he believed that all men were created equal.Therefore, with the same enthusiasm, he kicked away all the officers and soldiers outside the brigade headquarters.However, he trusted his men.He believed, as he had often told them in the briefing room, that they could fly at least ten more missions than any other force.At the same time, he also believed that anyone who did not have such confidence in his subordinates could get out.The only way they were going to get out, though, as Yossarian had overheard when he flew to meet ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, was to fly these ten additional missions. "I still don't understand," protested Yossarian, "whether Dr. Daneeka was wrong or right?" "How many times did he say so?" "Forty times." "Daneka's right," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen conceded, "as far as Twenty-sixth Air Force Command is concerned, it only needs to fly forty missions." Yossarian was delighted to hear that. "So I can go home? I've flown forty-eight times." "No, you can't go home yet," ex-Private Wintergreen corrected, "you're not crazy, are you?" "Why can't you go home?" "Catch-22 says so." "Catch-22?" Yossarian was surprised. "What does Catch-22 have to do with going home?" "Catch-22," Doc Daneeka replied patiently after Hungry Joe flew Yossarian back to Pianosa, "you are to obey the Commander's orders at all times." .” "But Twenty-sixth Air Force Command said I'd be able to go home after forty missions." "But they didn't say you had to go home. Military regulations say you have to obey every order. That's the trap. Even if the colonel violated the order of Twenty-sixth Air Force Command and insisted that you continue to fly, you still You have to carry out the mission, otherwise, if you disobey his order, it will be a crime. And the 27th Air Force Command will definitely ask you for the crime." Yossarian was completely disheartened. "So, I have to complete the prescribed fifty missions?" he asked very sadly. "Fifty-five times," corrected Dr. Daneeka. "What fifty-five times?" "The Colonel is now asking all of you to fly fifty-five missions." Hungry Joe sighed deeply after hearing what Dr. Daneeka said, and grinned.Yossarian grabbed Hungry Joe by the neck; he was forced to fly immediately with him back to ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen. "If I refuse to fly," Yossarian asked confidently, "what will they do to me?" "We might shoot you," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied. "We?" cried Yossarian, startled. "What do you mean we? When did you side with them?" "If you're shot, who do you expect me to side with?" retorted former Private First Class Wintergreen. Yossarian flinched.Colonel Cathcart had set him up again.