← Old School with Shilo Brooks
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:00]
A
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm sitting down with Elliot Ackerman. Elliot is a best selling author, a contributor to the Free Press, and a veteran of the Marine Corps and CIA Special Operations. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, published in 1961, changed Elliot's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is old school. Elliot Ackerman, welcome to old school.
- [00:39]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Shiloh.
- [00:41]
A
It's a pleasure to have you. I've been looking forward to this. I want to talk to you about Catch 22 today. This is a novel you selected, said that it changed your life. When did you first read catch 22 and how old were you and where did you find that book?
- [00:56]
B
I really first read it and it kind of hit me when I was 26 years old. I was a Marine first lieutenant. I was aboard the USS Iwo Jima. Israel had invaded Lebanon. I had just come back from Iraq, and we're sitting here in the Mediterranean Sea, not in Iraq for this deployment. And our battalion was in charge of evacuating all the Americans out of Beirut. And so we were at sea for about two months doing that. And being on the ship every day was a little bit like Groundhog Day. And this sort of postmodernism, absurdism of Catch 22, it made it like the perfect time to read this book.
- [01:40]
A
So you're a veteran. I think if people don't know that, they should. You served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart. Can you talk about at that time? You were 26, you were on this ship. This book resonated with you as a person in the military may now resonate with you differently as a veteran. Why did Catch 22 resonate with you at that time and why does it now?
- [02:03]
B
Well, I think what Catch 22 does and why it's such an important book is it takes a lot of the military tropes and it puts them on their heads. It shows the circular nature and the self defeating nature of war. And what I mean by that specifically is that war itself ultimately is a catch 22. It is a system that contradicts itself. So I think the comedian George Carlin put this most succinctly when he said that fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity. It just doesn't make any sense when you actually boil it down. Civilizations, countries go to war to protect themselves, right? And when the core of any civilization is this idea of Thou shalt not kill, you know, civilized people. That's sort of the baseline. If you're civilized. We don't walk through the streets just, you know, slitting each other's throats. And then from that foundation, we kind of build out nations, countries, other rules. But that's sort of the baseline rule. Well, when countries go to war, we suspend that rule. We engage in state sanctioned violence in order to preserve our civilization, which is founded on this idea fundamentally that we don't kill each other. So it's this self kind of contradicting action, you know, catch 22. I think the whole book is very entertaining, it's very funny. But ultimately, at its core, it's unpacking a lot of those ideas, a lot of those contradictions, and just showing that war fundamentally is, yes, it's an absurd act.
- [03:36]
A
We're recording this episode in a week when Maduro has just been extricated from Venezuela. And, and I was reading this book at the same time those things were going on, and I was just curious whether you think this book has any enduring lessons to teach us about a situation like the one we seem to have just gotten ourselves into.
- [03:57]
B
Well, I think it absolutely does, because, I mean, I think the book and the story of John Yossarian, who is the protagonist of the book, and he is a Bombardier on a B25 in World War II. And his great struggle is, yes, he's fighting against the Nazis and against the fascists, but he also feels like he's fighting against the system he's stuck in. And the system he's stuck in is one where every time he approaches the number of missions that he'll need to fly so he can go home and survive the war, his commander and Colonel Cathcart increases the number of missions. So increasingly, as he's fighting in this war, he not only comes to believe that the Nazis are trying to kill him, but he also comes to believe that his own side is trying to kill him and basically everyone's trying to kill him. So he doesn't know which way to look for the adversary. So I think anytime we go to war, it's tough to have a North Star to understand what is this war about. And I think we're sitting here today where the war in Venezuela is about Maduro is about oil, Are we going to be invading Greenland? Which seems like completely absurd, but now this is suddenly our reality, or are we going to war with Colombia? And I just think the number of events that are washing over us and as quickly as they are, yeah, Sometimes you have to turn to stories that are rude and kind of postmodern, bits of obscurity or absurdity, to, like, understand what's going on in the world.
- [05:20]
A
Can you talk more about that absurdity? Because when I was reading catch 22, one of the things that occurred to me is this is a man, Joseph Heller, extraordinary writer, who's making a comedy out of something that's very grave and very serious, namely war and men dying. And not just that, but the great moral cause of the particular war about which he's writing, the Second World War, which really was, more than any war in recent history, a war, a spiritual war, in some ways. What role does comedy have in helping us understand that, given that it's a quite serious thing?
- [05:55]
B
Yeah, and I've written a lot of books about war.
- [05:58]
A
Exactly.
- [05:59]
B
Yeah. And I can tell you, and I remember many of my books, the majority of my books about war are actually pretty serious. There's not a lot of ha ha lines in them. But then I've also written some books that, you know, are comedies about war. And the impulse I felt to write in a comedic vein was, I think, you know, with anything I've written. And I don't know if Heller felt the same way, but, like, I wanted to really tell the truth. And at a certain point, one truth I could never dodge was like, war's funny. It's funny because it's so serious. You can't take it serious and stay sane. You have to cut a joke, you know, laugh just as a way to release the tension. And so I think one of you know, just the truths that Ice Rancher war is like, that most of the time when I get around from, like, with buddies of mine from that time, you know, usually the stories we're telling are like, all the funny ones. And they're often funny stories that occur in, like, the most tense situations, because we, you know, we needed the joke in that moment. So I think as much as, you know, World War II is probably seen as, you know, America's most righteous war, you know, it's our National Iliad, our story. It's probably the least absurd of our wars, and that it felt like there was, you know, good guys and bad guys, but even in a war like World War II, you know, those comedic and absurd strains continue to exist.
- [07:17]
A
Let's start with just a summary. You mentioned this main character, Yossarian. That Yossarian is an airman, if I'm not mistaken, and they're on a fictional island. And basically, the premise of the book is that Yossirion continues to have to fly larger and larger numbers of combat missions under the presupposition that if he only flies two or three more, it's over and he doesn't have to fly anymore. Then they raise it and then he's got to fly some more. But the novel features a lot of different kinds of characters. Can you tell us about the kind of development that Yossarian undergoes in this novel to give us a better sense for people who have never read it, of exactly what the arc and trajectory of the story is?
- [07:59]
B
The novel is told non linearly. There are episodes in it like the death of Snowden, who's a young airman, which really affects Yossarian. That kind of reoccur in memory throughout. It kind of almost like a chorus throughout the book, as Yossarian's grasping with those. Also this idea that, you know, this. This growing realization on the part of Yossarian that he will never be able to fly enough missions to be sent home from the war, meaning he will eventually die in the war. So he. It's sort of the trajectory of the novel is like Yossarian reckoning increasing with the fact that he feels doomed, and then Yossarian kind of realizing he needs to act in those circumstances. But the book also has this massive ensemble cast of like sort of zany, crazy, tragic characters, each with their own small stories that are tangential to Yossarian. So it's sort of this big chorus and all of them are kind of captured in this world of catch 22, where they're trapped.
- [08:59]
A
This is old school. And here we have an appreciation for old school. Quality, craftsmanship, how things used to be made. Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare, that's V A E R, was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking. And they've actually pulled it off. Vare is now the largest independent watch assembler in the US building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. I absolutely love the watch these guys sent me. It's beautifully made and it feels substantial on my hand. It genuinely lives up to the reputation they've built. Ver has over 10,000 5 star reviews, and once you wear one, you're going to understand why. The materials are top grade, the construction is rock solid, and it's durable enough that I can swim with it, yet it still has a luxury feel. I get compliments on it all the time. If you're tired of disposable products and Want something rugged, timeless and thoughtfully made. Check them out. Go to their watches dot com, that's V A E R watches dot com and support American craftsmanship. Let's talk about that phrase, catch 22. The title has become, for lack of a better term, a catchphrase in American jargon. We say, well, that's a catch 22. I don't know how many people really know what that means when they say it, but there's a passage in the book that Heller in which Heller gives us a full account of what that is.
- [10:25]
B
It's at the beginning of the book, and it's basically Yossarian speaking with Doc Danika, a very important character, you know. And Dr. Nika is basically the flight surgeon who Yazarian is hoping can kind of punch his ticket and get him sent home. So it begins. Yossarian decided right there and then to go crazy. You're wasting your time, Dr. Niko was forced to tell him. Can't you ground someone who's crazy? Oh, sure I have to. There's a rule saying I have to ground anyone who's crazy. Then why don't you ground me? I'm crazy. Ask Clevenger. Clevenger? Where is Clevenger? You find Clevenger and I'll ask him. Then ask any of the others. They'll tell you how crazy I am. They're crazy. Then why don't you ground them? Why don't they ask me to ground them? Because they're crazy, that's why. Of course they're crazy, Dr. Nika replied. I just told you they're crazy, didn't I? And you can't let crazy people decide whether you're crazy or not, can you? Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. Is or crazy? He sure is, Dr. Neeka said. Can you ground him? I sure can, but first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule. Then why doesn't he ask you to? Because he's crazy, Dr. Nika said. He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground or. But first he has to ask me to. That's all he has to do to be grounded, that's all. Let him ask me. And then you can ground him? Yazarian asked. No. Then I can't ground him. You mean there's a catch? Sure there's a catch, Danika replied. Catch 22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy. There was only one catch. And that was catch 22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind, or was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask, and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions, insane if he didn't. But if he was sane, he had to fly them. If he flew them, he was crazy and didn't have to. But if he didn't want to, he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of catch 22, and let out a respectful whistle. That's some catch, that catch 22, he observed. It's the best there is. Dr. Nyko agreed.
- [13:21]
A
Yeah, so at the bottom of this lies the contradiction that if you want to fly more missions, you must be crazy, and so they will ground you. But if you go and say, I don't want to fly anymore, I'm done, please let it stop, they say, well, that's a very reasonable response. So clearly you're sane. And this kind of contradiction, this kind of humor, Heller injects into the novel from the very beginning. You've just read a passage from the beginning all the way through. What do you think about this absurd making of war? I mean, in a way, this novel comes off as a kind of protest novel because it makes these things absurd. And yet there seems to be something that resonates in truth with someone who's fought. So I'm curious to get your analysis of this whole catch 22 absurdity that's sort of pregnant and running throughout.
- [14:13]
B
Yeah, listen. I mean, it's a postmodern novel, right? And it's a postmodern war novel. And, you know, what do I mean, like, by postmodern? I guess I'll give my kind of definition of that. It is a book that deconstructs the meaning out of situations where we bring sort of assumptions, right? We look at a war, and I think most of us, when we see a war, our instincts, like, who's right, who's wrong, who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Heller deconstructs all of that. He's like, no, there's, you know, there are no good guys, bad guys. The war just sort of just is. You know, same ideas with sort of heroism. You know, what's heroic, what's not heroic. Heller kind of strips all that away. It's like there's no heroes. There are really no villains almost. I mean, although some of the characters are clearly antagonists to Yozarian, there's just Yossarian and his heroic act is sort of just trying to survive and exist. So does that make it an anti war novel? I think catch 22 is usually sort of read as an anti war novel. I don't necessarily read it that way. I think it's sort of a novel that foregrounds a truth about war. That is, the longer you can stay in it, the more untethered a person can sort of feel from these grounding moralistic concepts and, and kind of grow closer to this relativism where sort of nothing means anything or the meanings of ideas like honor. Right. The law, sanity start to erode and we are kind of adrift.
- [15:48]
A
You're right. This kind of postmodern confusion comes out in his disposition toward war. I give the example that he thinks on the one hand that the enemies who he is bombing are his enemies. After all, they're trying to kill him. However, he also seems to think that the generals and majors and these sorts of people who are in his own army, his commanding officers, are also his enemies because they're trying to kill him, because they're sending him in. So everyone's trying to kill him. And part of the premise of the novel is that Yossarian seems to want above all else not to die. He seems to have this fear of death. And so Yossarian comes to sight as a character who is self concerned in a way, but he has a concern for other human beings, a sensitivity for other characters in a way that no other character in the book does. You know, I can think of various young women who, young girls who he's concerned with their fate, certain of his friends who he seems to have a tenderness for and a concern for their well being. And so there's. This is a complicated character.
- [16:49]
B
Well, and I think what redeems Yazarian as a character is he never turns his back on his humanity and he refuses to let anyone, you know, put him into a construct that isn't true to who he is. And at the end of the book he is sort of, he's tempted by that. So sort of the two of the great antagonists of the book are Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Corn, who are these sort of, you know, shiftless senior officers with no morals. Colonel Cathcart, sort of desperate to become a general, you know, has that ambition, fully embraces the, you know, absurdity of the war. And at the end of It. Or sort of towards the end, a little bit of a spoiler here. They basically want Yossarian to stop fomenting dissent in the squadron. And they tell him, okay, fine, we will let you go. We'll let you go home. You don't have to fly your missions. And they say, well, what's the deal? What do I have to do for you guys? And the two of them say, you just have to say. There's a long pause. That you like us.
- [17:52]
A
Yeah, right, right.
- [17:53]
B
And it's this, you know, this moment, this conundrum for you. Osarian's like, what do I do? He's like, just that I like you. He's like, just say you like us. And I think it's like, it's fantastic. It's like, it's so simple. And I will. And again, I would totally spoil the book. I'll say, yo. Zarian winds up, I think, handling that, you know, he handles the situation admirably in a way where he doesn't lose completely lose his humanity at the end. He finds a way out. Listen, I think, you know, I think particularly with stories about war, there's a temptation to kind of go all in. Like, this is the true one. This is the anti war book. This is what you have to read to understand war. No, this is the more heroic narrative. This is what. You know, they're all true. Yeah, the heroic narratives are true, the anti war narratives are true. They each capture something that is essential and true about the experience of war. I mean, we could be sitting here right now, you know, talking about For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I think is a fantastic book that is, I think, you know, more definitely more sentimental, more anchored in beauty, more anchored in the idea of what a person. You know, what a person becomes when they sacrifice themselves for a cause and how noble that is. And I think that is a book that is beautiful and true, but so is this book. This book is actually beautiful and true, too. It's funny, it's ironic. It has an anti her, as opposed to a hero at the center of it. You gotta read them all if you want to understand these things. And for me, and the experience I've had as war, as a participant, as a journalist, covering them, even just as a citizen, now, as we're talking about what's in the headlines, I go back to these books to try to understand, okay, where am I sitting?
- [19:34]
A
There's this odd juxtaposition in this book between the bureaucratic, administrative coldness of the military apparatus and the individual feelings and sufferings of a human being. I have in mind this. There are these funny scenes where Yossarian, they're trying to bomb Bologna, and Yossarian goes to the map of where this territory lies, and he moves the bombing line on the board, whether it's pins or a string, over to Bologna to indicate that they've bombed Bologna even though they haven't. He just moves the string and then it spreads around the entire company that they've bombed Bologna, and there's phone calls and did you hear that? We did it simply because he's moved the string. Right. This happens another time when there's this doctor, his name is Doc Danika. You've mentioned him. He hates flying. And so what he often does to get his flight hours, he has to have only like four flight hours a month, is that he puts his name in the flight logs of the planes that go up and kind of stays on the ground, but puts his name on the log. And so it looks like he's flown one of the planes that he puts his name on the log of ends up being destroyed. And so everyone thinks because he was on the flight log, Doc Danika's dead. And they look at him and say, you're dead. And he's like, no, I'm not. I'm here. And they're like, well, you were on the flight log, so you're dead. This is again another way, just like moving the string while you were on the flight log, that the absurdity of the administrative authority is brought out. Now, juxtaposed to that, you have situations in which there is genuine human suffering. There's a moment when a young man is standing up on a raft in the ocean, having some fun with his friends one evening in a kind of party, and a plane flies low, happens to know the people in the ocean, and sort of is tipping its wings to them, gets a little bit too low and cuts this character, kid Sampson in half, such that his legs are all that's left standing on a raft and his torso goes flying into the water. That's horrible and horrifying. That's juxtaposed with he moved the string and Dr. Nika was dead because his name was on the flight log. What does this juxtaposition mean?
- [21:49]
B
Well, I think, you know, bureaucracy always attends war, you know, particularly wars that go on for a long time, and they became. They become self perpetuating entities. So I think what Heller is getting at through, you know, through his comedy, through the idea that by moving a string, they all decide that they bomb Bologna or, you know, there's. There's a certain point where Colonel Cathcart, throughout the book, he's. He's. He's very much obsessed with. With the type having tight bomb patterns to the point where he kind of loses the threat. He's actually like, boys, what I really care about is the tight bomb patterns. And he's always telling the squadron that. The point where, like, they missed the target. But it's a tight bomb pattern. Colonel Cathcart is very happy. You know, I absolutely, you know, recognize, you know, tendencies like that in my own experience, because people just sort of. They lose the thread, they lose the idea of what they're doing, the whole reason they're there. And a bureaucracy can often not only subsume individuals, but can also subsume the entire purpose of a given enterprise. I mean, we want to go back to Americans wars, you know, the body count in Vietnam that we had to constantly report these body counts. But the body count was no longer the thing that was the metric for measuring the success of the war. It was other political matters. We didn't count those. But because the bureaucracy counted them, that was what matters. So I think, you know, Heller, through Yozaria and through the bureaucracy, I mean, what he's gesturing to there is the way that war and large institutions erase people's humanity. And that what makes Yusarian and all these other characters sort of heroic is the way they sort of struggle to cling to their humanity throughout that. And then I think in the writing, what I appreciate about Catch 22 is, you know, it's comedy. And we often can lose sight of the fact that, you know, there's this very slim membrane that separates comedy from tragedy. And the best comedic writing, like a book like catch 22 is you wind up with these moments where you've been laughing along the whole time. And through the jokes, through the sort of zingy one liners which are just like, littered on every page of this book, you're growing closer and more invested in these characters. And so if the story's like a rocket, the comedy is like a booster. It really gets you into orbit. You're taking flight because you start to love these folks. But the payload at the tip is the tragedy. So when Kid Sampson's cut in half, you know, you feel it. Or, you know, we talk about Snowden, the scenes with Ozarian and Snowden. I mean, you really feel those as being imminently tragic because they've come at the end of this comedic journey and you've grown close to those characters. And I think Heller does an incredible job of really mapping out the absurd bureaucratic reality they're all living in, giving you the comedy of that reality, but then showing how it leads to ultimately, for many of these characters, to tragedy. And you really feel that in the book.
- [24:34]
A
You know, I asked you this question about the cold bureaucracy and the facelessness that Heller seems to be trotting before our eyes to great comic effect. But there's this notion of the organization, man. You know, you're in this organization and you're a cog in the machine. Yossarian seems to have some sense of that and feel a certain existential dread at the whole thing. I mean, that he can just move the string and make it appear as though we've bombed. Heller is remarking on something very, very modern. And this is not. Although the novel takes place in the Second World War, it is very modern and in a way, post war Cold War, and arguably even contemporary in its character, for that reason, because of that existential dread. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about that, given that you've been in these gigantic organizations, written books about war, and of course, we're both modern people who. I immediately empathize with him when I see his terror at this circumstance.
- [25:33]
B
You know, reflecting on, like, my own wartime experience, kind of the coming home, you know, people will sometimes ask me, like, about, you know, like, PTSD and what it's like to come home. And. And my response to that typically, is, you know, when you go to war, you are given this, like, very clear sense of purpose. You know, you often have a mission that's relatively clear. You know, whether you're like, you know, in Afghanistan, you're holding a mountaintop, or you're in Iraq, you're holding a few city blocks. So the tactical mission is clear. You're charged with that, with accomplishing the mission. People who, like, might become some of your very best friends. Right? So I think in life, for any of us, the purpose is what brings us joy in our life.
- [26:16]
A
Right?
- [26:17]
B
You know, and when you're 19, 20, 21 year olds, and you go 21 years old and you go to war, you are experiencing this very intense sense of purpose. It's crystal clear. So it's like if purpose is sort of the drug that induces happiness, you start in your 20s, you're like, free basing the crystal meth of purpose. Like, nothing gets you more riled up than this. And you do it for a few years, and then eventually you sort of have to come home. You have to reckon with the descent and you come home and it's time to, well, you know, repurpose yourself. What are you gonna do now, young man? So you look around and, you know, maybe you're gonna use your GI Bill, go to college or sell real estate or work at Home Depot. Whatever you're gonna do. So if you went from, you know, the crystal meth of purpose, well, now, you know, you're gonna be like, sipping the cooler's light of purpose.
- [27:05]
A
Yeah.
- [27:06]
B
And you realize that the rest of your life will be spent on your front porch drinking cooler's light, and a sort of like, kind of depression will set in and a sense of being unsettled. So when I recatch 22, I feel like, yes, Heller is writing about a squadron in World War II. I also feel like. Is he also writing about what it feels like to be in post war America as a veteran? He was an advertising man when he wrote this. He was working at Time magazine writing copy. You know, so you go from being a B25 crew member, flying those types of missions, to now you're just sort of, you know, sitting around working a 9 to 5, you know, writing, writing ad copy. It's disorienting. And you have throughout Katrina, you feel that sense of disorientation. Right. Nothing means anything. Anytime a character, you know, can latch onto something, it immediately dissolves. That's what makes the novel feel postmodern.
- [28:05]
A
It also feels contemporary in its structure. It feels in a way, like a succession of television episodes, which you mentioned. He's an advertiser. It's a very modern feeling novel. It's almost as though it could appear on TikTok or something. I mean, you know, there's these short, punchy chapters. It's like previously on Catch 22. And then, you know, he just so it's a very both in its substance is what you're saying and I'm saying in its form. Hey, it's Shiloh Brooks. If you want a news podcast that's informed, uncompromising, and outside of your echo chamber, check out the Gist. With Mike Pesca. As the longest running daily news podcast, it's become a mainstay on Apple's top charts. In 30 minute episodes, the Gist tackles thought provoking questions that don't fit neatly into partisan lines. With the help of expert guests from the worlds of economics, entertainment, academia, and more, Mike criticizes the right and keeps the left honest. He isn't afraid to spotlight absurdities, debunk conspiracies, and Explore tricky topics like the impact of sports betting, for example, as an award winning journalist with bylines in the Atlantic, the Free Press, the Washington Post, and more might deliver sharp analysis with even sharper wit. Find the gist every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. The word of the day is theodicy. Theodicy can be broken down into its Greek roots. Theos is a Greek prefix that means God. Dikes means justice. So it's a word that has at its root God's justice. And it's really the question of how we should make sense of a world in which there is a good God, but in which evil occurs. There are a few authors who grapple with this, one of which, the most famous of which is perhaps Leibniz. I would also say Dostoevsky and his brothers Karamazov and Nietzsche in a book called Beyond Good and Evil. All of these authors are looking at the world which is a place full of evil and suffering, and asking themselves the question, how can there be a God who is a good God who permits that evil and suffering? Theodicy is an attempt to reconcile and find a solution to that problem. Theodicy is a major theme in catch 22 because this is a book about the evils of war. And the main characters are struggling to make sense of how a war which features so much human suffering can be good and permitted by a good God. There's one character that I cannot help but address with you, and that is this man, Milo. Milo Mender Bender.
- [30:41]
B
I was hoping we would talk about Milo.
- [30:42]
A
We got to talk about Milo. So Milo is a character who embodies the perennial argument that every war is just waged for the sake of money. Like, so Milo, for people who haven't read the novel, is this character who he works in the mess hall, but he ends up forming on his own with his own genius, this international cartel that he calls the Syndicate for Essentially Food Trade, whereby Milo somehow inflates the prices of food across Europe, engages in kind of criminal trade to buy and sell the food such that he makes a profit. The men get the food, the US army appears to make a profit. The people who he's buying from appear to make a profit. And anytime anyone asks him about this, he says, oh, no, it's all above board. After all, you own a share, you own a share of the syndicate. And they're like, oh, wait, I own a share. And so there's this kind of perennial wars are for the sake of money, and everybody's just getting rich. Now that's come out in the news just this week because people are saying, well, Maduro was removed from Venezuela because people are just trying to get that oil and they're just trying to. America's just trying to get rich. Here it is again, it's the same theme. And so can you assess the accuracy, the veracity, the cynicism, the truth of that theme, Heller's treatment of it, and even today, you know, it's in the headlines.
- [32:15]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, I am a Marine, and I would be remiss if I didn't quote one of the great Marine heroes from history, Major General Smedley Butler, two time recipient of the Medal of Honor, who in the 1920s said, War is a racket. It's waged for the benefit of the few at the expense of. Of the many. So I think you can look at war and often see a profit motive. That doesn't mean it's the only motive of the war. But in many wars, there are those who get rich off of war. And so I think Heller definitely kind of interrogates that idea with the very colorful, humorous character of Milo Minder Binder. And Milo is. I mean, he's great. He, at one point, I think he corners the Egyptian cotton market, but he has all this cotton on his hands that suddenly he can't sell, so he decides he's going to cover it in chocolate and feed it to the men. And he needs Yossarian to tell him he'll eat it. And the Yossarian eats some. He's like, what is this? It's disgusting. It's cotton. He's like, well, you know, people eat cotton candy. It's like cotton candy. It's just cotton covered in chocolate. And then at a different point, he is. I think he's. He has another deal where he's trying to. I think he's trying to offload the same cotton to the Germans. And the Germans agree they'll take the cotton, but only if milo gets the B25 squadron to bomb its own base for the Germans. So he cuts that deal. So at one point, Milo is, they're bombing the own base and Colonel Cathcart is in on it because that's the price for the. For the Germans to take this cotton. So he's sort of showing all of these economic cross currents that, you know, frequently a war, you know, don't show allegiance to any ideology or any side, and, you know, there's truth in that. That doesn't mean that's the only reason wars are fought. But if you look at a history of war in any country to include our own. Frequently there is a profit motive. And sitting here today, the President's been pretty explicit that what's going on in Venezuela is about oil and about the US Reasserting its oil interests. So I think we can look at catch 22 to see some of the precedent of that.
- [34:17]
A
Does that fact, that economic interest and these sorts of other things somehow cheapen those higher motives, especially of the individual mental?
- [34:27]
B
Well, I think one of the things that a book like Catch 22 does. Heller doesn't really wade into the politics of the Second World War at all. He sort of holds it up as absolute. This just is what it is, and these are the people existing in this universe. So it's like he's not making an argument for or against the economic or political gravity of war. He's just saying it's gravity. It just. It exists, and this is how people behave under these types of gravity. So he's showing there's political gravity, there's economic gravity, and those forces exist in Heller's universe, and they exist in the universe today as we have it, with issues like Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, I mean, you name it. I think if you look at any of those conflicts, you'll see similar forces existing within them.
- [35:17]
A
So in a piece you recently wrote for the Free Press, I was really interested to see the way you say at the beginning, when you were looking as a young man at the wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, you had some fear that you had missed out because there was this declaration that, you know, we've got it behind us and these kinds of things. And it felt like it was going to be complete. And yet you say in your piece that you were told by. I believe it was one of your mentors, or maybe you yourself had this thought yourself, well, there will be an insurgency. And so you managed to get into the war that you wanted to get into. Yossarian seems not to have that feeling at all. In other words, he seems to want to get the heck out of war. The way you put it in your piece yesterday with the Free Press is that you wanted to get into it. So I'm curious if you could take us into the minds of young men today who see what's going on around the world in Ukraine, the pullout in Afghanistan, about which you've written very movingly and participated in. And then, of course, now this latest situation in Venezuela. What is a young man of some. What the Greeks would call thumos. Manliness, Courage. What is such A man thinking about the situation in the world and his place in it.
- [36:37]
B
Well, I think a young person of thumos who volunteers to serve, you don't volunteer to serve, so you can sit back and base and not do anything. If there's something going on, most people want to be involved. And that was certainly the case with me when the Iraq war began. And in that piece, I mentioned sitting with a mentor of mine as we were watching President Bush give his Mission Accomplished speech, sort of lamenting that we very much felt like we had missed the war. And this captain saying, well, there'll probably be an insurgency. Good chance on that. And the two of us just agreeing that, yeah, we hadn't missed it quite yet. And my experience has been I've. I fought in two wars. I've covered two as a journalist. Every single one that I have witnessed, when I've shown up, I always felt like I was late and that I'd missed it. And then when I look back at my experience in retrospect, I realized, oh, my God, I was actually there pretty early. So it's difficult to know, in a conflict, are you at the beginning? Are you at the middle? Are you at the end? And so much of the understanding where you're at in the timeline deals with, you know, there's a strategic judgment. So, I mean, for instance, we're sitting here today with Venezuela, you know, is the raid that occurred over the weekend, is that the end of the conflict? Like, is that the end of our military engagement in Venezuela? And will the country, you know, now sort of, you know, shift its policies in alignment with what President Trump wants? I mean, you know, maybe. So I would imagine the administration probably hopes that, yes, that was the last military incursion in Venezuela, and now everything's gonna lock into place. But if we're at the very beginning of the conflict, obviously, there's a real problem there. So I think knowing how to situate yourself in a conflict can absolutely be a challenge.
- [38:19]
A
You mentioned President Trump. I mean, one looks at today's politics and wonders. In fact, I long for a Joseph Heller to emerge again, because a beautiful novel could be written with the kinds of characters that we see in our politics today. A kind of humorous and, I suspect, comedic novel. Heller has an eye for this. I mean, one can imagine a Trump like, character in a catch 22.
- [38:42]
B
Sure.
- [38:43]
A
You know, it would be just hilarious. Maybe you're the man to write such a novel. I don't know. But how does a president change his mind who comes into office with this sort of America first, no foreign intervention policy. Become a president within the span of a year who is heavily involved in foreign intervention. Venezuela. I'm thinking of Iran, these sorts of things, because one of the things you see in catch 22 is the higher ups sort of changing their mind for reasons that seem absurd and that at least Yossirian seems in some cases not to be able to give any account of. So I'm curious to get your view on the thought process by means of which a man of this kind of authority ends up changing his mind in this way. Is he changing his mind?
- [39:28]
B
I don't know if he's changing his mind. I think there's a healthy dose of Milo Minder Binder in President Trump, you know, in that he, you know, often does what is, you know, politically and economically, you know, expeditious, you know, for him and for, you know, and what he views as the best interests of the country. And I think for us as citizens, sometimes that can feel very disorienting because it's not necessarily tethered to a deeper ideology that kind of can often act as like, a center of gravity. So we all know where we're going. So I think that, you know, we. With President Trump, and he also, strategically, and not to his discredit, necessarily keeps his cards very close to his chest. So he's never gonna say what he is or isn't going to do, which also leaves us as citizens guessing. So I think we have to see where this is going to take us as a country. And sometimes these things work out very well. But I think the challenge is when they don't work out well, the downside is extreme, extreme economically extreme in loss of life and in the type of personal tragedies that you see even in a comedic novel like catch 22.
- [40:49]
A
Do you think that some of the sort of skepticism about what's called the military industrial complex, I think Eisenhower may have coined that term in his farewell address. Do you think some of the skepticism about that and about intervention more generally has filtered into the armed forces itself?
- [41:10]
B
You know, I think it's always important. I mean, the US Military is huge and politically diverse. So it's absolutely. I mean, this is not a monolithic organization. There are as many political opinions amongst those in uniform as exist in this country. I think just the one difference of why sometimes we might think that the US Military is monolithic is because at least up until now, you know, there's been sort of a culture of amerta and that you don't. You don't speak your really, your political views. I mean, I'll actually tell you, I have great, dear friends of mine from the service who I've known 20 years. And I think probably just as a holdover from our time in uniform, we never talk politics together. We just don't. Because we wouldn't ever want that to come between the friendships that we have. And I think that certainly includes those in uniform. But I think there's certainly some, I think, who probably, yes, do look, you know, with a lot of skepticism about the motives that have existed not only in the past, but today for our political leaders and why certain interventions or wars or whatever you want to call them are being waged and how they might filter into the economic reality of our political class. And I think there's others who are probably a lot less skeptical. So I think it's just important to recognize that the strength of our military is that politics are not front and center, that we create the conditions so they can put the mission front and center. And I think we should just be very careful politicians who would try to inject more of the type of partisanship that sort of infected our entire society into the ranks.
- [42:42]
A
You mentioned that you had read this book in your 20s and you were enlisted. I'm curious whether you recommend this book to enlisted people today, and what effect do you think it will have on them? Because I can imagine an enlisted person reading this book, and if they read it with the proper sensitivity, and they had never been exposed to the mockery that it makes of military life being somehow plunged into turmoil of the soul by this book. It's a serious book. And I think comedy oftentimes is not taken to be serious. But in fact, this is why oftentimes things are funny, is because they're so serious we have nothing but laughter to do at their absurdity. So how do you see this book affecting a young person, maybe a young enlisted person who reads it today? Is it a dangerous book?
- [43:38]
B
Well, I think any book that makes you think is dangerous because it's going to sort of knock you off your. Off your center. But I think, you know, a person who's going to come to this book and have it resonate with them, I think is probably someone who's ready to hear its message. And at least I can only speak for myself. I had experienced war. By the time I read this book, I'd read a ton about war. And this was a great book to kind of add to my understanding because it spoke to many of the absurdities that I had Observed but not necessarily seen, represented in the type of sort of more straightforward and earnest books I'd often been drawn to. And then it helped me contextualize some of those straightforward and earnest books. I mean, I went on to for years after I read this book. And it's a touch point. It's. Each book is like a constellation or it's like a single, you know, it's a single prick in the constellation of our understanding on a subject. And I think this is, you know, you know, an important touch point in that larger constellation of war. So, you know, read catch 22, read for whom the Bell Tolls. Read Jim Webb's Fields of Fire. I think, you know, all of us should be sort of rugged enough to carry contradictory ideas in our head because they help us in, you know, they help, they help us interrogate the truths that we hold the most closely if they're being challenged.
- [45:08]
A
Yeah, I love what you're saying because I think it represents something fundamental to this show, to my own intellectual approach, to my teaching, which is that a book is a perspective on an enduring question. And you're saying in response to me, catch 22nd of May well be a dangerous book. It may well take a cynical perspective. It may well have a corrupting influence. It's a perspective among many on an enduring question about the nobility, dignity, purpose and experience of war. And so you should read this book, but you should also read other books which might have more ennobling messages. You mentioned For Whom the Bell Tolls such that books become a kind of circle of mirrors of a question. We hold the question up in the mirror and the book reflects its point of view, its perspective. And yet there are infinite or innumerable other books with other perspectives. And you should fill yourself with all of them. And in that case, even the dangerous ones, even the ones that make cynicism or light or mockery of the things you hold dear are valuable to you and you should not run away from, nor should you be censored from. And catch 22 is among those books. It's a hard book to reckon with if you hold certain views. And yet it's a book which by necessity for a wisdom seeking person, must be read and reckoned with.
- [46:29]
B
Absolutely. It's how do you know? How do you make steel? You take a bunch of alloys and you heat them and you fold them together and you bang them out and that makes something that's truly strong and truly enduring. And I think, you know, catch 22 is, is if you're going to read about war to understand it. I think catch 22 is an important alloy to fold into your understanding of war, along with many other perspectives. And, yes, it's a dangerous book. It's going to challenge, you know, many, many of your precepts about war, if those precepts are all just rooted in ennobling narratives, heroic narratives. But, you know, it's important to understand why In World War II, you know, people wrote Kilroy was here, and why in Vietnam, across many bases, you know, stickers would appear that said Yozarian lives. So you need to understand that. You need to understand why.
- [47:22]
A
You got time for a quick lightning round?
- [47:24]
B
For sure.
- [47:24]
A
You're a writer who's done the rare thing, relatively rare thing of writing both fiction and nonfiction, and you're good at both, and that's not easy. So I'm curious. You know, I ask a lot of people this question, but I think it would be particularly telling with you, who are three writers who have been influential, most influential on you.
- [47:46]
B
So I think I could pick many, but Graham Greene has been a huge influence on me. Wrote fiction, nonfiction, incredible novelist. Also wrote comedies and books that were more serious, which I also aspired to do. Rizzard Kapuczynski, Polish journalist. I think one of the finest writers of nonfiction in the last hundred years, wrote a spectacular book about the fall of the shah in Iran called Shah of Shahs. And my wife, Lee Carpenter, who is a screenwriter and a novelist, you know, who's a huge influence on me. And we. It's great. We talk. We talk about work. She reads a lot of my stuff. So I'd be remiss if I didn't say she had a big influence on me.
- [48:35]
A
You would indeed. What is the most valuable lesson that you learned in combat or from combat?
- [48:43]
B
But I think one of the enduring lessons of combat, and this gets a little bit back to catch 22, and it's one of the catch 22s of combat, is that when you go to war, when you're back in the States, you're getting ready for your deployment. You're with. You're all training with your unit. You know, you're training together to become technically competent, but you're also bringing, you know, you're creating these real bonds. This, you know, maybe we call it esprit de corps, this unit cohesion, so that in the moment when you have to accomplish the mission, you know, guys will go out and do these very brave things for each other because they've bonded together through this training. So they're doing that for love. But as a commander in combat, whether you are a general all the way down to the most junior corporal, you know, the mission always comes first. Accomplishing that mission, whether that's to take a series of buildings, seize a hill. And so ultimately, as a combat leader, what you are asked to do in ordering your men to execute these missions, where you know many of them are going to get hurt and some killed, is to destroy the thing that you love. And that is sort of, I think, one of the enduring paradoxes of combat. So many people come home and they've been involved in decisions and actions where they've been forced to give the order to go do the thing where they know their friends are going to get hurt. They've been asked to go destroy the very thing that they love. And that paradox sends people home with a certain degree of heartbreak. And your heart can't break unless you are in love. And so I think that's something that I've learned in combat, that if you see it, if you go see the elephant coming with that, is always going to be that type of heartbreak, because you're probably going to be asked to destroy something you love.
- [50:24]
A
Is there a book that if you could have every soldier read, you would. We've talked about. You need to read a variety of books, and I grant that about this topic, but is there an essential book for a soldier that you think that's one you can't let pass you by?
- [50:37]
B
I think there's probably many books that soldiers should read. But if I'm gonna be honest, I guess I have to go back into my own past, tell you that the first thing I did when I was a Marine rifle platoon commander and showed up to Camp Lejeune to meet my very first platoon, the one that I would go to Iraq with when I was 24, was I said the entire platoon was going to read one book. So I guess I'll have to give you that book.
- [51:04]
A
Wow.
- [51:05]
B
Which, I will tell you, was a very unpopular decision in my platoon, particularly among the NCOs who were like, we didn't join the Marine Corps to join your reading club, sir, but we read it anyways. The guys still teased me about it, but I think it's a great book, and that is Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, which is a meditation on the role of a citizen, the role of a soldier. And it's set in a science fiction universe where the Mobile infantry is locked in a life and death struggle with what they called the Bugs, which is sort of in the 50s. It was an analogy for communism and it's a ripping reading. It looks nothing like the very camp movie that was made in the 1990s that was adapted. So I wouldn't say necessarily that's the only book I would give to a soldier. But I guess I have to out myself and say that was the one that I gave to my first platoon because it meant so much to me.
- [52:02]
A
Is there a misconception that Americans have about war that you would clear up if you could clear up one misconception that they have?
- [52:09]
B
I don't know that Americans have a misconception about war necessarily. I'll say one thing that concerns me about the American way of war as it exists today, now in 2026, is that every war the United States has fought since its inception has had a construct to sustain it. Broadly speaking, I mean, in blood and treasure, right? How are we gonna pay for the war? That's the treasure and the blood. Who's gonna fight it? So if we go, let's say, like the Civil War. The Civil War, the blood was the first ever draft we had in this country was to sustain the Civil War. The treasure was actually the first ever income tax in this country. You go to the Second World War, it was bond drives and a national mobilization, or the Vietnam War. The construct was a draft that was very unpopular that led to an anti war movement that ended the war. So in the current iteration and after 9 11, the construct was, well, the blood came from our all volunteer military and the treasure came from deficit spending. So there was no war tax. And the result of that construct was that the American people up to the present day have largely been insulated from the costs of war. War is not something that's existential for us. It's not painful, it's not hugely disruptive to our lives. And the challenge that construct presents is it makes it very easy for the US to go to war. We just think, well, this is going to happen. It's not going to affect us at all. And we can maybe only see the upside. And the challenge is that when you go to war, when you roll the iron dice of war, the enemy always gets a say. And I feel that that construct makes us particularly susceptible to stumbling into a war that we don't want to fight. That becomes incredibly disruptive to our society. And I think that psychology really puts us in peril today and quite possibly puts us in a position of moral hazard as a nation as we think about war.
- [54:02]
A
If you had to assign a grade to Donald Trump's foreign policy. One year in, we're having this conversation in January of 20, would you be willing to assign a grade and what would that grade be and why my.
- [54:14]
B
Grade would be incomplete.
- [54:16]
A
Very clever.
- [54:17]
B
Yeah.
- [54:17]
A
Yeah. I guess I don't need to ask why.
- [54:22]
B
I, you know, I mean, I'll say why, you know, incomplete because, you know, we don't know like you don't know. I mean, listen, he could come out smelling like a daisy on all of this, but it's very risky what he's doing there. There is huge downside, and I hope that he and the advisors around him are having a very clear eyed look at the, at the potential downside.
- [54:45]
A
Elliot Ackerman, thank you for coming on Old School.
- [54:47]
B
Yeah, thank you. Shiloh.