“War is back in vogue, and a zeal for war is spreading,” Pope Leo XIV warned in his first major address to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps last Friday. It’s hard to dispute his assessment.
In Venezuela, a U.S. operation that captured President Nicolás Maduro has sent shock waves through the hemisphere. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is now declaring that “anything less” than U.S. control of Greenland would be “unacceptable.” In Iran, a deadly crackdown on nationwide protests has Washington threatening the possibility of direct military action. Sudan has been torn apart by nearly three years of civil war. And the conflict in Ukraine grinds on. Moscow has launched new strikes on Kyiv even as U.S.-led negotiations attempt to broker an end to the conflict.
All this instability and conflict makes now a good time to revisit the most acclaimed antiwar novel in American history: Catch-22.
In the latest episode of Old School, Elliot Ackerman—a Marine Corps veteran and former CIA special operations officer—sits down with host Shilo Brooks to unpack Joseph Heller’s classic satire, why it speaks so sharply to this moment, and how Americans have been shielded for the past few decades from the true costs of war. If you prefer to watch it on YouTube, click here.
Old School is The Free Press’s podcast about the great books that everyone should be reading. You can watch on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re a paid subscriber to The Free Press, you can listen ad-free by connecting your subscription. Some recent episodes include Cornel West on Plato’s Republic, Fareed Zakaria on The Great Gatsby, and Ryan Holiday on The Moviegoer. Other books we’ve covered: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Leopard, A Conflict of Visions, and many more.
Why war is always absurd:
ELLIOT ACKERMAN: Catch-22 is about the circular and self-defeating nature of war. War itself is ultimately a catch-22. It is a system that contradicts itself. 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 sense. The core of any civilization is this idea that “thou shall not kill.” For civilized people, that’s sort of the baseline. We don’t walk through the streets just slitting each other’s throat. When countries go to war, we suspend that rule. We engage in state-sanctioned violence in order to preserve our civilization. So it’s a self-contradicting action. It’s an absurd act.
SHILO BROOKS: The U.S. has just extricated Maduro from Venezuela. Do 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?
EA: Absolutely. John Yossarian, the protagonist of the book, is a bombardier on a B-25 in World War II. He is fighting the Nazis, but he also feels like he’s fighting against the system in which he’s stuck. Every time he approaches the number of missions that he’ll need to fly in order to go home and survive the war, his commander increases the number of required missions. So he comes to believe that not only the Nazis are trying to kill him, but his own side is also trying to kill him.
Any time we go to war, it’s tough to have a North Star to understand what the war is about. Is the war in Venezuela about oil? Are we going to be invading Greenland, which seems completely absurd? Are we going to war with Colombia? The number of events that are washing over us, and as quickly as they are . . . sometimes you have to turn to stories that are rooted in this kind of postmodern absurdity to understand what’s going on in the world.
SB: Can you talk more about that absurdity? Joseph Heller, an extraordinary writer, is 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 was, more than any war in recent history, a spiritual war in some ways. What role does comedy have in helping us understand war, given that it’s a quite serious thing?
EA: Most of the time when I get to see my fellow veterans, usually the stories we’re telling are the funny ones. And they’re often funny stories that occur in the most tense situations because we needed the joke in that moment. World War II is probably seen as America’s most righteous war, our national Iliad, probably the least absurd of our wars, in that there were clear good guys and bad guys. But even in a war like World War II, those comedic and absurd strains continue to exist.
Why veterans get depressed:
EA: People sometimes ask me about PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and what it’s like to come home. When you go to war, you are given this very clear sense of purpose.
You have a mission that’s relatively clear, whether you’re holding a mountaintop in Afghanistan or holding a few city blocks in Iraq. The tactical mission is clear, and you’re charged with accomplishing the mission alongside people who might become some of your very best friends.
