Quotes from Ed Rasimus

The SAM sites had been bulldozed and graded then photographed by our reconnaissance aircraft. They were off-limits while under construction but could be attacked once they were completely built. To confirm that they were actually no longer under construction, the SAM site had to be observed firing a missile at you.

As I turned to the chapters dedicated to operations in North Vietnam, the ridiculous gave way to the absurd. I couldn't discern whether the enemy was the North Vietnamese or the U.S. Navy. The enemy might just as easily have been the State Department or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They all seemed to have a voice in the ROE, and the tone of the voice was seldom in favor of winning the war, defeating the enemy, or even ensuring the fighter pilot's chances of survival.

We asked for a car. The clerk checked our driver's licenses. "Sorry," he said, "you guys are too young." Right. Among the three of us we've got 226 missions over North Vietnam, three ejections, two Silver Stars, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, twenty-three Air Medals, three Purple Hearts, and we're still too young to rent a car.

Air Force regulations required that the appropriate checklist would be open and in hand for whatever activity was taking place. In reality the books stayed in a G-suit pocket or a canvas carryall bag throughout the flight. The only time anyone ever opened up the checklist was when they were in deep shit and totally out of ideas.

If I didn't fly, I wouldn't be killed or wounded or captured. I would be alive, but I would be in that netherworld of failures and cowards. I would be disgraced without family or friends or profession. It would be a lonely world, inhabited only by that loathsome individual looking back each morning from the mirror.

Yossarian knew that you had to be crazy to fly combat. But you couldn't fly combat if you were crazy. If you turned yourself in as crazy so that you couldn't fly combat that would clearly be the act of a sane person, so you couldn't really be crazy and you must fly combat. Yossarian knew all this and he recognized it as the "catch." It was Catch-22.

Although the fear was still in the back of my mind, I was beginning to realize that activity and interaction with the others was helping me to take each successive step in this process.