Work Text:
There is nothing more terrifying in this dreaded, disgusting world than war. Nothing signifies lingering decay more than the marching of young men into the line of fire, all while those who dictate it never set foot on the soil which trembles weakly under gunfire and blood. All who go to and fail to die in its grip keep it as their baggage until their dread puts them in the ground. It is a game of the insecure to play and lose over and over again. It is a sin under God.
Tappman sits at the foot of his bed, his mouth set tightly into a frown as he makes his daily prayer.
In all senses, he is isolated in the mind whilst does so. Not in the form of isolation which he grew accustomed to in his shoddy tent in Pianosa where prayers were made in a silent desperation for change, but in a solacing way which frightens him down to his very nerves. His desertion was a horrible transgression which could never be forgiven by the saints he prays to now. This lack of possible forgiveness hardly shakes him— the dread simmering within him lingers from the fact he didn’t find it to be terrible at all. Sin was a delight in a place where man-made brutality is utterly pious, and such convoluted thinking still jostles his gentle spirit every time he recalls how far gone his mind had become. War has a way of making man crazy. It is a fact every conscript must accept whether he’d like to or not.
Tappman tilts his head up to the ceiling with a pensive expression. The soft colors of the flowery wallpaper still reach his peripherals, a gentle assurance of his faith in what seems to be a life he can never abandon hanging over his head in the form of his misshapen shadow. Although nobody found death by his hands, he bears his guilt more violently than any man who found thrill in the bombing of small towns of innocents in Germany, any man who would be commended for a ‘job well done’. He knows his sympathy is what will kill him— Whitcomb never let him forget it— but cannot help but foster some need to pray for their afflictions. Just as he moves to relax his posture from craning his neck upwards, he swears he sees his silhouette blink before him. Crazy, he thinks, he’s really gone crazy. Crazy just like scatterbrained Nately, unsung martyr Snowden, madman Yossarian.
His mind trips over the last name momentarily, involuntarily, before he returns to his litany of religious-speak.
The chaplain recalls how war’s cruelty slowly fizzled out of his life in the early days of 1945 once his unwillingness to abstain from religious practices landed him a dishonourable discharge from the squadron, and he had been packed up and flown out from Pianosa the very same day. His persecution was the first of a dozen prerequisite mock trials in which a true conviction was pinned upon him, more oddly, for a crime he did not commit to begin with. Of course, he had not done anything every other time they held him in the basement floor and interrogated him either, but all is crime when it is contorted to be such. Gentle refusal was enough to be inexcusable in the spirits of militants such as Cathcart, something punishable by death. This written-off expulsion was of no objective disappointment to Tappman if not accounting for the loss of support for his allies, but that meant not accounting for the fact most of them were already dead or deserted. Had he made an effort to count on his fingers how many of his allies were still on base, he would have done nothing but shook his fist in his own face defeatedly.
That bomber base on Pianosa passes from the forefront of the chaplain’s thoughts as nothing but a fleeting daydream. He sighs into his steepled hands, barely muttering out a halfhearted “amen” that’s utterly pitiful, and he knows so. The horror of his deployment was no lucid reverie which could have been penned down as a horrible dream by Major Sanderson, who cared more neurotically about the sexual promiscuity of such matters than their disconcerting implications, and not much else. Such was the philosophy that mattered most to every man in the squadron. Their liberation came from bedding sleepy-eyed Italian whores, all feeble attempts to solidify themselves into a position of authority they knew they could never amount to. Tappman’s fingers tremble weakly as he peers down at them, eventually settling to fold his arms on the edge of the bedframe and wearily bury his face within them in an effort to soothe his nerves. The sapele wood is faintly cold, or so he can discern through his sweater.
His trance returns in the spirit of his wife and children now, a presence long lost to him, one he can barely muster memories of. In spite of his wishful thinking that the Catch would not follow him home after his forced discharge, the chaplain was met with the disappointment he had defeatedly grown accustomed to once more whilst standing in the doorway of the Kenosha home he bid his farewells to in 1943. His constant recollections of jamais vu slipped his mind in the residence left abandoned for no apparent reason, the scene presenting as more of a distant memory of some ailing fear than a reality failing to settle in. He used to worry over his family ceaselessly in his restless nights, he recalls, certain that incomprehensible brutality would befall outsiders in a war they did not wage, but such thoughts grew foreign when presented with their certainty. The truth of his fear was numbing in a way which renders man immobile, trapped in a belief that he will wake up and find it to be a cruel joke of the mind. A pity those eyes never opened, even as Tappman kept blinking, as if doing so would fix anything.
Only a letter was left tacked on the inside of the door, a reminder that what’s good for the country is good for him. It astounded Tappman to find it was not stamped with the seal of M&M enterprises. What he found much more compelling, however, was the fact that he shed no tears for his missing loved ones thereafter. The countless deaths of gunners and bombardiers deemed as mere collateral damage had wrecked him so unforgivingly to the degree that disappearances were merciful, common, the gentlest way out. Nobody knew where men like Dunbar went after they were disappeared, but nobody thought to ask. You never think to ask when you’re crazy. He had gone so crazy that once it became mandatory for the hospital-bound troops to spend their days censoring letters, he failed to notice how no letters were sent back by his wife. He had gone so crazy that he could not be sent home nor disappeared, only holed up in his tent with demands to serve the American dream. With nobody to love and nobody to gain affections from, you grow easily forgettable. That is their goal.
The name Yossarian abruptly creeps back into the forefront of Tappman’s mind.
Yossarian was the case which perplexed the chaplain most of all between his estranged allies, only due to the fact he seemed so unwilling to adapt to his unhappy reality. War practically didn’t exist to the bombardier. Withal, Tappman only assumed such after he took note of Yossarian’s irresolute geste when placed in front of the line of fire itself, or by the way others chose to describe him while he was not around. A belief in a certain immortality which danced around no man except the Assyrian captain sat with everybody who hated him. All who showed him fondness found him to be a paranoid, ignorant bastard. Such notions only made it stranger that Yossarian was the only person capable of understanding it was a war to begin with, and his immortality certainly stemmed from the fact he understood something so simple. Everything about the captain was a complexity so incomprehensible that it only stirred frustration in most, although such a generalization conveniently never applied to the chaplain. His bravery without an ounce of courage was utterly admirable.
Tappman looks up from where he kneels on the floor to find the ex-bombardier fast asleep. His expression is twisted in a moue of mild discomfort, or perhaps irritation at something he does not have, as is often the case. He sleeps like the dead man in his tent who he could never rid himself of, unceremoniously dragged out by his clueless roommates who Yossarian loathed with a fervor. War had not done much to change his opinions, very little did, but he had confided in the chaplain long ago that he could only trust him out of any man in the squadron. Dunbar had questioned too much, Nately was too in love with his whore to notice his ails, and the rest were nothing but complicit sons of bitches.
He rises to his feet and walks around to the bedside, reaching out to jostle Yossarian out of his sleep. The other groans uncomfortably and sits up halfheartedly, glaring at the chaplain through his bleary gaze with a grimace. “Quit shooting at me,” he huffs, “I’m trying to sleep.”
“What do you mean? There’s nobody shooting at you.”
“Just because you don’t think anybody is doesn’t mean they aren’t. Haven’t I told you that before?”
Tappman rocks back on his heels with a defeated sigh, suppressing a faint scoff of laughter at his indignance. “Do you think I would be the type to do that to you, Yossarian?”
“You never know, do you?” he asks casually, reaching over to grab his cigarettes off the nightstand. “You can never be too careful.”
“That’s crazy.”
“I think you’re crazy, chaplain.”
“How so?”
Yossarian shrugs, placing a lit cigarette between his lips and huffing on it in silence before looking back up at the older man beside him. “Because you’ve been thinking again. You know you can’t change any of it, so why keep trying?”
“That might be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“Maybe it is,” he grins, “but who gives a shit? You know I still think about Snowden losing his guts over in Avignon all the time. Doesn’t mean I can change the fact it’s over.” His voice has grown noticeably softer, more pensive, but he shakes his head dismissively. “Don’t beat your ass over something you can’t fix anymore.”
“Do you think you’ll live forever that way?”
“Fuck, who knows!” he laughs, tossing his head back carelessly. “We’re alive right now, aren’t we? Isn’t that all we’ve got?”
Tappman nods with resignation, deciding to sit on the footboard and look upon the deserter lying among the sheets. Yossarian’s immortality is a complexity that exists because he does not believe in it to begin with, he concludes, and understands now that he has no reason to try and do so himself.
If he really has gone crazy, and he really has sinned, he wishes for it to be no other way.