Bleeding Death: Mortality and Acceptance in Catch-22

The death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler's tyranny. Nine million died during the Russian Revolution, and twenty million more died during the reign of Stalin. Almost sixty thousand American soldiers died during a small phase of the Vietnam conflict, a small phase that was eventually abandoned as a failure. Yet such numbers, relied on by every modern media source, are only mathematical representations. While striving to paint an honest portrait of war for those on the home front, for those distanced by land and generations, body counts succeed only at numbing the reality of death. They "reduce human suffering to cold statistics" (White). However, "human suffering" has been reduced to ideals far more pathetic than cold statistics for far longer than statistics have even been a common practice of describing war. death means almost nothing in the modern era. It has been accepted to the point of expectation, and war has become only another means by which to fulfill the promise of finite life. Nations abuse death tolls for political defenses and political attacks, numbers that lie and erase the moral fiber of proper respect for those soldiers and civilians alike sacrificed in the name of the progress of freedom and democracy. Beyond numbers, death is such a common occurrence that soldiers, breathing it and tasting it day to night and year to year forget that it is not inevitable, a phenomenon explored by Joseph Heller in his book catch-22. death has become a tool, an object, not a means within itself, but a means to an end result molded in the hands of time and civilization. And war, its greatest ally, with its death tolls and body counts, its endless thirst for blood blurred in the minds of its very victims, the men and the women in uniform and the men and the women hoping and pray and trying to remember the men and the women in uniform in the midst of an easier path, the path to forgetting; war bleeds death in its most carnal form, that of innocent forfeiture.