Brothel raid

The Brothel Raid is the event in which military police and carabinieri, invoking Catch-22, evicted all the prostitutes and residents from the enlisted men's apartment in Rome, leaving the building a wreck and the girls homeless, an act that crystallizes the arbitrary, self-justifying power of the system Yossarian opposes.

Background and Setting

When Yossarian returns to Rome after Nately's death, he finds the city in ruins. The airdrome has been bombed eight months earlier, the Colosseum is a dilapidated shell, and the Arch of Constantine has fallen. He goes directly to the apartment where Nately's whore and the other girls lived, the same apartment Major -- de Coverley had rented for the enlisted men. The building is a shambles. The windows have been smashed, and the interior is wrecked: torn drapes and bedding lie dumped on the floor, chairs, tables and dressers have been overturned, and everything breakable has been broken. The only person left is the old woman who kept house, bundled in sweaters and a dark shawl, boiling water on an electric hot plate. She rocks back and forth on a creaking chair, moaning, "Gone."

What Happens

The old woman tells Yossarian that "the mean tall soldiers with the hard white hats and clubs" — military policemen — and the Italian carabinieri came and chased all the poor young girls away into the street. They would not even let them take their coats. The girls cried, asking if they had done anything wrong; the men said no and pushed them out the door with the ends of their clubs. When the girls asked what right they had, the men answered, "Catch-22." The old woman explains that Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything the girls cannot stop them from doing. Yossarian, furious and bewildered, demands to know if they showed her Catch-22; she replies that the law says they do not have to show it. He realizes bitterly that it probably was not even really there. The old man who lived in the apartment is dead, something having broken in his head. Yossarian leaves money in the old woman's lap and strides out, cursing Catch-22 vehemently even though he knows it does not exist — but that everyone thinks it exists, which is worse, for there is no object to refute.

Consequences and Aftermath

The raid leaves Nately's whore's kid sister — a twelve-year-old girl — alone in the city with no one to take care of her. Yossarian, who had been trying to find her, is told by Captain Black that the whole place is busted and the whores flushed out into the street. The kid sister has been "flushed away with the rest of the broads." Yossarian is deeply shaken, objecting that she is only a kid who knows nobody else in the whole city. The destruction is total: every window smashed, darkness pouring into each room. Yossarian can imagine the heavy, crashing footfalls of the tall M.P.s in their hard white hats, and their sanctimonious, ruthless sense of right and dedication. The event drives Yossarian to seek Milo's help in finding the girl, but Milo becomes distracted by the prospect of smuggling illegal tobacco. The raid also reinforces Yossarian's understanding of Catch-22 as a self-justifying, circular logic that gives those in power the right to do anything they can get away with — a principle that has just been applied to destroy the lives of the most vulnerable.