General Status

The pursuit of a general's star is the engine that drives Colonel Cathcart's every decision, a consuming ambition that warps his judgment, multiplies the dangers faced by his men, and exposes the hollow, self-serving logic at the heart of the military hierarchy. Cathcart is a man who can measure his own worth only in relation to others, and the gap between his current rank and the generalship he craves is a source of constant, gnawing torment. This obsession is not a private fantasy but a public policy that dictates the number of combat missions his group must fly, the targets they are volunteered to attack, and the very atmosphere of fear and resentment that pervades the squadron.

The Arithmetic of Ambition

Colonel Cathcart is a slick, successful, slipshod, unhappy man of thirty-six who wants to be a general. He is impervious to absolutes; he can measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence is to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who are doing the same thing even better. The fact that there are thousands of men his own age and older who have not even attained the rank of major enlivens him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the fact that there are men of his own age and younger who are already generals contaminates him with an agonizing sense of failure and makes him gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that is even more intense than Hungry Joe's. This unstable arithmetic governs his life: he oscillates hourly between anguish and exhilaration, multiplying fantastically the grandeur of his victories and exaggerating tragically the seriousness of his defeats. He is a valorous opportunist who pounces hoggishly upon every opportunity Colonel Korn discovers for him and trembles in damp despair immediately afterward at the possible consequences he might suffer.

The Price of Promotion

Cathcart's ambition directly translates into the escalating mission quotas that terrorize the group. He raises the number of missions from twenty-five to thirty, then to forty, forty-five, fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, and finally to seventy and eighty, each increase a desperate bid for attention from his superiors. He believes that forcing his men to fly more combat missions than any other bomber group is the most tangible achievement he has going for him, a dramatic gesture that will spotlight his unique qualities of leadership. He is willing to try anything, even religion, summoning the chaplain to discuss saying prayers before each mission after seeing an article in The Saturday Evening Post about a chaplain who did so in another bomber group. His reasoning is purely self-promotional: "Maybe if we say prayers, they'll put my picture in The Saturday Evening Post." When the chaplain raises practical objections about atheists and enlisted men, Cathcart abandons the project, concluding that having the men pray to God probably wasn't such a hot idea anyway, since the editors of the magazine might not have cooperated. Every decision, from the bombing of an undefended village to the creation of a skeet-shooting range, is filtered through the same calculus: will this be a feather in his cap or a black eye?

The Machinery of Self-Interest

Cathcart is not alone in his ambition; he is surrounded by men playing the same game. He is dependent on Lieutenant Colonel Korn, a loyal, indispensable ally who gets on his nerves. Cathcart pledges eternal gratitude to Korn for the ingenious moves he devises and is furious with him afterward when he realizes they might not work. He is jealous of Korn's intelligence and has to remind himself often that Korn is still only a lieutenant colonel, even though he is almost ten years older, and that Korn obtained his education at a state university. Cathcart bewails the miserable fate that has given him for an invaluable assistant someone as common as Korn. He is also locked in a struggle for favor between General Dreedle and General Peckem, each of whom represents a different path to advancement. He is terrified of displeasing either one, and his attempts to please both simultaneously lead to absurd contortions. When he learns that General Peckem is slated to replace General Dreedle, he is overjoyed, but then immediately worries that the change might never take place, and that he would not be sorry to see that happen either, because General Dreedle is another very good man. He hopes the chaplain will keep all this under his hat, because he would not want either one to get the idea he was throwing his support on the side of the other.

The Futility of the Quest

Despite all his maneuvering, Cathcart's ambition is ultimately futile. His correspondence is systematically sabotaged by ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, the mail clerk at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, who distorts, destroys, rejects, or misdirects any correspondence by, for, or about Cathcart that might do him credit. Wintergreen, who also wants to be a general, finds Cathcart's prose too prolix and throws his communications into the wastebasket. The final blow comes when the command structure shifts: General Dreedle is out, General Peckem is in, and then, in a stunning reversal, the despised Colonel Scheisskopf is promoted to lieutenant general and placed in charge of all combat operations. Cathcart's elaborate schemes have come to nothing. He is left with nothing but his cigarette holder, his plum tomatoes, and his gnawing sense of failure. The general's star, the object of his every waking thought, remains forever out of reach, a mocking symbol of the absurdity of a system in which personal advancement is the only recognized virtue and the men who die for it are merely statistics on a report.