Kid Sampson's death and McWatt's suicide

Kid Sampson's death and McWatt's suicide form the most violent and traumatic turning point in the novel, shattering the fragile illusion of safety on Pianosa and driving Yossarian deeper into despair. The event occurs when McWatt, in a reckless low-altitude pass over the beach, slices Kid Sampson in half with a propeller, then, overwhelmed by guilt, flies his plane into a mountain. The aftermath—Colonel Cathcart's immediate raising of the missions to sixty-five—exposes the absurd, mechanical cruelty of the military system that treats human catastrophe as a mere administrative inconvenience.

The Beach and the Propeller

On a warm afternoon, Yossarian, Nurse Duckett, Nurse Cramer, and others were at the beach on the other side of the sand dunes from where the men swam nude. McWatt, who loved to fly low and fast, came roaring along the shoreline in his B-25, a "great growling, clattering roar" that hurtled over the bobbing raft on which Kid Sampson, "his naked sides scrawny even from so far away," leaped clownishly up to touch it. At that exact moment, "some arbitrary gust of wind or minor miscalculation of McWatt's senses" dropped the speeding plane down just low enough for a propeller to slice him half away. The sound was a "briefest, softest tsst!" filtering through the shattering howl of the engines. Then there were just Kid Sampson's "two pale, skinny legs, still joined by strings somehow at the bloody truncated hips," standing stock-still on the raft for what seemed a full minute or two before they toppled over backward into the water, turning completely upside down so that only the "grotesque toes and the plaster-white soles" remained in view.

The Immediate Aftermath on the Beach

All hell broke loose. Nurse Cramer materialized out of thin air, weeping hysterically against Yossarian's chest while he hugged her shoulders and soothed her; his other arm bolstered Nurse Duckett, who was trembling and sobbing against him, her long, angular face dead white. Everyone at the beach was screaming and running, the men sounding like women. They scampered for their things in panic, looking askance at each gentle, knee-high wave bubbling in as though some ugly, red, grisly organ like a liver or a lung might come washing right up against them. Those in the water struggled to get out, forgetting in their haste to swim, wailing, walking, held back in their flight by the viscous, clinging sea as though by a biting wind. Kid Sampson had rained all over; those who spied drops of him on their limbs or torsos drew back with terror and revulsion, as though trying to shrink away from their own odious skins. Yossarian drove both stumbling, faltering women before him frantically, shoving and prodding them to make them hurry, and raced back with a curse to help when Hungry Joe tripped on the blanket or the camera case he was carrying and fell forward on his face in the mud of the stream.

McWatt's Guilt and Suicide

Back at the squadron, everyone already knew. Men in uniform were screaming and running there too, or standing motionless in one spot, rooted in awe, like Sergeant Knight and Doc Daneeka, who gravely craned their heads upward and watched the guilty, banking, forlorn airplane with McWatt circle and circle slowly and climb. Yossarian shouted anxiously to ask who was in the plane; Sergeant Knight said McWatt had the two new pilots with him on a training flight, and that Doc Daneeka was up there, too—though Doc Daneeka, standing right there, contended he was not. Yossarian exclaimed in despair, "Why doesn't he come down? Why does he keep going up?" Sergeant Knight answered, "He's probably afraid to come down. He knows what kind of trouble he's in." McWatt kept climbing higher and higher, nosing his droning airplane upward evenly in a slow, oval spiral. A white parachute popped open; a second parachute followed. The plane continued south, then lifted a wing and banked gracefully into its turn. "Two more to go," said Sergeant Knight. "McWatt and Doc Daneeka." Doc Daneeka, still on the ground, plaintively insisted he was not in the plane. Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn't jump, and went running uncontrollably down the whole length of the squadron, waving his arms and shouting up at him imploringly to come down, McWatt, come down; but no one seemed to hear, certainly not McWatt, and a great, choking moan tore from Yossarian's throat as McWatt turned again, dipped his wings once in salute, decided "oh, well, what the hell," and flew into a mountain.

The System's Response: Raising the Missions

The immediate institutional response to the double tragedy was a grotesque escalation of the very system that had driven McWatt to despair. "Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five." This mechanical, reflexive increase—treating human loss as a mere administrative variable—perfectly encapsulates the novel's central critique of a bureaucratic logic that is utterly indifferent to individual life. The event also triggers a chain of further absurdities: when Colonel Cathcart learns that Doc Daneeka too had been "killed" in McWatt's plane (based on a flight manifest entry, despite Doc Daneeka being alive on the ground), he increases the missions to seventy, setting off the farcical bureaucratic death of Doc Daneeka himself.

Thematic Significance: The Collapse of Hope

Kid Sampson's death and McWatt's suicide mark the point at which the novel's dark comedy gives way to an almost unrelieved horror. The beach, previously a site of respite and flirtation, becomes a scene of grotesque dismemberment. McWatt, the "craziest combat man of them all" because he was "perfectly sane and still did not mind the war," is destroyed not by enemy fire but by his own reckless joy and subsequent guilt. For Yossarian, who had already lost Clevinger, Orr, and Nately, this event deepens his trauma. The memory of Kid Sampson's "skinny legs bloating and decaying" in the rain becomes a recurring, obsessive image, and the novel's narrative turns decisively toward the final confrontations with Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. The event also foreshadows the novel's climax: Yossarian's refusal to fly more missions is a direct response to the system's callousness, a refusal that is itself triggered by the cumulative weight of deaths that began with Snowden and culminates in the senseless destruction of McWatt and Kid Sampson.