Milo's raid

Milo Minderbinder's syndicate, M & M Enterprises, had grown into an international cartel with freedom of passage everywhere, and it was this very freedom that enabled the most grotesque betrayal of the war. Having contracted with the American military to bomb the German-held highway bridge at Orvieto and simultaneously with the German military to defend it with antiaircraft fire, Milo realized a fantastic profit from both halves of the project for doing nothing more than signing his name twice. This arrangement, which he considered an important victory for private enterprise, set the precedent for an even more audacious deal: a contract with the Germans to bomb his own outfit.

The Attack

One night, after a sumptuous evening meal, all of Milo's fighters and bombers took off, joined in formation directly overhead, and began dropping bombs on the group. The planes separated in a well-coordinated attack and bombed the fuel stocks and the ordnance dump, the repair hangars, and the B-25 bombers resting on the lollipop-shaped hardstands at the field. Milo's crews spared the landing strip and the mess halls so that they could land safely when their work was done and enjoy a hot snack before retiring. They bombed with their landing lights on, since no one was shooting back. They bombed all four squadrons, the officers' club, and the Group Headquarters building. Men bolted from their tents in sheer terror, not knowing in which direction to turn. Wounded soon lay screaming everywhere. A cluster of fragmentation bombs exploded in the yard of the officers' club, punching jagged holes in the side of the wooden building and in the bellies and backs of a row of lieutenants and captains standing at the bar. They doubled over in agony and dropped. The rest of the officers fled toward the two exits in panic, jamming up the doorways like a dense, howling dam of human flesh.

Colonel Cathcart, clawing and elbowing his way through the unruly, bewildered mass, stared up at the sky in stark astonishment and horror. Milo's planes, ballooning serenely in over the blossoming treetops with their bomb bay doors open and wing flaps down and with their monstrous, bug-eyed, blinding, fiercely flickering, eerie landing lights on, were the most apocalyptic sight he had ever beheld. He let go a stricken gasp of dismay and hurled himself headlong into his jeep, speeding toward the airfield as fast as the rocking car would carry him. At the control tower, he seized the microphone and began shouting hysterically, "Milo, you son of a bitch! Are you crazy? What the hell are you doing? Come down! Come down!" Milo, however, was standing right there beside him in the control tower with a microphone of his own, calmly directing the operation. He chanted into his microphone, "Very good, men, very good. But I see one supply shed still standing. That will never do, Purvis—I've spoken to you about that kind of shoddy work before." When one pilot, Alvin Brown, radioed that he had finished dropping his bombs and asked what to do next, Milo ordered him to strafe. Brown was shocked, but Milo explained, "We have no choice. It's in the contract."

The Aftermath and Rationalization

Bombing his own men and planes was more than even the most phlegmatic observer could stomach, and it looked like the end for Milo. High-ranking government officials poured in to investigate. Newspapers inveighed against Milo with glaring headlines, and Congressmen denounced the atrocity in stentorian wrath and clamored for punishment. Mothers with children in the service organized into militant groups and demanded revenge. Not one voice was raised in his defense. Decent people everywhere were affronted, and Milo was all washed up—until he opened his books to the public and disclosed the tremendous profit he had made. He could reimburse the government for all the people and property he had destroyed and still have enough money left over to continue buying Egyptian cotton. Everybody, of course, owned a share. And the sweetest part of the whole deal, Milo argued, was that there really was no need to reimburse the government at all. "In a democracy, the government is the people," he explained. "We're people, aren't we? So we might just as well keep the money and eliminate the middleman." He warned that paying the government would only encourage government control and discourage other individuals from bombing their own men and planes, taking away their incentive.

Milo was correct, of course, as everyone soon agreed but a few embittered misfits. The raid's moral horror was neutralized by the logic of the syndicate, where every man had a share and profit was the only measure of success. The event even had a direct, personal consequence for Yossarian: the morphine syrettes in the first-aid kit on the mission to Avignon, where Snowden lay dying, had been stolen and replaced by a note reading, "What's good for M & M Enterprises is good for the country. Milo Minderbinder." The raid thus stands as the novel's most concentrated expression of the principle that the business of war, when run as a business, can consume its own participants without a trace of moral friction.