CORRECTION APPENDED

Adapted from Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty © 2011 by Tracy Daugherty.

I. Prologue

Joseph Heller crawled into the transparent womb at the front of the B-25. It was August 15, 1944. He was about to fly his second mission of the day. That morning, he and the rest of his crew had been ordered to attack enemy gun positions at Pointe des Issambres, near St. Tropez, in France, but heavy cloud formations had prevented them from dropping their bombs. According to military reports, flak cover at the target was “heavy, intense and accurate.” Just one week earlier, over Avignon, on the morning of August 8, Heller had witnessed flak bursts cripple a bomber. “I was in the leading flight,” he recalled, “and when I looked back to see how the others were doing, I saw one plane pulling up above and away from the others, a wing on fire beneath a tremendous, soaring plume of orange flame. I saw a parachute billow open, then another, then one more before the plane began spiraling downward, and that was all.” Two men died.

Now, on this follow-up mission a week later, the goal was to destroy the Avignon railroad bridges on the Rhône River. As he had done 36 times before, he slid down the narrow tunnel beneath the cockpit to the bomber’s Plexiglas nose cone. The tunnel was too small for a man wearing bulky equipment; he was forced to park his parachute in the navigator’s area behind him. Up front, in the glass bowl—the crew called it “the hot house”—he always felt vulnerable and exposed. He found his chair. He put on his intercom headset so he could talk to comrades he could no longer see in other parts of the plane. The wheels left the ground. Now he was alone, in a blur of blue.

As his squadron began its approach to the Rhône, German anti-aircraft guns let loose and flak filled the air. Hurtling through space, the man in the glass cone watched the shining metal of a damaged bomber fall. A minute later, he was steering his plane. His pilot and the co-pilot had taken their hands off the flight controls. It was time for him to drop his bombs, and so, to ensure a steady approach to the target, he commanded the plane’s movements using the automatic bombsight, steering left, steering right. For about 60 seconds, no evasive action would be possible, just a sure zeroing in.

Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs. Immediately, his pilot, Lieutenant John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target. Rome, about 20, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat experience. The co-pilot, fearing this green kid was about to stall the engines, seized the controls, and the plane went into a sudden steep dive, back to an altitude where it could be holed by curtains of flak. In the nose cone, Heller slammed into the ceiling of his compartment. His headset cord pulled loose from its jack and began whipping about his head. He heard nothing. He couldn’t move.

Just as quickly as it had begun its descent, the plane shot upward, away from the flak, one moment yo-yoing into the next. Now Heller was pinned to the floor, looking for a handhold, anything to grasp. The silence was horrifying. Was he the only crewman left alive? He noticed the cord to his headset lying free near his chair. He plugged himself back in and a roar of voices pierced his ears. “The bombardier doesn’t answer,” he heard someone shout. “Help him, help the bombardier.” “I’m the bombardier,” he said, “and I’m all right.” But the very act of asserting what should have been obvious made him wonder if it was true.