‘Two more to go,’ said Sergeant Knight. ‘McWatt and Doc Daneeka.’
‘I’m right here, Sergeant Knight,’ Doc Daneeka told him plaintively.
‘I’m not in the plane.’
‘Why don’t they jump?’ Sergeant Knight asked, pleading aloud to himself.
‘Why don’t they jump?’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ grieved Doc Daneeka, biting his lip.
‘It just doesn’t make sense.’
But Yossarian understood suddenly why McWatt wouldn’t jump, and went running uncontrollably down the whole length of the squadron after McWatt’s plane, 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.
Colonel Cathcart was so upset by the deaths of Kid Sampson and McWatt that he raised the missions to sixty-five.
Mrs. Daneeka When Colonel Cathcart learned that Doc Daneeka too had been killed in McWatt’s plane, he increased the number of missions to seventy.
The first person in the squadron to find out that Doc Daneeka was dead was Sergeant Towser, who had been informed earlier by the man in the control tower that Doc Daneeka’s name was down as a passenger on the pilot’s manifest McWatt had filed before taking off.
Sergeant Towser brushed away a tear and struck Doc Daneeka’s name from the roster of squadron personnel.
With lips still quivering, he rose and trudged outside reluctantly to break the bad news to Gus and Wes, discreetly avoiding any conversation with Doc Daneeka himself as he moved by the flight surgeon’s slight sepulchral figure roosting despondently on his stool in the late-afternoon sunlight between the orderly room and the medical tent.
Sergeant Towser’s heart was heavy; now he had two dead men on his hands—Mudd, the dead man in Yossarian’s tent who wasn’t even there, and Doc Daneeka, the new dead man in the squadron, who most certainly was there and gave every indication of proving a still thornier administrative problem for him.
Gus and Wes listened to Sergeant Towser with looks of stoic surprise and said not a word about their bereavement to anyone else until Doc Daneeka himself came in about an hour afterward to have his temperature taken for the third time that day and his blood pressure checked.
The thermometer registered a half degree lower than his usual subnormal temperature of 96.8.
Doc Daneeka was alarmed.
The fixed, vacant, wooden stares of his two enlisted men were even more irritating than always.
‘Goddammit,’ he expostulated politely in an uncommon excess of exasperation, ‘what’s the matter with you two men anyway?
It just isn’t right for a person to have a low temperature all the time and walk around with a stuffed nose.’
Doc Daneeka emitted a glum, self-pitying sniff and strolled disconsolately across the tent to help himself to some aspirin and sulphur pills and paint his own throat with Argyrol.
His downcast face was fragile and forlorn as a swallow’s, and he rubbed the back of his arms rhythmically.
‘Just look how cold I am right now.
You’re sure you’re not holding anything back?’
‘You’re dead, sir,’ one of his two enlisted men explained.
Doc Daneeka jerked his head up quickly with resentful distrust.
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re dead, sir,’ repeated the other.
‘That’s probably the reason you always feel so cold.’
‘That’s right, sir.
You’ve probably been dead all this time and we just didn’t detect it.’
‘What the hell are you both talking about?’ Doc Daneeka cried shrilly with a surging, petrifying sensation of some onrushing unavoidable disaster.
‘It’s true, sir,’ said one of the enlisted men.
‘The records show that you went up in McWatt’s plane to collect some flight time.
You didn’t come down in a parachute, so you must have been killed in the crash.’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said the other.
‘You ought to be glad you’ve got any temperature at all.’
Doc Daneeka’s mind was reeling in confusion.
‘Have you both gone crazy?’ he demanded.
‘I’m going to report this whole insubordinate incident to Sergeant Towser.’
‘Sergeant Towser’s the one who told us about it,’ said either Gus or Wes.
‘The War Department’s even going to notify your wife.’
Doc Daneeka yelped and ran out of the medical tent to remonstrate with Sergeant Towser, who edged away from him with repugnance and advised Doc Daneeka to remain out of sight as much as possible until some decision could be reached relating to the disposition of his remains.
‘Gee, I guess he really is dead,’ grieved one of his enlisted men in a low, respectful voice.
‘I’m going to miss him.
He was a pretty wonderful guy, wasn’t he?’
‘Yeah, he sure was,’ mourned the other.
‘But I’m glad the little fuck is gone. I was getting sick and tired of taking his blood pressure all the time.’
Mrs. Daneeka, Doc Daneeka’s wife, was not glad that Doc Daneeka was gone and split the peaceful Staten Island night with woeful shrieks of lamentation when she learned by War Department telegram that her husband had been killed in action.
Women came to comfort her, and their husbands paid condolence calls and hoped inwardly that she would soon move to another neighborhood and spare them the obligation of continuous sympathy.