How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Clevinger recoiled from their [the Action Board's] hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more. (8.199)
This information is chilling to Clevinger because it means that his own countrymen, his fellow soldiers who are supposed to have his back, hate him more than anyone else in the world. The kicker is that he has done nothing to earn their hatred.
Quote #8
Major Major sat down, and Yossarian moved around in front of his desk and told him that he did not want to fly any more combat missions. What could he do? Major Major asked himself. All he could do was what he had been instructed to do by Colonel Korn and hope for the best.
"Why not?" he asked.
"I'm afraid."
"That's nothing to be ashamed of," Major Major counseled him kindly. "We're all afraid."
"I'm not ashamed," Yossarian said. "I'm just afraid." (9.186-190)
Fear is a healthy reaction in this case and Yossarian knows he need not be ashamed. Unlike many other life situations in which we are taught that fear is a cause for shame, war changes the rules and, to a certain degree, bravery becomes foolishness.
Quote #9
There was no escaping the mission to Bologna once Colonel Cathcart had volunteered his group for the ammunition dump there that the heavy bombers on the Italian mainland had been unable to destroy from their higher altitudes. Each day's delay deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, working mordantly into each man's ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease. (10.33)
The Bologna mission brings extreme fear to the men since the sick ward has been shut down to prevent men from defecting. Fear here is described as both depressing and inevitable.