Famed 1962 anti-war novel and dorm-room staple Catch-22 draws from author Joseph Heller’s experiences as a B-25 bomber pilot over Italy during World War II. Darkly comic, the catch-22 of the title refers to the various no-win scenarios faced by the pilots, the most notorious of which is that once one flies a certain number of missions, one gets to go home; but every time you get close to flying the requisite number of missions, the commanders raise the required number, to make themselves look better to the top brass.

At the risk of sounding like a teenage cliche, the book made an immense impact on me as an impressionable young 17-year-old. In my defense, I had been raised in a conservative home in a conservative community you see, one with a very matter-of-factly uncritical celebration of military service and duty to country, wherein even the cartoons and comedies I was raised on that initially seemed to poke fun at military discipline (think Bill Murray in Stripes and etc.) ultimately still came around to valorizing the same, as ultimately good for both recruit and country. (There was a stretch in childhood wherein I even considered enlisting myself). Reading a novel that did not in fact swerve around to ultimately celebrate war and military service, but instead went so far as to double-down on condemning the entire war-time enterprise as inherently insane, immoral, and irredeemable, was a downright revelation for me. And when I finished it, I recall running into the backyard outside and throwing the book up into the air in jubilation.

Yet even in that euphoric moment, I still assumed the book was merely an exaggeration, a distorted fun-house mirror. It wasn’t till a few years later, after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were in full swing, that I learned from friends in the service that the novel was no hyperbole at all, that in fact every aspect of military life it described–the commanders obsessed with parades, the callous and dehumanizing bureaucracy, the flagrant war-time profiteering and black markets, the top brass endangering the lives of the troops for their own promotions–was still deathly accurate.

All this, incidentally, is what LDS scholar Hugh Nibley once scathingly referred to as “the Mahan Principle”–named for when Cain after he slew Abel, and then declared “Truly I am Mahan, the master of this great secret, that I may murder to get gain” (Moses 5:31)–an idea Nibley first developed while a soldier during WWII himself. In his own words: “What I saw on every side was the Mahan Principle in full force, that ‘great secret’ of converting life into property–your life for my property, also your life for my promotion (known as the Catch 22 principle). Attached to army groups and various intelligence units during 1945, I took my jeep all over western Europe and beheld the whole thing as a vast business operation” (Timely and the Timeless, xxxiv). Nibley could’ve been describing the plot to Catch-22, which you’ll note he even cited here directly.

Nibley, of course, is most renowned in LDS circles for his research into Middle-eastern studies and Book of Mormon apologetics, his first great work of which is 1950’s Lehi in the Desert, wherein he argues that Lehi’s flight into the desert just before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, conforms to a thousand incidental details that would’ve been unknown to even the most accomplished scholars of the 1820s. As Nibley would further develop elsewhere, Lehi was following the example of the Rechabites, an anti-urban tribe of ancient Israel who pursued a “nomadic ideal”, purportedly so that they could more fully live the Law of Moses in its purity out there in the desert. Some scholars have identified influences of the Rechabites upon the communities of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 (for Nibley, it is no coincidence that both the Lehites and the Essenes at Qumran escaped to the desert and built communities that eventually buried scriptures in the ground to come forth in a latter day). There is even speculation that John the Baptist, and possible Christ himself, were associated with these desert communities. I bring this all up because Joseph Heller was Jewish, and it is possible to identify a similar Rechabite motif in Catch-22‘s finale.

Though it features an ensemble cast, the novel’s protagonist is inarguably John Yossarian, an Assyrian-American pilot desperately trying to not fly anymore missions. When asked why, he responds, “Because they’re all trying to kill me.” When told that they’re trying to kill everyone, he responds, “What difference does that make?” And when asked what if everyone thought the same way as him, he gives the delicious answer, “Then I’d be a damn fool to think any other way.”

But of course it’s not easy at all to simply cease flying missions. There is still that aforementioned catch-22, that the more flights you fly, the more you’re required to fly. It’s maddening, diabolical, inescapable. But then, in the very last 10 pages of the novel, Yossarian makes a remarkable discovery (SPOILER ALERT): his old tent-mate Orr, whom everyone assumed was shot down over the Mediterranean roughly 2/3rds through the novel, has in fact turned up alive and well in Sweden. Described as “a warm-hearted, simple-minded gnome,” Orr is generally considered crazy, especially by Yossarian, who repeatedly turned down Orr’s offers to fly with him due to Orr’s penchant for getting shot down constantly. Upon learning that Orr hadn’t died after all, Yossarian suddenly realizes the truth: Orr’s supposed simple-mindedness and child-like demeanor (“for of such is the kingdom of heaven”) was all a put-on, so that no one would suspect he was laying the groundwork for his great escape.

That’s why Orr crashed so often, as well as spent so much time happily fishing for tuna in a life-raft: he was practicing, to fake his death and row all the way around the continent to Scandinavia. It’s why he kept inviting Yossarian to join him, so that they could escape together. Yossarian in that moment decides to follow after Orr after all, and so makes a mad break for it. He knows that his commanders will pursue him relentlessly, that he will be a hunted man till he can finally escape to a neutral country. But he also knows that the only way to escape the wickedness of the world–the military-industrial complex, the Great and Spacious building, Babylon the great, whatever you want to call it–is to reject it entirely.

That ending is a moment of great terror and great euphoria (it’s why, again, I ran into the backyard and threw the book into the air when I was 17), an affirmation that it is possible to escape, to leave, to walk away after all. But indeed, is that not what our religion is supposedly based on? “Oh Babylon, oh Babylon we bid thee farewell/we’re going to the mountains of Esau to dwell”, we sing on Sundays. This was the same trajectory of the Essenes, the Rechabites, John the Baptist in the wilderness, Abraham, Elijah, Enoch, Lehi, Alma the elder, the Jaredites, Ether, Moroni, and the Mormons in the Rocky mountains: to leave behind the Mahan Principle of the world in order to live the word of God in peace.

Of course, that is still much easier said than done. Today smog-and-MLM-ridden Utah is as integrated into the global economy as anyone. The siren call of Babylon remains oppressively seductive. But not irresistible, and not impossible (we still covenant to keep the Law of Consecration–that is, to flee Babylon and set up Zion–in our holy Temples), and perhaps the unique appeal of Catch-22, beyond any facile “war is hell”-statement, is its very Jewish exhortation to flee the world and seek a refuge, holy, set-apart, consecrated.