What made Catch-22 so appealing to the young, no doubt, was its bracing cynicism, which rapidly became the default mindset of undergraduates everywhere. Flying in the face of what everyone imagined about the “greatest generation,” it mocked heroic ideals as little more than manipulative rhetoric, eviscerated mass organizations as totalitarian institutions that chewed up individual lives, treated the army as a system for killing its own men more than the enemy, and sent up its vaunted officers, for all their medals, as pompous, dull-witted, vainglorious fools. For the soldier caught up in this operational nightmare, the only escape was to look out for number one, to save one’s own skin.
-- Morris Dickson, The Catch in Catch-22