War cannot be faced. It is too dreadful. It is the great emptiness that stands before life, transforms itself into a million shapes of unutterable horror, then returns to mocking silence. It is the nightmare from which we can never awake, because the nightmare is the truth: We die. We die like animals because we are animals. We are all creatures who blindly run until something big and hard hits us and our torn insides spill out and we die. "It was easy to read the message in his entrails," Yossarian thinks in "Catch-22" as he stoops over the w ....