He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive.

This line comes from Joseph Heller’s World War II novel *Catch-22* (1961), set among U.S. Army Air Forces bomber crews stationed on the Mediterranean island of Pianosa. Heller, himself a former bombardier, depicts the air war as a grinding bureaucracy in which survival becomes the only rational aim. The sentence describes the mindset of a flyer whose “mission” has narrowed from military objectives to the bare goal of returning alive from each sortie—an attitude shaped by escalating mission quotas, arbitrary command decisions, and the constant, statistical likelihood of death in combat flights.

The paradox—“live forever or die in the attempt”—captures Heller’s dark comic logic: in a system where death is routine and policy is indifferent, the only meaningful form of resistance is self-preservation. Calling survival his “only mission” satirizes how institutions can hollow out language and purpose; “mission” becomes not a strategic task but a personal, existential objective. The line also crystallizes *Catch-22*’s central theme: rational individuals trapped in irrational structures will redefine success as simply staying alive, even when that redefinition is treated as cowardice or insubordination by those in power.