War & Peace Quote by Joseph Heller

War doesn’t just scramble morality; it rewrites the job description of “enemy” into something brutally pragmatic. Heller’s line lands with the deadpan clarity of a field manual, then quietly detonates the premise that war is a clean contest between two sides. The “enemy,” he suggests, isn’t a uniform across the trench. It’s any force - bureaucracy, incompetence, ambition, friendly fire, a commander chasing medals - that increases your odds of dying. The sentence is a small act of insurgency against patriotic storytelling: it refuses to let danger be conveniently outsourced to the Other.

The intent is pure Heller: to expose how institutions convert people into expendable parts while insisting the machinery is rational. By making “enemy” a function of outcome (“who’s going to get you killed”) rather than allegiance, he drags survival into the foreground, where lofty language can’t compete. It’s a soldier’s worldview rendered with a novelist’s knife: loyalty is negotiable, ideology is decorative, and the most lethal threats often wear your own insignia.

The subtext is even darker: the system is structured so that death can arrive from any direction, and the narratives meant to justify war are themselves a hazard. That’s the Catch-22 atmosphere - a world where the rules are designed to trap you, and the people enforcing them can be as dangerous as the people shooting at you.

Context matters here: Heller, writing in the shadow of World War II and the mid-century American military bureaucracy, takes the myth of righteous conflict and replaces it with absurdity as lived experience. The wit isn’t a garnish; it’s how the truth becomes speakable.