In 1969, the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the U.S. Army was jailed for a variety of financial crimes committed in Vietnam. Millions of dollars had disappeared on his watch, while his commanding general, bribed with whiskey, appliances, and fine furniture, looked the other way. So, it emerged, did everyone in the chain of command, all the way up to the top.

Between 2003 and 2013 in Iraq, $100 billion vanished into pockets unknown. In just one reported instance, U.S. Army personnel sold off brand-new military equipment by the convoy load as scrap metal in neighboring Jordan, netting millions of dollars.

In his comic anti-war masterpiece Catch-22, published in 1961, Joseph Heller, a bombardier during World War II, anticipated those breathtaking crimes with a character he called Milo Minderbinder. Rising through the officer ranks, Milo organizes schemes complex enough to keep a team of forensic accountants busy for decades. In one, he captures the market on Egyptian cotton, but he fails to forecast the market for the commodity and has to create a shortage in order to oil the machinery of supply and demand. How he does that is, well, spectacularly devious and worthy of a high-level executive position at Halliburton.

The moral center of Catch-22, whose very title speaks to an absurdity (if you don’t want to fight, you’re sane, which means you can’t be excused from fighting on grounds of insanity), is another bombardier. Yossarian is convinced—quite reasonably—that people are trying to kill him. “They’re shooting at everyone,” says a fellow officer, but Yossarian takes it personally, “because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up in the air to drop bombs on them.”

But it’s Milo’s machinations that drive the story. Yossarian tries to look the other way at first, even as Milo attempts to enlist him in one scheme after another. Indeed, Milo has organized the supply chain of war so that every bomb that falls, every bullet that flies, every egg that fries brings him a profit. His bookkeeping is convoluted, a pyramid that would make Bernie Madoff blush with shame, culminating in a syndicate in which everyone holds a share—and Milo, heading MM Enterprises, means everyone: “The Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders.”

Threading his way through a gauntlet of incompetent, greedy, venal senior officers who keep raising the number of required bomber missions to the point of certain death, Yossarian wants no part of the syndicate, no part of the Army. The killing is one thing, but it’s the corruption that bothers him most: “When I look up,” he says wearily, “I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”

It’s the nature of war, the nature of fat defense contracts and unmonitored dollars. It’s criminal. It’s absurd—and no one has captured that better than Joseph Heller, whose Catch-22 has become a byword for a web of martial intrigue.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.