But I just saw this article, 'World's largest elk' to be built in Sweden (via Making Light), and had to do some research. I learned that what is called a moose in North America is called an elk in Europe; what we call an elk in the US is a smaller animal of a different genus, and is called the wapiti in Eurasia.

1. a. The elk, Alces alces. The usual name for the animal in North America (where elk is used instead for the wapiti, Cervus elaphus canadensis)...

What I want to add to the discussion is this thought, from a New York Review of Books article about war reporters:

... that violent conflict is simply beyond representation ... may be true about movies.... About writing, though, it is untrue. This is a matter of craft, a matter of devising the right technique. And it always has been. Right at the dawn of modern fiction, Jakob von Grimmelshausen recognized that his experiences in the hell of the Thirty Years' War could not be told straight because they were beyond the comprehension of peaceful readers. So he transposed them into a key of horrifying, merciless, callous satire, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669). Don't try to "understand," don't try to "imagine,", just read Simplicissimus and be appalled at your own laughter. That way, you are getting close to what Carolin Emcke and Anthony Loyd are trying to report. —Neal Ascherson

This describes Heller, whose biography is similar to Yossarian's, perfectly. This is not the work of a veteran, a decade or two after the war, deciding to write something clever about how darned wacky it was. Catch-22 is a scream of pure rage, at war in general but more pointedly at those individuals who bear responsibility for causing war and for making it worse, at those people who cause horrible suffering with callous indifference.