All that changed on Heller's thirty-seventh mission, a raid on Avignon, on the Rhone River in southeast France, the basis of a fictionalized account that is central to Catch-22. During the bombing run, a co-pilot panicked and set the B-25 into a dive, causing Heller to be pressed against the top of the bombardier's compartment. After the plane was again under control, the co-pilot called over the intercom, "Help him! Help him!" Heller replied, "Help who?" "Help the bombardier!" was the co-pilot's response. "I'm the bombardier; I'm all right," Heller answered. When he then checked the rear of the plane, however, Heller found that one of the gunners was, in fact, wounded, and Heller realized that death lay near on these flights. The young lieutenant's war was not the same after that. He did complete sixty missions in the Mediterranean and received an Air Medal as well as a Presidential Unit Citation with his honorable discharge.
Because of the GI Bill, a federal program that helped tens of thousands of veterans to pursue higher education following the war, Heller was able to enroll at the University of Southern California in 1945. He published his first short story in the prestigious Story magazine that year and was married to Shirley Held, with whom he eventually had two children, Erica Jill and Theodore Michael. The next year, he transferred to New York University.
At NYU, under the tutelage of Professor Maurice Baudin, Heller came to believe that he could be a professional writer. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948, with the distinction of being named to the academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. That year he also published two short stories in The Atlantic Monthly and two more in Esquire. Heller earned his Master of Arts degree in American Literature from Columbia University the next year as well as a Fulbright Scholarship to study for a year at Oxford University in England.
