As the mess officer of Yossarian's squadron, Minderbinder is an entrepreneur during World War II, "perhaps the best known of all fictional businessmen" in American literature.
Minderbinder travels across the world, especially around the Mediterranean Sea, trying to buy and sell goods at a profit, primarily through black market channels.
Eventually, Minderbinder begins contracting missions for the Germans, fighting on both sides in the battle at Orvieto, and bombing his own squadron at Pianosa.
When Nately's Whore's Kid Sister, a young girl for whom Yossarian comes to care deeply, goes missing, Minderbinder agrees to help him find her, but abandons the attempt in order to smuggle illegal tobacco.
The Minderbinder character of the miniseries comes across as more sympathetic and less tyrannical than the earlier representation in the 1970 film or the original in the 1961 book, at least in his personal interactions with Yossarian.
[3] A running gag is that whenever he explains how he accomplishes his grandiose tasks to other characters, often involving technical acts of treason, it is drowned out and censored by background noise.
Joseph Heller intentionally seeded Catch 22 with "anachronisms like loyalty oaths, helicopters, IBM machines and agricultural subsidies", all of which only appear in the McCarthy Era, in order to create a more contemporary atmosphere.
[6] Milo Minderbinder has become an archetypal unabashed war profiteer in the American novel, similar to Charles Holt in the 1863 novel The Days of Shoddy by Henry Morford, and the later characters Marcus Hubbard in the Lillian Hellman play Another Part of the Forest, Joe Keller in the Arthur Miller play All My Sons and Noah Rosewater in the Kurt Vonnegut novel God Bless You, Mr.