Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

  Barganier said the solution was real easy. He said, “I’m going to make the decision for you. I’m not filing the paperwork. You’re not going home, and if you try to go home then I’m going to tie you up here so long that you can’t leave.”

  His mother and brother showed up to the graduation. Allyson didn’t. He didn’t remember her even being there. The army shipped him to advanced training in Fort Eustis, Virginia, outside the small fishing town of Newport News, where he trained as a helicopter mechanic, fixing Black Hawks and Chinooks.

  At Eustis, Caleb had enough freedom to remember what freedom was like, but he was caged up and he couldn’t enjoy anything. He wasn’t allowed to have a car. Mostly he missed Allyson and his little brother, John. The other soldiers talked about sex and the ways of women and he didn’t know much. He felt himself retreating in these moments. Disappearing. He was younger than the other guys. If his grades were 80 percent or better, he’d get a pass and he could leave for the weekend. He’d go to the bars with his buddies and they’d stay at hotels.

  Caleb kept dating Allyson, but over time he sensed a drifting in her voice. She was still talking to Cole Boy. “You’re gone too much,” she said. So he called this other girl he knew from home named Gillian, who lived in Atlanta. “You know I’ve crushed on you since seventh grade,” he told her. “I was just too worked up about skipping school and riding rodeo to give you the time of day.” A Greyhound got him to Atlanta, and the two had plans to meet, but when he arrived his friend Smitty dragged him to a bar. Caleb stood her up.

  A few days later, they met and drove to the beach on Tybee Island in Savannah and they stayed up all night talking and the talking was easy. They buried and unburied their feet. They sat on that beach and they must have talked for nine hours and it didn’t feel like long. Never went further. She was a strong Catholic girl.

  Twice a week Caleb and Gillian went to Taco Bell, and, once, he told her: “You’ve been nothing but sweet to me. I love you. But I’m not going to talk to you anymore until I get everything resolved at home. You get one phone call a day when I get all this baggage put behind me. Will you be there when I do all this?”

  “I’ll be here as long as I can,” she said.

  Allyson found out Caleb had those two weeks off. She started calling his father constantly. Caleb’s father said he couldn’t take it anymore. “Get her off my back,” he said.

  But it was too late, Allyson had left a message on Caleb’s answering machine: I’ve used all my money. I bought a ticket to come to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. One way. I don’t have a way back home and I don’t know my way around the airport, so you better be there. I’m just coming.

  She arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson wearing a yellow dress and peach perfume. They rented a cabin for three days and Caleb noticed that things were different. It was pretty much the way it had been in Centralia. Sex, hot and heavy. That was it. There was no foundation to it at all. There was still that part of him that wanted to take care of her. He thought of her as helpless. She gave him that whole I can’t live without you talk.

  Back at Fort Eustis, after too many days spent lubricating drive systems, repairing cockpit gauges, checking tension on flight controls, Caleb decided he was lonely again. He was eighteen years old. He asked his buddy Smitty what to do: Should I go for the sexy one I don’t like or the not so sexy one I do like?

  Smitty said write a letter to both of them and tell them you’re sorry and whichever one takes you back is the one it’s supposed to be. Caleb wrote Allyson and Gillian the same letter and they both said okay. Smitty said the only way to do it now is to flip a coin. Good logic. So they flipped a coin. It landed on Allyson.

  Allyson came down the day before he graduated from advanced training, a few months after the coin toss. It’d been a long time since he’d seen a girl. They got a hotel and toward the end of the weekend they were lying in bed. “Listen,” Allyson said. “I went back to Cole Boy. We had sex a couple times but I realized he wasn’t for me. You’re the one I want.”

  The military guys at Eustis told Caleb it was a common thing and so he forgave her. At graduation she pinned on his airborne wings and smiled in pictures with just the two of them.

  They drove back to Missouri and took a bit of leave and Allyson had this little red Plymouth piece of junk and he had a 1977 Ford pickup truck. He started working on it because he had one week to get it seaworthy enough to drive to Georgia. They rented a U-Haul trailer and put it behind the truck and they drove, Allyson in the Plymouth, and Caleb in the truck.

  In a town called Dalton, in Georgia, his power steering went out. The only person he had to call with any money was his father. He said he was broke down with empty pockets. He had to report to the base by morning. His father gave him 146 bucks.

  Allyson’s mother found them an apartment in Statesboro, forty-five minutes away from Fort Stewart. It was a little one-bedroom apartment. It was a lot of really good sex and a lot of jealousy. Allyson didn’t want Caleb in the army. She wanted to get married and have children and she wanted him to be home.

  One time they were at a restaurant that sold thick hamburgers and she said, “There’s a girl just walked in the door. Don’t look at her.” She must have compared every part of herself to this woman. Caleb wasn’t cheating. She always thought he was cheating. Allyson stayed anyway and took classes at Georgia Southern. He’d try to talk to her about what was going on in the army. She said she hated the army.

  Finally, unable to take it anymore, his long workdays, the uncertain future, she pinned him in the house. “I’m not letting you leave.” Caleb punched a hole in the wall next to her head. Allyson stepped slowly to the side. An hour later, he came back. Nothing but a note saying she’d be gone for the night at a hotel. She’d taken his credit card. All night he was sorry and he painted these picture frames that she’d asked him to paint yellow.

  Caleb and Allyson moved to Savannah next and he was stationed with Hunter Army Airfield base, working as a low-level army mechanic, a low-paid private, with the 159th Aviation Regiment.

  Payroll messed up his check one month, and they had no money to pay the bills. Allyson wasn’t working. Caleb called Smitty, and Smitty recommended they get married, and so they married because that added eight hundred dollars to his monthly paycheck, and because they could not leave each other, and because they were eighteen, and they hung crosses on their walls and this meant something. They married at the justice of the peace for thirty-five dollars and took a slow honeymoon at Red Lobster.

  Caleb didn’t know what marriage was supposed to be like except that you’re gonna be miserable for the rest of your life and your wife is gonna bicker at you and life sucks. He thought, Well, this is what it’s like to be married. Things shifted. Allyson had full rein to go crazy over anything. The jealousy got way worse. Any time the military would say, be here at this time, she’d say, if you love me, you won’t go. It was hard enough to have to do it and then come home and hear her shit. He’d say, they’ll throw me in jail if I don’t go. Within six months they weren’t even talking anymore.

  One day, in the middle of all this, members of the 160th Aviation Regiment, a Special Forces helicopter transport crew known as the Night Stalkers, asked Caleb’s unit for extra help doing phase work on their choppers. No one volunteered to go over. They’d heard rumors about those guys: that they were six-foot-tall snake-eaters, and throat-slitters, and that they did stuff you couldn’t talk about, and you couldn’t talk about them. Their motto was Death Waits in the Dark. Their creed, taken from the Book of Revelation: “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.”

  Some said when Night Stalkers died in the field, they’d be decapitated, the hands removed and hidden in bags, separated from the body to prevent identification. Som
e said when a Night Stalker died in ways you couldn’t tell his family about, they mutilated the body to launder it. Some said they’d run it over with a jeep, blow it up, douse it with oil, and set it on fire, invent a new truth.

  The platoon leaders called on their four newest cherries, and Caleb, with only three months’ experience, was sent over. He was surprised. They jogged in shorts instead of sweatpants and took on dangerous missions, mostly at night. They were a Special Ops regiment, flying Blackhawks, MH-47 Chinooks, Apache gunships, supporting dangerous combat missions of Special Forces recon teams. Caleb never wanted to go back to the 159th. He stayed a few weeks, fixing choppers, observing the men—their camaraderie and intensity.

  He stopped by the sergeant major’s open office hours and told him he wanted to become a Night Stalker. “What the fuck are you talking about, you pencil-dick pussy? You’re nothing but a goddamn kid. Get the fuck out of my fucking office on the fucking double.”

  The sergeant major spit when he spoke. Caleb nodded at his words but came back every week for six weeks until he was escorted out by military personnel. Special Ops was divided between the guys who do stuff and the guys who don’t. He learned that assessment is the way to get to do stuff. The guys who assess, they fly the helicopters, go into combat, shoot the bad guys. The guys who don’t, they sit at a desk. Finally the sergeant major said, “You’re not going to let me alone, are you. You realize what you’re getting yourself into? You realize what assessment is?” Assessment is the entry point into SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape) school and then the Special Forces. They beat you, drug you, starve you, lock you in a dark cell for a week, play rape scenes on a movie screen for hours, and blast static and screams from loudspeakers, trying to make you break, trying to see if you can hold up.

  • • •

  Caleb decided to assess anyway, and before assessment he went through a five-week training program called Green Platoon. A lot of carrying logs around and walking through mud. Close quarters combat, weapons, medical. Sticking IVs, chest tubes, shots. How to carry tampons to plug bullet wounds. Sterile. Easy to carry. Great blood stoppers. If somebody got shot, he asked: Super or regular? Then a lot of what to do with credit cards, how to deal with travel vouchers. Lots of classroom time. Then it was back outside, more close quarters, standing right across from each other and slugging, learning where to hit for trauma, trying to knock one another unconscious. If the instructor didn’t think you were training hard enough, he’d slug on you both and make sure you understood 110 percent. At the end of the week, the instructor put on a foam Red-Man suit and fought the men until they bled. Those weeks were about getting guys to quit.

  On the third week the sergeant major lined up all the men. He said, “One of you guys has screwed up and I want you to tell us who it is.” Caleb didn’t know what was going on. By the looks of it, no one else in the room did either. The sergeant major said okay then, walked off, left the men wondering. The next day he came back. It was the same ordeal: lining everybody up, accusing them. “Somebody has done something wrong. Are you going to tell me who it is?”

  The room was full of Green Berets, Army Rangers, top-notch guys, and an E-2, a low-ranking guy, just got in the army, hadn’t been in the army even a year. The sergeant major looked at the E-2. “Take off your uniform.”

  This kid, it turns out, went to the store on base and bought all these badges he’d never earned. The Special Forces badge. The airborne wings. The combat badge. All these extra badges. Later he got drunk and put them on his uniform and went to the strip club.

  It’s Saturday night. The women paw at him, dance for him. The sergeant major is at a table, watching everything.

  The E-2 kid cussed the sergeant major. “That’s it,” he said, “so now I guess I’m kicked out.”

  The sergeant major said no, you’re going to stay in the unit, because it’s going to take a while to outprocess you. He stayed for eight months, and they tortured him, harassed him. In close quarters combat, they used him as a dummy. When it was time to learn a knee strike, the sergeant major nailed the kid, and he’d fall down, and he’d get back up. Every day they trained and they trained by him. When Caleb got to the medical portion of Green Platoon, it was January and it was cold and they were out in the woods and this kid was the one who got stuck with IVs. Guys missing veins on purpose.

  • • •

  When Caleb finally told Allyson about his plans to assess, she threatened divorce, telling him that those were the guys who went to hotel rooms and cheated on their wives. Caleb assessed anyway. When he came home, Allyson wouldn’t talk to him. He found his uniform in the trash, buried in a snowfall of tissue. Dog hair and garbage all over the floor. There were no paper towels.

  Eventually Allyson suggested he make up for lost time by watching her cheerleading squad at the Georgia Southern men’s basketball game. Caleb watched. After the game she told him, “The girls and I are going to Hooters and you can’t go. I know how guys are when they go to Hooters.”

  He’d finally found a job he loved, something he was good at, and the more he loved the army, the less it seemed that Allyson loved him.

  He went to Taco Bell to be lonely. He ordered a chalupa extreme, a cheesy double-beef burrito. He spoke to the drive-thru like a confessional, telling it things, things he would never tell anyone else. The face he saw in the yellow window where he received his food was never what he wanted—something beautiful and waiting. But it didn’t matter. He ate in the dark, facing the restaurant, so he could see inside.

  Nights, he slept in the green-lit back of his truck, someplace new every day, the fast-food chains that broke the dark highway with their haloed light.

  He bought a gun and considered killing himself. Back at home, he told Allyson, “This is going to make me sound like a girl, but there’s got to be a way to have a relationship besides sex and arguing.” She yelled at him, “What do you mean? What do you think a relationship is? It isn’t always perfect. Yelling is normal. It helps things.”

  He got in his car and drove toward nowhere, said he was going to drive until he figured the mess out. While the truck was nagging to start, Allyson was outside in her nightgown, making a scene. He drove all the way back to the base at Hunter, and from there, he drove to SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

  SERE school was like a prison camp, preparing men for capture, captivity, torture. Once he was running thirty miles during a training exercise with a broken foot, limping, unsure if he could finish. The sergeant came up to him, handed him a thirty-pound weight from his rucksack, and asked Caleb to drop it on his foot. The sergeant’s foot. “Now I got a broke foot too,” the sergeant said. They continued on their run.

  To train, they’d hit the men, kick the men, cover the men with bruises and throw them into a dark room. Someone was always inside, wandering around in the dark. They had to know when they were just a few feet away from the other guy. Then they’d strike.

  Caleb made it through SERE school, drugged and beaten within an inch of his life. He was gone a little over a month. That last day he called home and told his father, “I made it. That was the final deal. That was the hardest thing I had to go through.” He mentioned the graduation date and hung up.

  Next, he called Allyson and told her the same thing. She said she had something important to tell him but she wanted to wait until he came home. Caleb wouldn’t hang up the phone.

  “You’re going to be angry,” she said. “You’re going to be a dad.”

  He’d lost thirty pounds from his already-skinny frame. Even his eyes looked smaller. He had yellow bruises on his neck. He ate five green beans for dinner and from that small portion he was full. In a way he was happy about the child because he’d always wanted a family, and so he said nothing at all. He slept for many days and she fed him and he ate and his body re-formed itself.

  “Are you still going to leave me?” Allyson asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. I can’t live this way. You’re not who I
want to be with.”

  “I’ll change,” she said. “I’ll change.”

  • • •

  Caleb was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 160th Night Stalkers, at Hunter Army Airfield. Within a week, his pager went off and he was gone to Texas for training at Fort Bliss, four months of flying choppers over the desert. When he got home he took a shower and said harsh words to Allyson. She asked Caleb again if he was going to leave. This time he told her he wasn’t. He said he just got home and he wouldn’t be going anywhere. When he was gone he’d thought a lot about his daughter and he remembered a promise he’d made to himself, that whatever you do, you stick it out for kids.

  The following week Caleb went back to the base to fill out forms for a travel voucher. The soldiers were quiet and drinking coffee and the news played on a television in the corner. CNN showed a plane hitting the first tower, and then another plane hit the second. The colonel walked in and told the men, “I’ve been on the phone with Washington, prepare to deploy right now.” He wouldn’t let them leave. He said get your shit and get on the plane. They were to report to duty immediately. Within weeks, Caleb was in Afghanistan, fighting with the 160th Special Ops as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. There wasn’t much time to call home. For days, Allyson didn’t know where he went.

  • • •

  Caleb came to know the war as green-lit and strange, from the back of a Chinook MH-47D, a seventeen-ton hollow beast strong enough to lift an armored Humvee while keeping speeds up to 155 mph. He was a gunner, pointing the M134 minigun in the dark, searching for tracers. Always in the dark, because the Night Stalkers flew only at night, their helicopters painted black so they would disappear into the dark. The hours they worked in the dark matched closely the American hours of light. When they flew, they stayed close to the ground, the chopper’s belly brushing treetops, avoiding ground radar systems. It felt less like flying than moving around things, mountains, buildings, trees, and armies, something elegant, like the flight of bees pollinating pomegranate blossoms.