Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

  On his belt Caleb carried a pocket-sized beacon. All of them did. In their pockets, a ten-inch knife for cutting through seat belts and paracord. On their heads, black helmets with a maxillofacial shield to protect from debris, wind back, rotor wash. On their shoulder sleeves, an insignia: a black figure riding a pale horse, carrying a saber. Beneath it, the Night Stalkers’ motto: Death Waits in the Dark.

  Caleb became part of a crew that manned a Chinook called the Evil Empire, tail #146. The Chinook had two rotors, and the aircraft’s wide rear opened into a ramp, from which they dropped the Special Forces recon team down the woven nylon ropes deployed on either side, letting them slip to the ground quiet as raindrops down leafstalks. There were stories of men falling, crushing the men below. Sometimes men would fall with straight legs and shatter bone, tibia and fibula.

  • • •

  While Caleb was in Afghanistan, his wife’s body grew. She must have worried the child was listening to the silence of the home, that it knew it would be born into a fatherless world.

  Caleb was allowed to come home the day before Allyson gave birth. The doctor let him help. He pulled his daughter out. Allyson screamed at him the whole time.

  They named their daughter Isabel. At first sight, he feared the girl. He had no idea how to raise one, having grown up among boys. But in the hospital, he held her and she reacted to him and the worry died. Everything he’d ever known in his life, and everything he’d ever loved, he’d either run away from or been kept away from. “And I will never leave you,” he said.

  Allyson said having the baby ruined her college years because she wasn’t skinny like the other girls. Isabel cried through the night. Caleb fed her. Allyson rolled around in bed, covered her ears. Caleb called it postpartum depression. Soon Isabel recognized Caleb’s voice and when he spoke she fell asleep to it.

  • • •

  On his next deployment, after Isabel was born, the Evil Empire broke down in the desert of Afghanistan and a radio call came in about how no one was coming to help. It was night. Pitch silent. The unit hunkered. Gunfire flickered in the distance. Forty or fifty Taliban, they guessed, saw the Chinook come down. A hoarse voice over the radio said as much. The chopper was now nothing other than a womb where he would reside and be easily shot, perhaps at close range with great pauses so that he would have time to know the face of his killer. The men didn’t speak. They knew they were going to die. The Taliban would either kill him or torture him, but either way, Caleb thought, he didn’t want them knowing about Isabel. Since it bothered Caleb to be away from his daughter. He carried a printout photograph of Isabel’s smiling face in the pocket of his uniform. Caleb pulled out the picture and looked at his daughter. Then he started eating the picture. He chewed on it. He swallowed it. Eating the picture made him brave. No one, he thought, was going to tell Isabel that her daddy lay down and died in a chopper. That he just gave up. He might die, but if it meant he could live to make it home to see his daughter, then he would be the one biting the esophagus out of a Taliban’s throat.

  Caleb ate the picture from the bottom up so he could still see Isabel’s eyes.

  They all stepped out of the chopper and walked across the hot earth and back to base and they never once saw the enemy in their trucks, staring with gun-dark eyes.

  • • •

  Gruesome news about the incident returned to the wives. They’d been gathering in the neighborhood, in each other’s homes, talking about what their men were doing. They heard about killings, and perhaps they talked, and the talking made them imagine the killings were done not with guns, or knives, or objects that divided man from enemy—a function of metal and physics—but with hands and with teeth.

  And so when Caleb returned, he returned home to a wife who feared him. He stepped into the house and Isabel was in her arms, a boneless shape. Maybe Allyson thought his hands would do something awful. She was white and larger than before, and she wore flannel to hide herself. Caleb opened his arms to receive them and she called him a murderer. Outside, through the open window, he heard the sounds of other fathers mowing lawns, their children playing in the cut grass.

  He slept through the day and into the night and in the morning he found a diaper on the bathroom floor, and he was convinced it was the same diaper he saw before he deployed, only now it was ripped up by the dog, spread into pieces, yellow and used. He found his uniform in the trash can.

  They slept in different rooms. Allyson didn’t trust him around Isabel anymore. Caleb explained that he’d just been through the most traumatic experience of his life. Allyson said he didn’t understand what she had to go through being at home by herself.

  “I had to take out the trash,” she said. “I had to take care of the baby. I had to be alone.”

  He wondered if she knew he was happy when he left.

  • • •

  He could see faces but he never knew anyone he killed. Most of the time he shot at lights until they stopped flashing. Rarely were there battles. Usually an ammo dump. He held the button down until he couldn’t move anymore. Gross motor skills.

  Six months later, he was at an Afghan compound. He and his crew of Night Stalkers hovered in the warm night air, waiting for an AC-130 gunship to blow up the guard towers so they could drop off the Special Forces soldiers they sheltered inside the Chinook. The signal to land came through, and Caleb and his buddy Shamus Goare stepped off the rear ramp clearing the way for the soldiers and for the four-wheelers. Everyone called Shamus Goare, “Al Gore.” He was thick-cheeked and brown-eyed and he looked too sweet for his job. His life was Chinook #146 and its duties. He was the flight engineer; sometimes working as a gunner, sometimes helping the Special Forces teams down the ropes. On this particular night Caleb and Al Gore stepped outside the chopper’s rotor disk and bombs started going off all around them. With their night vision goggles the rounds of explosions turned the world an impossible white. The compound was gone and the guard towers remained. They blew up the wrong part.

  The men headed back to the Chinook, and on their way, an object, small and bright like the moon, appeared over the Evil Empire. Caleb didn’t know what it was or from where it had come. But it came closer. Then he knew. A huge fireball. The flames held something dark, like a pit. A person in the flames. A charred Afghan on a motorcycle, grinning. It hit the ground and the Afghan disappeared into ashes.

  The crew returned to the base. They’d taken some heavy fire on the way. Blood was all over the floor of the aircraft. The tie-down rings were covered in severed fingers. Bullets took them clean off.

  A few maintenance guys were working their way up the flight path, hauling a big fire hose to spray in the turbine engines and clean all the sand out. When that was done, they would come on the floor of the aircraft and use pressure washers to clean out the dust and dirt. Caleb stepped off and started yelling at them. He looked like hell. He was covered in blood. He was flailing his arms and screaming. “You’re not going to come up here,” he said. The workers told Caleb it was their job to clean the aircraft. So Caleb snatched the pressure washer and stayed there the rest of the day in the heat and cleaned the blood out of the chopper.

  • • •

  Caleb’s mother collected articles about Iraq and Afghanistan from USA Today, the New York Times, Vanity Fair. She put them in a folder. On a visit home, she showed him the articles. She said, “Is this frivolous? Are people frivolously dying?”

  Caleb explained things to his mother. He explained that the bombed Afghan wedding wasn’t a wedding at all, and that the press had only thought it was a wedding because that’s what the local Afghans had told the press. The locals weren’t shooting celebratory fire with Kalashnikovs, he explained, a tradition at Afghan weddings, but were shooting antiaircraft missiles, and that after it was all over the Afghans came and took all the guns away, leaving the women and the children dead and unarmed. “That’s all the press had to go by,” he said. “If you ask Special Forces what happened, they aren’t telli
ng you shit, and by no means would they fly over someone and say, hey, let’s kill all these people. And, by the way, do you really think that out of three aircraft of highly trained Special Forces guys, who know they have to write up a report later explaining why they killed everybody, would all three randomly fire onto a village of people and kill all of their women and children?”

  Caleb’s mother tucked the articles back into the folder. She sat down with her thin limbs and long dark hair. Caleb said, “Guess what, Mom. It was my guys. We did it.”

  • • •

  Caleb deployed twice to Iraq and eight times to Afghanistan. In the army, his nickname was Dapper Dan, because no matter what the conditions, after combat, after his helmet had been on his head for days in the Middle Eastern heat, his hair was always immaculate, brushed and molded finely with his favorite gel.

  A lot of the war bored him. But sometimes death turned the world into something rare and magnificent. It bonded the men, and pretty soon Caleb felt closer to his unit than he did his wife. They played together as children. When the Evil Empire broke down in the desert, which it often did, they tossed a purple Nerf football to kill time. They threw smoke grenades in a Porta-John. They sang with dumbbells in Delta Forces gyms, “I fucking need you now tonight! I fucking need you now forever!” In Germany, they were drinking at a club and Kip gave the DJ a quiet neck choke—enough to knock him out, keep him down, then drag him behind speakers and tie him with a cord. He switched the techno to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Master Sergeant Tre Ponder’s wife sent the crew a box of marshmallow Peeps. Tre hated marshmallow Peeps. It was a joke between them, and when the Peeps arrived to the desert, the men used the small yellow birds for target practice. They called the day crew woodchucks because they were always hammering shit at the FOB. Caleb and his buddies went into the woodchuck den one night and started dry humping them. Caleb was running around with a camera. “You better get protection!” The guys grabbed hard helmets, put them on, and started humping again.

  At home in Savannah, they all went to Hooters, without their wives, and they signed an army helmet and they hung the helmet on the wall. Nights, they went drinking at Kevin Barry’s Irish Pub, a bar in the historic district where the walls are covered in photographs of dead soldiers. Hunter Army Airfield is a ten-minute drive away and all day gray planes fly low over the bar’s roof.

  The commander of the Evil Empire was Major Stephen Reich, and the day he was late for a flight from Texas back to Hunter, the men worried, because he was never late, always by the book. A West Point graduate, your perfect army commander, a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-it-done kind of guy. Except that time Caleb said Reich handed Saddam a photo of Jesus and nearly coughed up a lung he was laughing so hard. When Major Reich finally showed up, he was holding a wedding dress, lace and ribbons blowing all over his face. “Can you get this on the aircraft?” Major Reich said. “Don’t screw it up.” The crew nodded and wove the dress into the Evil Empire’s soundproof ceiling so it stayed fresh.

  Major Reich was set to marry a woman named Jill Blue whom he met in Forsyth Park in Savannah, when their dogs pressed noses. He asked her out to barbecue. She said she wasn’t interested, and he said, oh, come on, what’s the worst that could happen?

  The wedding dress was her sister’s. It arrived at Jill’s door in a body bag. That’s all the men had.

  Four years after the war began, twenty-one-year-old Kip Jacoby showed up to the 3rd Battalion as a helicopter repairman and worked his way up, becoming a Chinook 47D flight engineer, eventually stationed with the Evil Empire. Six-foot-two and covered in Alice in Wonderland tattoos—mushrooms, rabbits, cakes—he wore oxblood, steel-toed boots and carried a Glock in his pants. Handsome and morbid in speech, always saying to hell with this and to hell with that. If you asked how he was doing he’d tell you to go poke his fucking eye out with a spoke. “I don’t give a shit about anything,” Kip said. “I’ve got mine.” He was the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to date your daughter. You either loved him or you hated him. Caleb loved him right away. Bored and on duty, Kip would call Caleb. “Just checking assholes,” he’d say, and then hang up. The two of them sat back-to-back in the chopper’s tail. Caleb was right gunner, Kip left.

  They both chewed Copenhagen snuff and, once, at a desert training exercise near El Paso, they ran out, which to these men was considered a first-rate emergency. Their buddy McCoy said he was getting off base to renew his ID, and he’d bring them both back a can. When McCoy returned, he teased them, said he’d only purchased one. McCoy chewed Red Man himself and laughed at the boys. He sent the single snuff can spinning down the tarmac. Caleb slugged Kip in the face. Kip lunged for Caleb’s leg, pulled it back so Caleb’s nose staked the asphalt. He was bleeding and stabbed Kip with his boot in the shin. Kip fell in a kneel and Caleb took off chasing the glinting metal, raging for nicotine. He ripped it open and Kip sauntered over. Caleb took a dip, handed it to Kip. He took a dip, handed it back. They were sitting side by side, grinning, the sun an orange smear on the horizon beyond the throb of twin-engine heat.

  • • •

  Caleb and Allyson hadn’t been having sex, but one night Allyson woke him and made love to him in such a way that if you’d walked in, not knowing, you might have mistaken it for rage.

  Weeks later she stood against the wall. Her nightgown glowed in the evening’s light, her body its dark center. She stood rigid, put one foot on top of the other. He saw all of her, touched her stomach to feel his growing son.

  “One time?” he said.

  He thought they had used a condom. He convinced himself that they definitely had. He convinced himself that she must have gone to the trash to get the condom. He imagined her on the bathroom floor, cinching it shut and then opening it like a wound, wide-legged and pouring it. He on the bed asleep with his back turned, breathing and dreaming.

  He punched the wall, and showed her the blood. He tried to explain that he would go to jail if he didn’t go to war, and she said that was a decision he had made.

  • • •

  They named their son Isaac. Years passed and his relationship with Allyson deteriorated. He worried his children would get old enough to remember the fighting. He’d promised himself to never let his kids grow up in a house full of bickering, and so Caleb told Allyson he wanted a divorce. He was set to deploy in a month, and she agreed to sign the paperwork while he was gone. But when Caleb returned from Afghanistan he returned to an empty house, the divorce papers unsigned, and his children gone. Allyson had run off with Cole Boy to Missouri.

  The soldiers of #146 heard about what Allyson did and they took Caleb to a strip club to celebrate and mourn. The girls wore sparkles and hoop earrings. Caleb played pool and a girl walked by and he said, “Hey, what are you doing with all your clothes on?” She had long blond hair and fat, wet eyes.

  “I’m not a stripper,” she said. “I’m a DJ. My name’s Krissy.” And she walked away.

  Before the club closed she asked Caleb if he wanted to go on a date. He told her not really. She said why not. “I don’t want to date anyone,” he said.

  They were sweating and the sweat on their foreheads made them shine like truck oil.

  “No strings attached,” she said.

  Caleb took her number and he called her on Monday and on Tuesday they started dating.

  The next time Caleb deployed, he gave Krissy a key to his apartment so she could look after it. When he came home, he found a new bedspread, new lace curtains for the windows. Framed photos of them hung on the wall. He found a diamond engagement ring in his shirt drawer. She’d used his credit card to buy it. “Don’t you want to be with me?” she said.

  • • •

  The dreams began when the death toll rose and the nights warmed in the summer before his friends would die. The foresight, the eerie vibes—for a long time he’d write it off, say it was coincidence, but then the other guys in his unit would see the same thing. At military briefings, he’
d stare at blueprints, and then he’d see it: two guys with AKs behind the second door on the left. Sure enough, they’d be waiting for him. This happened over and over. People began to call him psychic. Soon the officers had him lead the briefings; telling the soldiers what he thought would happen.

  He saw the Evil Empire bursting into flames, everyone dying. In the dream the Night Stalkers are flying through the mountains looking for a place to land, and when there’s no good place to land, the pilot holds a hover. The pilot can’t see anything going on in the back, so there’s a guy hanging off the ramp, talking on the radio: Come back one, hold her right. Come back left, hold back two. And the pilot is listening to this voice. It’s the inflection of the voice. Everybody is talking but nobody is stepping on one another. It’s a critical time. They’re lining up for a fast rope landing. Caleb throws the rope off the ramp and the men start sliding down at ten or fifteen feet off the ground. That’s when the firing begins. They’re stopped. They’re hovering. They’re at their most critical point. All their guns are hanging off the side. The rounds are bouncing off the electrical panels and the helicopter peels over and they get hit from the back by a rocket.

  You know those falling dreams? The ones where you’re in an elevator and you’re falling but you never hit the ground—you’re just falling, falling?

  Caleb can’t see anything. He can only see flashes. He can see colors. Everything is blurred out, like if you put goggles on your face and rubbed the front with Vaseline.

  In the dream, he’s lying there on his side, and the aircraft is turning over and everybody is screaming.

  “Kip,” Caleb yells, “Kip, buddy, can you get out? I’m pinned down. I can’t move.” Caleb is on his side, peering into the smoke.