Three days later, the officers arrived at her house just as Caleb said they would. It was seven in the morning and the sky was white and the room was cold. Kristina was still asleep on the couch, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. In the days following Kip’s death, she preferred the couch to her bed—using a torn spot where some foam broke through as a pillow.
The men raided the house. They opened drawers. They took everything that belonged to Kip. Clothes, guns, computers. Everything. They didn’t say two words to Kristina. They brought a chaplain and he walked up to Kristina and said, do you need to talk? She said, I’m fine. The men packed Kip’s things in heavy plastic bags and brought them to his parents’ house in Pompano Beach. They put the bags on the front steps. Delivered them like lunch.
• • •
Kip’s father, Steve, told Caleb he wanted an open casket at the funeral. Caleb said that wouldn’t be happening. Steve said, “I want to see my son. My son is dead.” Caleb shook his head. “There’ll be no open casket.”
Steve wouldn’t listen. “I want an open casket.” Caleb had to drive Steve to the morgue to convince him otherwise. He unzipped the body bag and told Steve to look. Kip was just pieces—bones and skin and ash. There were parts missing. There was a large chunk of femur.
“We’re not doing an open casket.”
Steve said, “Okay.” He was weeping into his hands. “I get it. I get it.”
• • •
Kristina found out from Caleb that Kip’s funeral would be in Miami at a place called Forest Lawn, nine hours south. She found out the day before. Caleb and his army friend Denis drove Kristina to Florida, the whole way, with air-conditioning and bad music and stops at fast-food chains and gas stations full of inflatable sea animals and stacks of purple chewing gum.
When they arrived at the funeral, Kristina wasn’t allowed inside. She wasn’t on the guest list. She’d never been close to Kip’s parents and they never put her on the list. Caleb tried to figure out what was going on. Steve said he lost his only son and wanted to have a private funeral. He didn’t mean any harm. Kristina waited in the car. The family didn’t want any soldiers to show up except Caleb and Denis. No military honors. Nothing. They didn’t want anyone at the funeral wearing a uniform.
The priest said few words. Kip was in in the same box he was shipped home in. Nobody ordered a casket.
Kip’s mother wasn’t there. Steve left in the middle of the ceremony.
When Kristina got home to Savannah she found a letter from Kip in her mailbox. I’ll be coming home in twenty-eight days, he said.
• • •
After the funeral, Caleb drove to the Blue Star Memorial in Savannah. The ground was covered in bricks inscribed with the names of dead soldiers. Caleb bought a brick for Kip and set it in the ground. Next to Kip, Caleb put down a brick for himself. A brick means you’re dead. Caleb liked being there next to his friend.
When the army organized a memorial service in Savannah they gave Kip the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star, the Service Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, the Air Medal, the Combat Action Badge.
After Kip’s parents received a military check for his life insurance, they divorced. Caleb heard the money went to a new car and gambling in Vegas; silicone breasts for the mom.
Kip’s ex-wife was a stripper from Florida. Caleb had this story about how Kip and the stripper bought a place together after the wedding and when he returned from his first deployment in Afghanistan, her things were in boxes. She left a note saying she went to visit her family, but she never came back. Kip and Caleb had dug through the boxes. They found homemade porn videos of her fucking. Kip forgot to change his will, so the money was still in the name of the stripper. Kristina didn’t get anything.
Jill Blue learned that her husband was dead while she was at work at her father’s law firm in Panama City, Florida. The chaplain and the officers showed up. She told them to be quiet. She sprinted out the door. They chased her all the way home. After she let them inside, she grabbed one of the men by his uniform, pushed him in the laundry room, and said, I know, I know. Don’t say anything. I know.
She keeps Steve Reich’s Night Stalker helmet in the living room. It looks like a helmet built for deep-sea diving or space exploration. She was disappointed the army didn’t let her keep the night vision goggles. When Halloween comes around, sometimes she puts on a fancy dress, slips the helmet over her head, and wanders the streets, masquerading as the dead.
The parents of Marcus Muralles, when they learned of their son’s death, requested that the street names in their neighborhood no longer be named after trees but after dead soldiers. Elm. Maple. Oak. Why not the dead? Now his mother can see the sign for Muralles Street outside her window, just across Interstate 74, into the Marin Estates apartment complex. Sometimes they go visit the street. She takes pride in picking up litter on the street named for her son. Because Muralles was buried far from Ohio, in Arlington Cemetery, she’s never been able to see his grave. Instead she hired a woman to take photos of the grave and she looks at these photos instead.
Leslie Ponder covered Tre Ponder’s grave site with brightly colored marshmallow Peeps.
Shamus Goare had a little brother named Cory who worked at an industrial factory. One year and two months after the Chinook crashed, Cory died. A machine pinched his head. The brothers were born thirteen months apart and they died fourteen months apart. Their family called the two of them mashed potatoes and gravy. Cory’s wife thinks he wasn’t paying attention because he was too sad about Shamus’s death. Judy blames Marcus Luttrell for not killing the goat herders. She mentions that her son’s body wasn’t burned up as badly as the others.
Because a crew card had been mailed back to Savannah listing the names of every soldier on the Evil Empire, Captain Brady’s wife believed her husband was dead. For forty-eight hours she lived in a soft, mournful world. The card was never updated with Major Reich’s name.
When Brady returned home from the war in September 2005, he found an e-mail from Jill Blue in his in-box. When Major Reich went on dangerous missions, his e-mails rerouted to Brady. The e-mail was addressed to Major Reich. It was the only e-mail. He didn’t want to open it.
Stephen, tell me you are okay? Tell me it wasn’t you? I need you now more than ever. I love you.
Some members of Captain Brady’s platoon got out of the military. Some stayed and served and were killed. Some stayed and saw their buddies killed and then got out because they were thinking: When’s my time?
At the SEAL 160 Ride, a memorial service honoring the fallen soldiers of Operation Red Wings, Captain Brady saw Jill Blue. It was the first time since Steve Reich died. He reached his arms out and held her. She said nothing.
“I just want you to know,” he said, “that Major Reich died to save the wounded, and to bring our men home, and he did it out of a sense of duty and he will always be memorialized and remembered for his courage.”
“I don’t care what you think,” she said. “I don’t care that my husband tried to save all those people. In fact, I think your motto is pretty stupid. Night Stalkers Don’t Quit. What does that mean to me? How does that help me? Is that what you guys do? Do you guys just keep doing things until you’re all dead? Because now my husband is dead. He’s dead because of you.”
That’s when Captain Brady started having terrible dreams. No dream bothered him as much as this dream. The one he had on the fifth of August 2011.
In the dream Major Reich stepped aboard a Chinook helicopter and he paused to look back at Brady. Then he started to burn. Major Reich was bursting into flames. His lips peeled back like wilted petals. “Brady,” Reich said, “I’ve got this one.”
The next day a Chinook MH-47, the same chopper as the Evil Empire, carrying a Quick Reaction Force in the Wardak province of Afghanistan, was shot down. Thirty-eight men on board died, surpassing the death toll of Operation Red Wings.
Sometimes Brady walks down the street and a stranger’s face will shift and mo
rph and become the face of Major Stephen Reich.
• • •
After the crash, Caleb was still dating Krissy, and she found him sometimes shaking on the floor, watching the crash all over again in his dreams: the choking gray-black smoke swirling with the voices of Kip and Al Gore. Kip, buddy, can you get out? Caleb was always looking for Kip. I’m burning, man. I’m fucking burning.
Caleb asked Kip: why am I still alive when everybody else is dead? Kip led Caleb down a dark stairwell. He wrote Scripture on the walls in cursive, You were slain, and have redeemed us to God by your blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; and have made us to our God kings and priests.
Krissy had enough of the dreams, the visions. The bodies ripped apart. Dreams where there was no more blood because it’s all in the dirt next to you. Dying in the worst ways. The Evil Empire in their bedroom at night, perfuming the air.
“You see Kip too, don’t you?” Caleb asked. Krissy shook her head.
Caleb had his eyes turned sightlessly toward the light. Krissy woke him. “Am I so horrible you have to sleep in the garage?” she said.
She got up and dug under the clothes where their engagement ring still sat untouched, and found a gun. It was a little white gun. A birthday present from Caleb. She walked downstairs. The afternoon sun poured through the unclean windows. He said she put the gun to her head.
He told her to put the gun down.
The only way he could stop her from shooting herself, he decided, was to put a gun to his own head.
Caleb ran outside. Krissy chased after him. He got in his pickup truck, shut the door, and locked her out. It smelled like rain. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out his gun, put it in his mouth. She stood at the window, looking inside with blue eyes. “I can’t live with you this way.” They both had guns to their heads. Birds moved around in the trees. Finally Krissy lowered her gun so Caleb wouldn’t shoot.
Everywhere he went, he saw them, their burned bodies, watching him.
These were the days after the war.
PART II
WE KILL OURSELVES BECAUSE WE ARE HAUNTED
I met Sergeant Caleb Daniels in a parking lot off Lake Allatoona in Georgia three years after Kip Jacoby’s death.
The sky was desolate warm and white. A dock frothed with roped-up boats and water licked the sand, leaving a rim of yellow, glistening foam. It was quiet for summer, no growling motors or tires breaking over gravel, just the sound of a slow breeze. A bird wetted its beak in the stomach of a dead squirrel.
When I arrived Caleb wasn’t there—nobody was. He showed up thirty minutes late, driving a burgundy Chevrolet with rust-eaten sides, wearing a button-up shirt, one-hundred-fifty-dollar jeans, and cowboy boots with a two-inch lift. His stubble sparkled like bits of sand. Six-foot-one. Sideburns thick as duct tape. Everything about him was pale but for his hair, which was black and oiled so that its blackness shined. Nowhere longer than a fingernail. He spit chew on the pavement and it steamed.
Over the phone Caleb told me he planned to buy abandoned factories across Georgia and hire a veterans-only workforce to rebuild old combat vehicles for humanitarian and civilian use; turning the waste products of war into something that would give life instead of destroy it. The veterans would have work if they needed work. They’d have a community if they needed a community. The profits would feed into suicide counseling programs for soldiers, which, I later found out, was a Christian exorcism camp. Caleb would run it. There was a small news clip about him in the Statesboro Herald.
The factory he wanted to buy stood alone in the center of a field in southeast Georgia. It was a drab metal thing made grand by the space around it. He’d been building things all his life, unfinished things, trying to make them whole. Caleb relished it, the lives he’d save, the days breaking back, hauling trucks, orchestrating the rise of steel beams. Already he carried notebooks and blueprints; drove a truck with a six-cylinder engine. At night, in his dreams, he saw the vehicles he wanted to build and he gave them names: Brute, Savage, Aggressor. He befriended a broker in Kennesaw, a large bald man named Buck, and convinced Buck to help him write a business proposal for the company. They determined a start-up cost of two and a half million dollars.
It was 2008, and the Department of Veterans Affairs had been caught withholding statistics on veteran suicide from the public. When CBS News began an investigation into the rates, the head of mental health at the VA said, “The research is ongoing. There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem.” Then he sent an e-mail to his media adviser with the subject line “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.” He wrote that there were a thousand suicide attempts per month within the VA. He wrote Shh!
Around eighteen veterans were killing themselves every day.
• • •
Private Jonathan Schulze, who lost fifty-one members of his unit in Ramadi and Fallujah in 2004, returned home and told his parents he wanted to die. He was number 26 on the waiting list to be admitted to the VA in St. Cloud, Minnesota, when the police found him hanging by an electrical cord in his parent’s basement.
Army specialist Timothy Israel, who had been awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded by a roadside bomb, hung himself with the drawstring of his pants in a jail cell in Elwood, Indiana.
Russell Dwyer, a former platoon sergeant and cavalry scout instructor at Fort Knox, shot his wife in the head in their front yard in Colorado Springs, and then he lay down beside her and shot himself. She was facedown, he chose faceup.
Lieutenant Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, who served in a company responsible for transporting Iraqi prisoners of war, hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of his family’s home.
Private First Class Stephen S. Sherwood, a veteran of the casualty-heavy battle for Ramadi, shot his wife five times in the head and neck with a pistol, then took a shotgun to his own head.
Sergeant Lisa Morales said, in an interview in the New York Times, that she reenlisted because she wanted to go back to Iraq so that the Iraqis would shoot her for what she’d done.
Private Walter Rollo Smith, a Marine Corps reservist who’d marched to Baghdad in the first invasion returned home to his twin duplex in Tooele, Utah, made love to the mother of his children, washed her in the bath, pushed her head underwater to rinse out the soap, and held it there gently until she died. When I called Private Smith’s attorney to see if I could visit Smith in jail, the attorney said I could not. “Everyone already knows he’s suffering from PTSD.”
Caleb was eager to tell his story, but most were not. The first person I called was the mother of Joshua Omvig, whose son is considered the first suicide of the Iraq war. She had a home in Grundy Center, Iowa, half an hour from where I lived, in a spread of quiet cornfields. Specialist Joshua Omvig of the 339th MP Company shot himself in December 2005, three days before Christmas. What happened was he handed his mother a suicide note that she thought was a Christmas list. She set it aside. She’d look at it later. There were dishes to be done. She returned to the sink and started washing. Joshua was in his bedroom, changing into his uniform, the one he wore on an eleven-month deployment in Iraq. When he was fully dressed, Joshua walked past his mother and headed outside. The suicide note was still unread. Still on the counter. Joshua climbed into the family truck, locked all the doors, pulled out the 9mm he’d stashed in the glove compartment, and brought it to his head. Joshua’s mother was reading the note. She ran outside, arms flailing, and stopped beside the passenger window. He angled the gun just slightly so he wouldn’t kill his mother. He was twenty-three years old. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve been dead ever since I left Iraq.”
Two years after Joshua’s suicide I called his mother. She didn’t want to talk to me. She had this quiz she gave all the newspaper guys before she let them ask her questions. I told her I wasn’t a newspaper guy. She said it didn’t matter. What’s post-traumatic stress? What’s happening to the brain? She wanted medica
l terms, and scientific reasoning, and I gave her the answers I knew. She said to go read the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and get back to her. The DSM is the official handbook of mental illness and disorder in the United States. In terms of treatment, nothing’s a disorder unless the DSM says it’s a disorder. I had in fact read the DSM’s classification criteria for post-traumatic stress and what I knew was that the DSM revises its definition of war-related trauma in every edition, and has been revising it since its first installment. It wasn’t until 1980, in DSM-III, that the term post-traumatic stress disorder appeared as an operational diagnosis. To be diagnosed with PTSD, one must have experienced a traumatic event, and DSM-III defines a traumatic event as one outside the range of usual human experience. The DSM does not define usual human experience.
I said I was very sorry for what happened to her son. The mother paused and then asked whether I’d fallen all the way to the bottom of hell and stayed for a while and then come back to earth again. She said that unless you’ve been to the bottom of hell and come back you couldn’t understand young Joshua’s blood splattering on the windshield anyway.
When I called a woman named April Somdahl, the half sister of twenty-six-year-old Sergeant Brian Rand, a marine who believed he was being followed night after night by the ghost of the Iraqi man he’d killed, she told me a story about the day Brian was in Iraq and she was in North Carolina and they were talking on Yahoo! Chat and Brian said he needed April’s advice. He said there was a guy out in the sand, and he’d been out there for hours and he wouldn’t come inside.
Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism Page 5
