Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism

by Jennifer Percy

  “Well, what’s he doing?”

  Brian sent his buddy Chris out to check on the guy. When Chris returned, he stood in the middle of the room and stared at the floor.

  “So what’d he say?”

  “Remember those people in the convoy that blew up earlier today?” Chris said. “Well, they blew up into billions of pieces. He’s looking for them because he thinks he needs to collect a fragment of their body to take home and give to their family.”

  “Bring him inside,” April said. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Chris brought the soldier inside. He sat him down in front of the computer.

  “Hi, hey,” April said. “How you doing? I’m out here in North Carolina—”

  “—BILLIONS OF PIECES! Billions and billions and billions. I gotta find one.”

  “Now listen,” April said. “That’s not very nice, to pick up a piece of someone and give it back to their family, is it? I think that would freak them out.”

  “No, no. They have to have a piece of them. I just need one little piece. It could be anything.”

  “Those men are dead,” April said. “You’re not going to bring them back. The families will have a funeral for them. If you bring a piece of their bodies back to their families you could hurt them. You don’t want to hurt them, do you?”

  The soldier said nothing.

  “Are you going home soon?”

  “Billions of pieces! Billions of pieces! Billions and billions and billions and billions. Billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions.”

  He kept saying it, billions and billions, over and over.

  “Please stop,” April said.

  The soldier stopped.

  “There may be billions of pieces of them all over the earth, but do you know those pieces will sink into the earth and they will form new soil or even fossils and they will become part of the world again? That was only their bodies. Their souls had already passed on into heaven. They are probably looking down on you right now, thinking how crazy you are.”

  The soldier said nothing.

  “I’ll tell you what: when I die, you can take my body and throw it over my neighbor’s fence.”

  “Really?” he said.

  • • •

  I wanted to talk to veterans and the families of veterans for the same reason that many were telling me I could not talk to them. That as soon as we say words like PTSD or trauma we have permission to ignore the problem because we think we understand it. It wasn’t so much that the familiar narratives weren’t working, it was there appeared to be no narrative at all.

  At the end of the phone conversation with April, she asked, “Was that PTSD?”

  • • •

  When I drove into Georgia I called Caleb and asked where we should meet. He said he was busy running errands, trying to find a boat engine for a girl named DeeAnne whose husband had just died of a heart attack. “It’s a piece-of-shit houseboat,” he explained, “but she won’t give it up. It was where her husband liked to go to think. This guy was huge. He ate so much food that one day he pretty much just fell over and died. Just last week she bought a new engine for ten grand, and guess what? Two days later it broke.”

  Caleb knew a guy in a town called Dalton selling boat parts. “Consider this,” he told me. “Once I asked my marine buddy Max to come help me fix vehicles. He didn’t want to meet me. He was on his way to drill. But I convinced him anyway. Guess what? The guys he was gonna ride with got stuck behind a Greyhound, and a big bus tire flew off and smashed their window. They ended up in the ditch.” The way he told it, he was a kind of talisman against death.

  I left my car in the parking lot and stepped into Caleb’s truck. Tobacco dust lined every inch of it. The worn leather scratched my thighs. Caleb looked a bit feverish. At the same time, on the edge of recovery.

  We drove with open windows, feeling the air. He looked at me and sniffed. “You drove all the way down here to talk to me,” he said. “Why?” He had one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on his thigh. “There were other writers that came to talk to me,” he said. “People that wanted to know about me and my guys. But I didn’t like them.”

  A long finger pointed to my head. “You’ll do.”

  At the time I thought he was just surprised that anyone cared. He’d been trying to get people to care for a long time.

  “By the way,” he said, “you religious?”

  I hesitated long enough for him to fill his mouth with a fresh wad of chew. I didn’t want the conversation to come down to this. Finally I told him I wasn’t.

  “Good,” he said.

  He sat quietly, just blinking, but everything inside him seemed to churn.

  In Dalton, Caleb stopped the truck and disappeared into a building that looked coughed up by the earth. He returned engineless. “Wrong store,” he said, and slipped into the truck.

  “So I don’t read the Bible that good,” he said. We turned onto a dirt road. “But there’s a hierarchy of angels, you know that, right? They have ranks just like the military has ranks. It’s hard to tell the difference at first between angels and demons, but over time you learn.”

  “I thought you weren’t religious.”

  “Spiritual,” he said. “There’s a difference.” Caleb sucked his lips under his teeth. “I hate religion. I think religious people are worse than people who hate God. Religious means, ‘I read my Bible and I go to church every Sunday and I do this and I do that and the good Lord does this.’ You see. They believe in God but only because their daddy told them to believe.”

  He started to move around in his seat as if there were a weasel in his pants.

  “What’s happening,” I said.

  “Hang on,” he said. Caleb stuck his hand out the window. “I’m getting something.” His eyeballs rolled and he sat straight-backed like an antenna picking up waves from somewhere far away.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Wasn’t real clear.” He twitched like a fly-bothered horse. “Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll have to stop. A text message from God kinda thing.”

  “Intuition,” I said.

  “Call it whatever you want.”

  I wrote sees future in my notebook.

  I asked if he knew any other veterans that were seeing their dead buddies. “My friend Valarie,” he said. “She makes dinner for her dead husband every night.” He whistled and tapped the steering wheel. “But you might have some trouble getting her to talk about it. A lot of guys have a hard time talking about it. They see PTSD, like you say, as when you go back and you experience those memories. I’d say for the majority of guys, they can’t figure out what it is.” He scratched his sideburns and cracked his neck by taking both hands off the wheel.

  We drove on until the land turned from vine-gnarled to barren, and towns bloomed with a stark suddenness into neon strip malls and restaurants with names like Chin Chin China, and a Hummer dealership where a purple ape balloon waved its hand below an American flag so heavy it could hardly lift itself.

  “Think about a girl that gets raped,” he said. “It’s the day-to-day things that start it back up for the raped girl. Like someone holding her wrist, and that’s when the emotions rise up. But see out there, it’s so big and so traumatic that you don’t even have time to deal with it, you can’t process it, your brain can�
��t process it.” He spread his arms wide and his knuckles clacked the windshield. “The world is just kinda shit for about twenty minutes and then it’s over. It’s mostly just reacting and then you think about it years later when you’re home.”

  He kept glancing at me with large, almond-shaped eyes that blinked heavily as if always in a state of waking. They were canine blue and rimmed with black lashes. “In the beginning,” he said, “I refused to believe I had a handicap—that it was PTSD. I didn’t want it to be PTSD. PTSD means you’re an outcast. It means you’re the crazy one. I probably had PTSD, but there’s always the influence of the demonic.”

  Then I knew that God was just a word he used to talk about other things.

  “It’s something that a lot of people aren’t going to want to hear about. Some people aren’t going to believe it at all. But I think it will change how they understand PTSD.”

  • • •

  He took me to Mi Casa, a Mexican restaurant across from a strip mall outside Atlanta, and we ate cheese enchiladas and drank Coke from plastic cups brought to us by a pretty girl with a bee-stung face. We sat at a booth away from the door.

  Caleb told me a story about his ex-wife, Allyson. “While I was deployed,” he said, “the dog got pregnant and miscarried. The miscarried puppies were in a pile on the floor and Allyson had to call me in Iraq to ask what to do. I told her to put the dead dogs in the trash, but she wouldn’t do it. When I got home, the dead dogs were still in the house.”

  He took his fork to his plate. He covered his mouth to swallow.

  “That’s the kind of shit I had to come home to,” he said.

  Not the first time I wondered whether Caleb was remembering what the war made him see.

  When I asked Caleb about his missions, he formed his Copenhagen snuff into a fine ball and told me he didn’t want to talk about Special Forces or ragheads or Saddam. He didn’t want to talk about his buddy who got his skull blown off and how he had to duct-tape it back on, “brains and all.” Or about Fluffy, that cat he peeled and ate dead off the side of the road, “still soft and cat-looking.” He didn’t want to talk about mistaking water balloons for grenades or those women with AKs. He wanted to talk about the day his entire unit died, how he thought he heard their falling, burning voices from a desk in an empty room at headquarters. He wanted to talk about how his ex-wife called him a murderer and then made him take out the trash. He wanted to talk about his friend Valarie who made dinner for her dead husband every night. He wanted to talk about how all of it was still there, every day, the blood in his mouth, the screaming, his dead buddies. He wanted to talk about after the war.

  “When I got home three years ago,” Caleb said, “I’d have this thing come visit me in the middle of the night. You could hear it coming down the hallway.” He stood up in the booth, hunched his shoulders, and started walking apishly in place. Boom, he said, slapping the table. Boom. A few customers turned their heads.

  “This thing,” he told me, “a big dark figure, opened my door. It was so tall it had to lean down to get its head through. In this really deep voice it said, I will kill you if you proceed. It sounded almost like it wanted an answer back from me, and so I started laughing at it and I said, ‘You’ve got to be face-fucking me.’ ”

  The customer across from us got up to leave. Caleb finished his Coke and spit his chew into the empty cup.

  “But it came back every night. One time I’m sitting in my room and it walks in, shuts the door, and comes after me. It starts to choke me. I’m physically choking. My dead buddy Kip comes in and wrestles it off me. But Kip isn’t stronger than this thing either so it chokes him too. Kip was taking the punishment for me. I’m watching this and I’m freaking out.”

  “Punishment for what?” I asked.

  “For killing,” he said, “and for living.”

  The air conditioner groaned and strings of dust swirled in the rushed, grated air. Caleb turned sideways, leaned his back against the wall, and rested his legs on the booth.

  I asked if he’d ever gone to the VA for help and he said he waited in line for two days and came home chewing painkillers.

  “A hundred and forty vets are dead every week because of shit like this. The VA doesn’t do anything. I’m pushing the verge of crazy to save these guys.” He put a napkin to his mouth, and his hands folded into its curves. The white looked clean against his skin. “I was one of the best-trained soldiers in the army. They spent millions training me how to go to war, but they never taught me how to come home.”

  I dug an article out of my purse that I’d been carrying around about the twenty-six-year-old soldier named Sergeant Brian Rand who shot himself after being followed night after night by the ghost of the Iraqi man he’d killed. I’d talked to his sister April on the phone and intended to drive to North Carolina for an interview after I spoke to Caleb.

  Brian had been stationed at a Fallujah checkpoint with his buddy Chris. The guys were bored. Not much had happened that day until a white van started coming up the road toward them, picking up speed. Brian turned to Chris and asked him what he thought they should do. Chris replied, “Shoot him, I guess.” Brian shot him.

  The dead Iraqi man came to North Carolina and choked Brian while he slept and demanded an apology for the killing.

  He told April. She said do whatever the Iraqi man said to do. Brian apologized but the dead man wouldn’t listen. Join me on the other side, the man said.

  Caleb read the article slowly, scrunched it into a ball, and threw it at me.

  “This is the same thing that visited me.” He pointed his finger at it. “Everything,” he said. “From how it’s talking to him. To how his friends think he’s talking to himself. To how he thinks he needs to die. I’ve heard the story thousands of times. It’s no different than mine. A lot of guys I’ve worked with, you would never get this out of them. Never. You talk about this and you’ll lose your career. You’ll never go back to combat. You’re the crazy guy. Your wife won’t believe you.”

  “You don’t think hallucinations are a part of PTSD?” I asked.

  Caleb switched the chew from one side of his mouth to the other. He looked to the side, waved to the waitress.

  “I know this is gonna sound crazy to you,” he said, leaning forward, getting close to my face, “but this isn’t PTSD.”

  The room was full of the smell of grease, the sound of air-conditioning. I watched him chew, the way his jaw muscles flexed to the size of walnuts. He wiped sauce from his teeth.

  “This thing,” he said, “this big, black thing—it can come after anyone. It can come after you and kill you and it will try to destroy you. It’s no joke.”

  The Black Thing.

  He said it does not represent anything and that it’s like nothing we know here in this world. He said it’s not a metaphor because there are no metaphors for this kind of evil. It was shadow. It was death. It was the gathered souls of all his dead friends.

  “Do you know when it’s coming?” I said.

  He put his hands out on either side of him, palms flat as if he were trapped inside a box. “I’ll be in a room just like this one,” he said, “and all at once the windows will go dark. And then the Black Thing just sort of seeps in.”

  • • •

  When Caleb returned to Georgia in 2005, he started seeing the chopper’s tail number—#146—everywhere. He went out for Mexican and received $1.46 in change. This was his last bit of cash. So he figured he might as well try for a Lotto ticket. Its number: 146, bought at 1:46 in the afternoon. He won five hundred bucks. At night he woke to see the clock flash 1:46.

  Caleb and Krissy ended their relationship. She couldn’t take all the waking up at night, all the talking to Kip and the Black Thing, or the way they wrestled.

  Caleb didn’t own much, a few suitcases and a toolbox. He carried a piece of the blown-up chopper with him, salvaged from the Hindu Kush. A black rectangle, printed with the words Evil Empire in white letters. He’d kept it in t
he garage.

  An old friend, an army guy named Ryan living near Atlanta, rented a room to Caleb for cheap. They’d known each other since seventh grade.

  Ryan deployed to Iraq and Caleb stayed home. Aimless and unemployed and consumed by memories of the dead soldiers, most days he spent on the couch, watching television and drinking beer with Ryan’s stepfather, a Lakota Indian named Wombly.

  Wombly was a big guy with loose black hair that fanned his breasts. One day Wombly raised his beer in the air and said, “Who’s that dead guy that keeps following you around?”

  It was the first time anybody had seen Kip. Caleb thought Kip was just PTSD. “You see him too?” Caleb said.

  Wombly sucked beer from the rim of his can. The ghosts annoyed him, floating around the television. “And who’s that handsome boy?”

  He described Major Reich’s blue eyes, the wedding ring. Al Gore’s mustache. Sergeant First Class Muralles. Master Sergeant Tre Ponder. All of them.

  Wombly invited Caleb to a sweat lodge in the woods. There were other Indians there and they all sat naked together in the steam, seeing spirits and getting visions. Caleb saw dead soldiers in the smoke. He saw old Indian warriors. The buffalo god Tatanka. Wombly believed Caleb had special powers and offered to train him to become a medicine man.

  Caleb agreed. His skin took on the smell of cedar plank and wood smoke. He stayed for months, memorized the names of healing plants: wormwood, horsemint, skunk cabbage. The names of gods: Gnas and Han and Etu.

  Men and women visited Wombly at the sweat lodge, pleading for help. A lady came with arthritis in her legs and Caleb watched one of Wombly’s friends pray over her, and as he prayed, the arthritis went into him, into his fingers, and his fingers twisted like gnarled wood. He had to get them amputated. Wombly trained Caleb about ancient cures, lost spirits, and displaced souls. He taught Caleb how to bridge the human and the spiritual realms.

  When Caleb finished training he thought he’d found a way to control the Black Thing. For two weeks, he thought it was gone.

  But it returned. Caleb remembered what Wombly taught him. He said stop and it stopped. Caleb said be still and it was still. Caleb said now stop choking Kip and it stopped choking Kip.