Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism

More Advance Praise for

DEMON CAMP

“
Demon Camp
is the amazing story of one man’s journey to war and back. It’s a tale so extraordinary that at times it seems conjured from a dream; as it unfolds it’s not just Caleb Daniels that comes into comes into focus, but America, too. Jennifer Percy has orchestrated a great narrative about redemption, loss, and hope.”

—Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Forever War

“This is the book I’ve been waiting for. Lyrical, haunting, surreal, as fiercely brave as it is fearsome, Jennifer Percy’s
Demon Camp
is both damning and redemptive, a shot straight to the hellish heart of war.”

—Kim Barnes, author of
In the Kingdom of Men

“
Demon Camp
is for fans of Michael Herr’s
Dispatches
or Hunter Thompson’s own dark journeys through America; indeed, it’s hard to describe
Demon Camp
as anything but a tour de force literary experience: exquisitely written, psychologically deft and nimble, and shocking. Jennifer Percy writes a book that is at once so singular that it speaks to despair and joy yawing over our collective horizon. Here is a new, utterly surprising world we can scarcely imagine being in, except in Percy’s hands.”

—Doug Stanton,
New York Times
–bestselling author of
Horse Soldiers

“
Demon Camp
is the most urgent, most harrowing book to yet emerge from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jennifer Percy is a brave and relentlessly powerful witness, again and again confronting us with the monsters of our own making. Written with haunting austerity, this exceptionally important book must be read not only by every voter but by every one of us yearning to be more humane.”

—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of
Battleborn

“A triumph of reporting, storytelling, and sympathy. Jennifer Percy writes as if possessed, not by her own demons but by the war-torn lives she documents. Like some pilgrim in a latter-day
Inferno
, with machine gunner Sergeant Caleb Daniels for her Virgil, she has descended into an all-American hell, eyes open, notebook in hand, and returned with this haunted and haunting fever-dream of a book.”

—Donovan Hohn, author of
Moby-Duck

“Beneath the taut, wry surface of Jen Percy’s
Demon Camp
is a deeply felt investigation that is marvelously disturbing—a pitch-perfect blend of reportage, meditation, and outright fantasy that beautifully captures the wounds of mind and heart in ruins.”

—John D’Agata, author of
The Lifespan of a Fact

“Jennifer Percy has taken a sensationalistic, tabloid-worthy subject and explored it in a remarkably clear-eyed and empathetic fashion, without a trace of condescension.
Demon Camp
is not only luminously written and exhaustively researched; it’s an important account of post-traumatic stress disorder in modern warfare.”

—Teddy Wayne, author of
The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

“With exquisite patience, a wide-open mind, and a willingness that trembles on vulnerability to immerse herself in her subject, Jennifer Percy recounts the terrible, ongoing struggles of soldiers whom the war has followed home. Writing in lucid, beautiful sentences, Percy exposes the great psychic cost of the Bush-era wars as paid by these young men, and gives us to understand that their demons are America’s demons, their stories, America’s stories.”

—Michelle Huneven, author of
Jamesland
and
Blame

“This wild journey alongside madness leads Percy to the place where myth is conceived and destroyed, our wars overseas brought home as nightmares. You will begin to wonder how much pain is dreamed and if fantasy might be the way to cure it. A unique, fascinating and always surprising book.”

—Benjamin Busch, author of
Dust to Dust

“Jennifer Percy has walked far out into the Twilight Zone and leads us into realms of horror and dread, mystery, and high weirdness. I have never read anything quite like it. Are there devils? You might come away from this book thinking it’s possible.”

—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of
The Devil’s Highway

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CONTENTS

Epigraph

A Brief History of the Disorderly Conduct of the Heart

P
ART
I

War Dreams

P
ART
II

We Kill Ourselves Because We Are Haunted

P
ART
III

How to Kill an Invisible Enemy

P
ART
IV

The War on Terror in Biblical Terms

P
ART
V

I Am the Voice in the Night

A Postscript for the Irritable Heart

Acknowledgments

About Jennifer Percy

For my family, and for Kip Jacoby

To understand original sin is to understand Adam, which is to understand that one is an individual and one is also part of the whole race.

—
KIERKEGAARD
,
The Concept of Dread

Dreams remained. For years afterwards in nightmares stark as archive footage, I was what I had been.

—
JAMES SALTER
,
Burning the Days

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DISORDERLY CONDUCT OF THE HEART

S
ergeant Caleb Daniels wanted to save all the veterans from killing themselves. A machine gunner three years out of the 160th Special Operations Regiment, 3rd Battalion, he’d tried to kill himself, four or five times, but he was interrupted each time—once by his dead buddy Kip Jacoby; once by his girlfriend Krissy, whom he met at a strip club; once on a lake by his house in his canoe when the rain stopped and he saw the moon; and once when the demon called the Black Thing came into his bedroom in Savannah and said, “I will kill you if you proceed,” and Caleb said, “No you won’t, asshole, because I’m going to do it myself.”

At first Caleb thought he was crazy because he saw dead people, but then his roommate’s new stepdad, Wombly, a member of the Lakota tribe, saw a dead kid soldier with Alice in Wonderland tattoos following Caleb around the house. It was Kip Jacoby, whom Caleb had last seen on the tarmac at Bagram Air Force Base, slipping inside the belly of an MH-47 Chinook nicknamed
Evil Empire
—tail #146—the same Chinook that would explode in a remote region of the Hindu Kush forty-five minutes later, killing all sixteen men aboard, including eight members of his unit. Wombly took Caleb to a sweat lodge down the street to teach him how to become a medicine man, worship their buffalo god, and talk to the dead soldiers who had followed him home. Caleb saw bodies appearing and disappearing in the smoke, old Indian warriors, crows and bats and wolves. At first Caleb thought he’d gained power sufficient to make the Black Thing go away, but the Black Thing didn’t go away.

Caleb met another veteran who also saw the Black Thing and knew how to fight it. So the veteran and Caleb drove to demon camp in Portal, Georgia, where the layer between heaven and earth is very thin, and Caleb sat down in a chair in a trailer and got an exorcism from a group of strangers, and he found his ruling demon wasn’t PTSD, like the doctors said, it was a six-foot, five-inch buffalo with horns—a manifestation of the war demon known as Destroyer. That’s when he realized it wasn’t for no reason he didn’t die on that Chinook, #146, the
Evil Empire
. The mission, he decided, was in America now. He knew the only way to save the vets from killing themselves was to kill the Black Thing first. He started a company, a factory in the woods that would hire a veterans-only workforce to rebuild old military vehicles—machines that would give life instead of destroying it. Then he’d use the profits from this company to counsel soldiers into not killing themselves. Some would recover with counseling, but some would not. Then he’d send these soldiers to demon camp for deliverance from the Destroyer. A modern-day exorcism of the trauma of war.

When I first met Caleb, one morning in June 2008, in an isolated parking lot beside the Allatoona Reservoir in the woods near Kennesaw, Georgia, he told me he wanted to talk about how the war had followed him home. But by lunchtime, over cheese enchiladas at the Mi Casa Mexican Restaurant, in a strip mall ten miles from the site where in 1864, 2,321 soldiers died in a single day at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he told me instead about the thing that followed him home from the war, the thing in the burning peach trees, the thing in the sandstorms and the dried riverbeds, the thing in the camel spiders that walked in the shadows of soldiers. It followed him across the Atlantic and sat beside him in the jet where he carried Kip Jacoby’s body home. It followed him to Florida where Kip’s father wanted an open casket and Caleb had to bring him to the morgue to convince him otherwise. It followed him back to Georgia and to Missouri, where he was born. Somewhere between Mi Casa and Portal, because Caleb said these things could transfer, and because these things are not limited to war, I started to wonder if it was following me.

P
ART
I

WAR DREAMS

T
he way he remembered it, the war was going to save him. There was no war yet, but there was the dream of it anyway. It was going to save him from the fields of Centralia, Missouri, a town where most kids wanted saving, knowing that beyond Centralia was a world as wide and unfilled as the wheat that spread like rolled carpet from their porches. In Centralia night came without a neighbor’s lit window and morning came without the sounds of turning tires or the echoes of children. The nearest city was twenty miles away and the wind—loud and fierce and ceaseless—made the wheat bend like men in prayer. It tore at the grain, lifting pieces into the air so that at times the fields looked like great swaths of insects.

The war was going to save him from the poverty of his mother’s wages at the Eastern Airways ticket counter. Some days she put Caleb on board and the pilots let him fly jump seat, and the landscape of his youth grew small and the horizon breathed opportunity. Nights, he dreamed of flight. Since the second grade, he wanted to be a military pilot. Somehow or another he knew he would go to war because the war was going to save him from his father, who divorced his mother when he was thirteen, leaving the house filled with traces of parents no longer in love, the halls still echoing with his mother’s screams. There were the days his father screamed at him, too, for not hitting a home run at the Little League game. He said the military wouldn’t even take Caleb. It was the war that was going to save him from the poor grades, the whiskey smells, the unexcused absences, the hallway fights, and the plum-sized bleeding eyeball his mother must have cooled gently with a frozen bag of peas. He needed saving from the days spent riding bareback in the rodeo, the thrill he felt in the ring’s quiet center, and the women who watched, wearing sequins and drinking cold Cherry Coke.

The war was going to save him from the agony of love: a girl named Allyson. The way it goes in Centralia is that you date and then you get married, and because Allyson always knew Caleb would get out, they started dating in the summer of 1997, when Caleb was sixteen, and on into harvest season, air thick with grain smells, doing the usual things: rubbing each other in the backs of cold theaters, tonguing salt-plastered lips, or just sitting in fields back to back with the wheat reigning all around them. On weekends he worked her father’s farm, rolling stiff veins of irrigation pipe, bringing water to places where there was none. Her father rarely got off the couch. One day he seemed to give up on life. That’s when Caleb made promises to Allyson, said he’d get her out of Centralia. One day they met on the back of a tractor in a bean field; Allyson told Caleb that while he’d been gone she’d started seeing a classmate named Cole Boy. So when he left for the war, he left her too.