Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (15 page)

The foliage moved and a spotlight appeared in the field. Eden’s mother, Katie, in her nightgown, arms spread like a scarecrow. Something’s going on, she said, something’s here.

Caleb says he jogged around to the front of the house and there was a thing standing in the driveway, waiting for him, right where the hump is between the driveway and the dirt road. Right on the line. “My best guess is that this thing was six-foot-five. It was dark. I couldn’t figure out what it was. It had something crazy on its head. At this point, I think it’s a real person. I start yelling at this thing, throwing rocks at it, thinking I’m going to confront it.” He walked toward it to get a better look. “This thing, it’s like a man’s body but it’s got hoofed feet and it’s got a buffalo head. He’s got this big buffalo head on him with two little horns. So it hits me: this is a demon, not a person.”

Caleb shows me how the horns curved on the buffalo by drawing them on his head with his hands.

“Three in the morning?”

He looks surprised. “It’s when all the shit happens.”

Eden steps into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around her head, freshly showered.

Caleb reaches his hand in the air above his head as if grasping for high fruit. “Are the kids both out?”

“I was just there,” Eden says.

“See if Isabel is having a bad dream.”

Eden leaves. She walks down the hallway.

“So I start taking authority over this thing,” he says, “praying against it, and I command it to leave. In the past, because of my authority, it would have been gone like this:
snap.
But it didn’t leave. This is the first time it didn’t leave. But you know, it kinda had to leave, and so it just turns around and shrugs its shoulders like this.” Caleb turns his back to me, and then slowly gives me longing eyes over his left shoulder. “It kind of had an attitude to it, you know? It walked a little ways down the road, ten paces or so, then stopped and turned around and gave me a look like this: What’re you going to do now? So I chased its little ass down the road. You know that shack next to the trailer? It made a left and went through the wall. That’s when I stopped. That’s when the dogs started going ape shit. They were howling. Tim has never heard them howl.

Caleb takes a hissing slurp of Coke and rubs damp hands on his jeans. “It’s the first time since combat that I’ve felt there was a real threat.”

“How do you make sense of it?” I ask.

“Remember that thing that came into my room and said,
I will kill you if you proceed
? That was him.” He puts the Coke down and grips the sink, hangs his head, and stares into the drain.

“It makes me feel better that it was so big. I can’t fight something that big. It’s been upping its game each time. But I’m okay with it. I like the idea of fighting a big, terrible enemy.”

•  •  •

I call a clinical neuropsychologist at Fort Bragg whose job is to evaluate the psychological health of soldiers entering the Special Forces. When I tell her about the demons, she asks that I not use her name.

“If he comes into the military, fine,” she tells me, “and leaves messed up, that’s completely understandable. That’s completely normal. That’s a normal reaction to an abnormal event.” The military, she reminds me, is an organization that trains people how to kill other people. “If you arrive with problems, then you’re going to end up a lot worse than when you came in. These people, their resources are capped out when they see their friends blown up.”

I’d read about a video game therapy for soldiers with PTSD called Virtual Iraq, where scientists have reduced flashbacks by up to 80 percent in some veterans. The program is a modified version of the video game Full Spectrum Warrior, but instead of watching a screen, patients put on a pair of goggles and a helmet to find themselves strolling through desert towns, dodging bullets, and shooting Iraqi soldiers. Therapists can alter the chaos of the experience by cranking up stressors like grenades and bomb blasts or adding scents such as sweat and gun smoke. Virtual Iraq has had a higher success rate than prolonged exposure therapy—previously considered the most effective treatment for PTSD—in which patients talk through their trauma in excessive detail. Virtual Iraq allows veterans to experience trauma the way they might relive an experience during a flashback. They are exposed to it again and again until the mind is able to assimilate and process the event. I wonder if Caleb has invented his own Virtual Iraq, his own traumatic repetition. Every time he sees a demon, he fights it. And like the controlled redemption of Virtual Iraq, patients cannot die or suffer wounds; Caleb always wins.

I mention Virtual Iraq to the neuropsychologist and ask if similar programs are being used to train soldiers to kill. I want to know if there’s a relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and the ways in which soldiers are trained to go to war. I imagine soldiers carrying these simulated environments with them onto the battlefield, overlaying Sadr City with the ruined corners of the National Training Center’s fake Iraqi city in Fort Irwin, now a fake Afghan city, where troops train in Hollywood-style counterinsurgency reenactments full of Arabic-speaking Iraqi-Americans, staged beheadings, goat meat.

The neuropsychologist says yes, scenario-based training is “let’s pretend.” There’s noise coming from a house over here. The smell of burning tires. Simulated villages. Simulated riot situations. You might be in a course where you have your target and you have the civilians next to the target and you might miss and shoot the civilians. In modern warfare, technology means humans can pretend they’re not killing humans. It’s easier to kill someone when they look different than you. Words used instead of kill: knock, waste, take, grease, hose, zap, probe. Words used instead of person: Kraut, Jap, Reb, Yank, Dink, Slant, Slope, Skinny, Gook, Haji.

“But I’ve never met a soldier who thinks war is a game. I’ve never heard them say: we’re going out on a raid and this is going to be fun. That’s the kind of antics I see when there’s no killing going on.”

The amygdala is the fear organ—the fight-or-flight sensor in your brain.

Sometimes the amygdala enlarges, the hippocampus shrinks. Trauma can cause inflammation, atrophy, neuron death, and shrinkage. Parts of the brain can wither, rearrange, and die. The blast of an improvised explosive device can cause blood to swell, stretch, and break vessels. The biochemical reactions that precede trauma leave cells dead in their wake. The brain, unlike the gray matter we imagine it to be, can bleed.

The brain evolved from the inside out. The deepest part of the brain is similar to a reptilian brain. It’s responsible for breath, heartbeat, basic survival. The middle layer, the limbic brain, evolved in the first mammals and has the ability to store memory. The outermost layer of the brain, the neocortex, controls the two lower brains and is responsible for morals, inhibition, imagination, abstract thought. Under severe stress, the center of the brain takes over. This part of the brain does not know how to form words.

“It’s like this,” the neuropsychologist says, “there was a bump in the road when Tom and Jack and Bill got blown up, so now I’m completely paranoid every time I see a bump in the road. I can’t disassociate the memory from the emotion. It’s replayed over and over again. Then you attach other scenarios to that danger zone. If you see someone that reminds you of Jack: emotion, old memory. People start attaching all sorts of scenarios to the trauma: any time someone gets angry with me, that means I remember that time Jack got blown up. Essentially it’s an inability of a person to disrupt those memories. The brain is wired to help that person survive. PTSD is an uncontrollable memory wiring.”

She says morphine helps. “If you inject someone with morphine after a traumatic event they won’t remember the screaming of other people.”

“What about a choking sensation?”

“That’s probably more of a panic attack.”

“What about his relief in deliverance?”

“It could be connected to the cult thing because it’s a pretend scene, or pretend scenario, and because these people are really trying to bring out the dead.”

With PTSD, traumatic memories as old as twenty-five years have been known to resurface with the strength of the original experience.

“A flashback is an amygdala memory,” she says. “Don’t go down that path because that’s where the tiger lives.”

•  •  •

He was marked for death. His whole life he believed something or someone has been trying to kill him. Seventeen years old and already three car crashes that killed everybody but him. When he was working as a grain truck driver doing 3 mph on an old country road, one tire dipped in a rut and sixteen tons of grain shifted. The truck flipped, rolled into a ravine, and onto the interstate. His head cracked on the glass. Consciousness returned slowly. Gasoline burned into small cuts on his face and lips. Worried he’d burn alive, he made his way out the passenger door, feet hitched to the steering wheel, rising from the cockpit into bright light. Fume-burned eyes saw the blur of the eighteen-wheeler, hauling ass.

The stories lived in his bloodstream, in the deepest cellular levels of his body, and he lived by them, as if by verse.

Again, another year, another highway, the rain coming down. An eerie feeling in his bones. The flashing lights of a downed truck up ahead and an eighteen-wheeler on his left. Boxed in. Raining so hard he couldn’t see. Couldn’t brake. A cold, swelling pressure grew in his spine. He felt fingers on his back. Someone was tapping him, trying to get him to turn around. He figured it was his heart. Then he remembered the taps he used to do with Kip in the
Evil Empire
when everything was too blurry, too dark, the machine noise too loud. A set of white teeth glistening there in the dark.
Kip, buddy, is that you?

•  •  •

“Do you think the war has changed the way you remember your past?” I ask. “Or even, being here in Portal?” I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.

“That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says, “but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

“What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

“Let’s say you did. What do you think you might have?”

I don’t say anything. He continues for me.

“You’re scared of the dark. What else? You identify the demon by pattern. Childhood. That’s when these things first move in. Demons only inhabit the places you give them permission to inhabit. A dark experience you don’t want to talk about. Could be something small. Would you be willing to share your trauma with me?”

“I don’t have trauma like your trauma.”

“Your trauma is just as important as my trauma. It’s not more or less. If I cut off your arm, that’s trauma. If I cut off your leg, that’s trauma. It still hurts. In my book it might seem minute, but to you it’s huge. It will be the thing that persuades you. Your weakness. For me it’s failure and guilt. My father always said, ‘Caleb, you’re a fuckup. You’re nothing but a goddamn failure.’ And, you know what? I always believed him. It was a pattern. In every situation I was a failure and I felt terrible guilt. From letting my guys down in the chopper because I wasn’t there to do anything about it, all the way back to when I had the chance to hit the home run and I let the old man down. For three weeks after deliverance, all I heard was, you’re a failure. It was a test, but I got through it and it didn’t bother me anymore.”

“So it’s just a change in your psychology?”

“Hmmmmpf,” he says. “No.”

“So there is psychology and then there are the demons. Can you distinguish them?”

“You can go through deliverance and call it whatever you want. In the classes I teach to soldiers, I don’t call it demons. I call it quantum physics.”

“Why?”

“Because demons freak people out.”

The body of a deer shows itself in the field, grazing with a flickering tail, a bowed head. In the yard, at the edge of the light, two chickens and a rooster claw in the dirt, muddy from the cool places they slept in the day.

“You know, I prayed that no one would ever have to see what I saw in Afghanistan. I said, God, I’ll go through as many years of this as you want me to go through if you promise me my brother and my son never go to war.” He wipes his face with his sleeve. “Now my brother is a stone-faced killer and my son is trying to get FedEx’d to Iraq. His chin rises as if by an invisible string and he speaks his words toward heaven. “I’m leaving it up to you, God, that some big demon isn’t going to come and crush my factory.”

There’s a kid in the field, walking around on all fours. The child pauses to look at me and then continue on, its bald head burning in the sun.

“Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

“White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

He clears his throat. “Listen. I can’t tell you to go through deliverance. No one can. You have to make that choice on your own. But I have an invitation for you.”

•  •  •

The possession experience has deep roots in killing. Prehistoric hunters sought to be possessed by the predators of the animals they wished to kill. In the
Iliad,
Greek warriors became superior killers when the gods entered them. The Cúchulainn warrior of Irish mythology and the shock troops of the ancient Persian Empire performed possession rituals before battle. Berserkers, or ancient Norse warriors, undefeatable in combat, entered battle in a possessed state. They began with shivering, chattering teeth, chills down the spine, faces swelling with rage. They roared and howled to imitate the bear. Their frenzy grew. They bit shields. The edges of swords. They entered war with bloodlust, hacking and tearing to pieces everything they saw.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former army Ranger, defines the first stage of killing as indecision, and the second stage—the stage of the killing itself—as enthusiasm. The origin of the word
possession
comes from the Greek word for enthusiasm,
eufousiasmz
, meaning “inspired by or possessed by God.”