Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (26 page)

“What brings you to Missouri?” the receptionist asks. Caleb stands spiderlike by the brochure rack. It’s an absurd question at the moment. My troubled laugh begins. First as a shiver. Then it spreads to Caleb. The receptionist watches. “Missouri” is all I manage to say, laughing. “Missouri.” The credit card hovers in midswipe. “All right,” she says. “You don’t have to tell.”

I say good night to Caleb. He slips back into the Lexus, merges into traffic on Interstate 70.

Rooms leak the sounds of television, people chatting, beds creaking. A long arm of light drapes over the bed in my room. I bolt the door and stand near the television. I turn all the lights on and the shadows deepen. I know I won’t be able to sleep. Caleb’s words are churning. I’m looking behind me, under the bed, in the closet. I stay in the bathroom. Red veins bloom in my eyes like coral growths. I run the water. My mouth foams with toothpaste.

I’m annoyed with Caleb, and I write him a message to let him know. I tell him that now I feel like I’m being followed. I want him to know my fear, to see what he’s done. My phone rings. It vibrates diagonally across the carpet like a mouse. It’s him. I pick it up and before I can say hello, he says, “Is it human or beast?”

“You don’t need to call,” I tell him.

“I’m coming,” he says.

“Please, don’t. Aren’t you tired?”

“I’m coming,” he says.

I step out of the bathroom and look at the door. I still have the phone pressed to my ear. I hear the sound of a car engine. The sound of tires. “It’s too late,” he says. “I’ve already turned around.” He stays on the line, noting passing objects: ramp, exit, parking lot, entrance, floor, door, door, door. Then,
I’m here.

The eyehole darkens.

I let him in. The metal bolt catches quick as a bite. I release it. He steps inside swinging his lowered head to the left and to the right, like a bull releasing himself from unwanted reins. “Where is it?”

I point at the clock. It’s one forty-six in the morning.

“Fancy that,” he says, and he takes a bow at the clock’s hard truth.

“You planned that.”

“No way.”

Caleb strides across the carpet. “What’s the first thing you do when the enemy enters? You make yourself at home. Take your shoes off. Stay a while.”

The room has two beds. He sits on one and I on the other. He twirls a loose string on the comforter. A long mirror hangs on the wall between us.

“I’m here. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” His grin twists like smoke. Take your jacket off. Lean back. Relax.”

Suddenly he leaps into the air and falls vertically onto the bed, landing with a gentle, fluttering bounce. He poses the way a woman might in want of portrait: elbow bent, palm flat to hoist a heavy, smiling head. Legs are stacked and curved. Toes, pointed.

“What was your most recent nightmare?” he asks.

“A bat. But wingless.”

“Good,” he says. “It’s lost power.”

I laugh and he follows. “Okay, you have authority over this thing. You can make it go away.

“Say, ‘Father.’ ”

“Father.”

“Say, ‘I command all things unclean or foul.’ ”

“I command all things unclean or foul.”

“Say, ‘to leave.’ ”

“To leave.”

“Say, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.’ ”

“In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.”

“ ‘Son of the Living God.’ ”

“Son of the Living God.”

I start scratching my neck where the bat touched me in my dream.

“Interesting,” he says, and he jumps to the floor. “You know how to make a dog obedient? You get it on the floor, press your hand against its neck.” Caleb is on the floor demonstrating dog submission, pressing one palm flat on the ground. “That’s what the Destroyer was doing.” Lamplight thickens on his forehead. “Let me pray,” he says.

He wraps his hand around my neck, and his fingers curl like a collar over my throat. It’s time for the killing. But instead he presses the top of my head into his hands, and I just sort of hang there, suspended, like something growing out of him. An act of saving. I wait, playing dead, while he speaks to God.

“Ah, it’s in your ear,” he says, and I fall back like those people on television struck by faith.

Now he’s in the desk chair, tilted back, feet on the bed.

He shoots me a relaxed look like he wants to smoke a cigar, watch football, shoot the shit. Then he pushes his foot against the TV and sends his chair into a quiet spin.

“You’ve been dating someone, haven’t you?”

I tell him I have.

“You know what I think? I think he was a conduit for evil. The demon worked through him. It’s the whole sex before marriage thing. Now you and him are soul ties. They’re hard to break. Took me forever to break my soul tie with Krissy.” He wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “That’s how the demon got power over you.”

He mulls over knitted fingers.

“But if you think about it, it’s almost funny. It’s just a stupid little bat.”

“Just a stupid little bat,” I say.

A plane comes into view and blinks on its diagonal journey to the ground.

A rough laugh overtakes him, and then quiets to something faint and grave. Neither of us is sure anymore what’s funny and what isn’t.

“Let me show you what the bat did to you.” And he stands up and comes toward me and uses his arms like wings to pump himself across the room. I keep my limbs close to my body. “Turn around,” he says. And he does what the bat did. He wraps. My head gets pressed sideways into his chest, making it hard to breathe, and I just sort of stay there, stiff in his arms. “I’m not going to let go,” he says. “Join my army.” I feel his breath beating into a single spot on my cheek. “Is this what it was like when the bat came?” Caleb holds me there, humming and rocking, pretending and believing. “This bat,” he says. “He had bundled you up. He was swaying and holding you. He had you all wrapped up tight in his wings. And you know what else? He was singing to you. The bat sang to you. A really sad song. He was singing you a lullaby. It was the most beautiful song in the world. Are you listening to this lullaby? I wonder.”

When the Sirens sang to Odysseus they sang about the truth of how the men suffered at the war in Troy.

“I won’t let you go,” he says. “I won’t let you go.”

I wiggle away. I’m watching him now like the enemy.

“It’s the saddest song in the world. Listen.” He leans into me and I have to push against him to support his weight. And there it is, his heart,
beating, beating, beating
—like a song.

He crawls like an insect onto the bed. He looks at me.

Lul-la-by,
he says,
lul-la-by.

“It’s the saddest song in the world. Listen.”

Kip Jacoby. Sergeant Kip Jacoby. Sergeant Kip A. Jacoby. He lets the words hang in the quiet. He makes me feel the death.

Lullaby.
The song that bridges waking and sleep.

A POSTSCRIPT FOR THE IRRITABLE HEART

I
n March 1969 a Vietnam veteran walked into the Boston VA outpatient clinic and told the psychiatrist on duty that he was convinced his buddies were trying to kill him. He was part of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, and his platoon was under orders to enter the village of My Lai in Northern Vietnam with their guns firing. The village, their commander said, was full of Vietcong. But when the soldiers arrived and the initial smoke cleared, they found elderly men, women, and babies whom they raped, tortured, and executed. Survivors lived by hiding beneath corpses. The veteran didn’t shoot. He threw his gun to the side and watched. The other soldiers knew this about him, and when the killings were over, the soldiers in his platoon turned to him and said that if he ever uttered a word about what happened in My Lai, they’d kill him too. One of the soldiers said they might kill him anyway just in case.

The veteran told the story to social worker Sarah Haley, and it was her first day on the job. Haley accepted the veteran’s story at face value. She had no illusions about war. The fact that war is sometimes women getting gang-raped, their bodies mutilated, infants shot point-blank in their mother’s arms, bodies moaning in piles. Her father was an assassin with the Office of Strategic Services in North Africa during World War II. She grew up on such stories.

But when the rest of the VA staff met to discuss the case, they had already determined a diagnosis. They said the veteran was a paranoid schizophrenic. In other words, they didn’t believe him. No one knew about My Lai—the newspaper reports weren’t out.

“Most American psychiatrists,” said Arthur Blank, a psychiatrist who worked with Sarah Haley at the Boston clinic, “based their encounters with Vietnam veterans on the official view that no such thing as PTSD existed.”

Judith Herman, author of
Trauma and Recovery,
writes that people who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a “highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy.” Recognizing the truth leads to recovery, but if secrecy prevails, then the story of the traumatic event won’t exist as a verbal narrative, she argues, but as a symptom. It’s Herman’s theory that despite a great deal of literature on the subject, there’s still an ongoing debate about whether PTSD is a real phenomenon. Because to study trauma, Herman says, is to encounter the human capacity for evil.

It’s no wonder that PTSD has had more than eighty different names in the last hundred years: neurasthenia, hysteria, war hysteria, irritable heart, soldier’s heart, disorderly conduct of the heart, combat exhaustion, combat fatigue, neurocirculatory asthenia, shell shock, war neurosis, fright neurosis, trauma neurosis, combat stress reaction, stress response syndrome, acute stress disorder, concentration camp syndrome, Vietnam syndrome, war sailor syndrome. French physicians of the Napoleonic Wars simply called it
nostalgia.

It’s a condition constantly refusing definition. It’s as if the illness itself were enacting its own symptoms.

When the
DSM-II
was published in 1968, there was no specific listing for the trauma produced by war. So in 1969, when American troop involvement escalated in Vietnam, there was still no term available to psychiatrists. They were required to use the language of civilian disease.

Historically hysteria was considered a distinctly female problem. Elaine Showalter writes in
The Female Malady
about such gender expectations of soldiers during World War I: “When all signs of physical fear were judged as weakness and where alternative to combat—pacifism, conscientious objection, desertion, even suicide—were viewed as unmanly, men were silenced and immobilized and forced, like women, to express their conflicts through the body.”

Hippocrates might be to blame, insisting that an errant womb triggered madness—a womb loose in the body, floating ghostlike among other organs, disrupting nerves, seeking the brain. In the dialogues of Timaeus, Plato wrote that the womb delighted in sweet smells but fled from fetid smells, ordaining the womb with the qualities of a conscious being, an “animal within an animal.” In early Christianity, evil spirits were thought to ascend from beneath the female, move up her genitals and reside in her womb, filling her with madness. Male soldiers, wombless, had no such concern.

But eight thousand men emerged from the trenches of World War I suffering hysteric symptoms. Doctors used the term
shell shock
and maintained that hysterical symptoms of men were not psychological in origin but a result of physical damage to the brain and central nervous system. Military doctors believed the physical impact of an exploding shell caused damage to the brain and nervous system. No one wanted to imagine a world in which male soldiers were vulnerable to hysteria. Finally it became clear that many hysteric soldiers had never been in the proximity of a shell explosion. These soldiers were considered moral invalids. Military doctors then decided on two categories:
shell shock commotion
and
shell shock emotion
. Those who suffered from shell shock emotion received no honors or care.

The denial continued. In fact, the history of PTSD could easily be characterized by this word—our denial, specifically, of the reality of war and its effect on the human psyche. In 1944 Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall blamed what we now call PTSD on America’s educational system. Army psychiatrist William Menninger blamed PTSD on American society, which was at “the immature stage of development, characterized by, ‘I want what I want when I want it, and the hell with the rest of the world.’ ” Philip Wylie, in his 1942 book
Generation of Vipers,
blamed PTSD on “moms.” He called PTSD
momism,
or “the problem of domineering mothers nurturing weak and immature sons.” At the back of the book, Wylie included a quiz: “Are You a Mom?”

War, Showalter believes, is the only time in history when men have occupied a central position in the history of madness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book features men and women who have been through traumatic experiences. I am grateful to these individuals for sharing their stories. I’ve changed certain names and biographical details.

I’d like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts for giving me the time and financial means to write this book. Thank you also to the Iowa Arts Council and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. Thank you to all the wonderful people at Scribner who believed in this book. My deepest thanks to my brilliant, tireless editor, Paul Whitlatch, who made this book better for his insight and talent. Thank you, Alexis Gargagliano, for your warmth and exuberance and for believing in this book from the beginning. My amazing agent, PJ Mark, and his team at Janklow & Nesbit.

I’m so grateful to have had the support of so many friends. Thank you especially to Zaina Arafat, Dini Parayitam, Tom Quach, Van Choojitarom, Nina Feng, Benjamin Shattuck, Daniel Cesca, David Busis, Joseph Tiefenthaler, Liz Weiss, Emilie Trice, Mike Scalise, Ossian Foley, Micah Stack, Dylan Nice, Rachel Yoder, Amy Butcher, Danny Khalastchi, Tommy Wisdom, Kristen Radtke, Benjamin Nugent, Leslie Jamison, Jennifer Kim, Anita Wickramasinghe, Casey Walker, Karen Thompson Walker, Ngwah-Mbo Nana Nkweti, Sidhartha Rao, Tim Denevi, Cutter Wood, and Andre Perry. And thank you to Mallika Rao for being one of the first to encourage me to write. I’d like to thank Benjamin Busch, Doug Stanton, and David Morris for help with fact-checking.