Demon Camp Read online

  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

  PART I

  War Dreams

  PART II

  We Kill Ourselves Because We Are Haunted

  PART III

  How to Kill an Invisible Enemy

  PART IV

  The War on Terror in Biblical Terms

  PART 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

  Sergeant 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.

  PART I

  WAR DREAMS

  The 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.

  Middle of sophomore year, sixteen years old, and he dropped out of Centralia High School. He’d already received emancipation from his parents. The GED wasn’t hard. He looked for work. The only place hiring was in the nearby city of Columbia, at the college, the hospital, and the AB Chance Company, where men worked with gloved hands inside a metal building for long hours forming ship anchors from soft iron, and at a company that had no name, just a man, Scott, who fixed steel buildings abandoned across the flat wilderness of Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois. He paid eighteen dollars an hour and Caleb waited for him in a parking lot at Home Depot while clouds of gnats rose from the plots of switchgrass that broke the pavement.

  The men he joined were not good men. They were coke addicts and meth addicts and they ate steak for breakfast, working eighteen-hour shifts, seven days a week. Every other week they had Sunday off. At night all the men shared a hotel room, three men to a bed, five to a floor.

  Caleb worked through harvest season into winter. From the road, the buildings looked like deep red slashes in the sky. They leaned. He liked climbing to the top of the buildings, where the voices below seemed too weak to rise, and everywhere there was the mingling of heat and cold—the backs of tractors collecting snowfall, livestock pooling amid rising steam.

  December came, and the farmers retreated to their homes and the livestock walked defeated to their barns to feed on old grain.

  The manner of the work was most likely illegal. They’d make bets: rebuild from the ground up in ten days, all or nothing. The guys were always yelling at each other. Guys falling off the tops of buildings because they were tiptoeing along inch-wide steel beams with nothing to tie on to. They used an old forklift with a broken emergency brake to hoist themselves forty feet in the air. One of the guys got the idea to put an old piece of fence on the fork, flat like a platform, and they huddled atop it like birds to work.

  One day Caleb was up on the forklift, welding a roof ledge, when the driver went into a cocaine rage and abandoned the vehicle. It rolled backward. Caleb jumped at the last minute, grabbed onto the roof ledge. Behind him, the forklift slammed into an eighteen-wheeler box truck and erupted into flames. The workers gathered around the fire, forgetting Caleb, who dangled by his fingertips until blisters grew soft between the metal and his skin. The screws rattled beneath his grip. Twenty minutes passed before they noticed. They picked him up off the roof with another forklift and lowered him to the ground. Caleb asked for a check and told them he was on his way to something else.

  • • •

  Snow fell, covered the highway. He passed the brokenness of grain silos, billboards for adult stores, McDonald’s signs rising over the fields like the sun itself.

  Ten miles out, somewhere near Right City, Missouri, the road going straight through farm country, a blizzard began, and up ahead, on the icy roads, two cars collided. Caleb came to a halt. A man in a white Ford Taurus had hit another car, and the whole front of his truck was mangled.

  One driver dead. The other in bad shape. An old man with blood and glass all over his face. The door was crushed-in, so Caleb couldn’t pull it open to remove him. But because the dome light was sparking and there was fuel everywhere, Caleb grabbed the old man and tried to drag him through the window. His ribs were so badly broken that they crumbled and snapped against Caleb’s hand like a tangle of rotten branches. He was shivering, bleeding in deep pools. At that moment another car pulled up and a man in an army uniform got out. Together they yanked off the driver’s side door and pulled the old man from the vehicle. A state trooper arrived and though Caleb asked for help, he wouldn’t give it. Caleb, infuriated, snatched the hat from the trooper’s head and put it on the old man. They stood over him. He handed Caleb a photograph. Tell my wife I love her, the old man said. Then he died.

  The EMTs had to push Caleb off the body. The old man disappeared with the ambulance lights, leaving Caleb kneeling on the road in snow smeared bright as cherries.

  He turned around and looked at the soldier.

  “I need to get out of here,” he said. “Is there anything you can do for me?”

  The soldier nodded. He was a recruiter for the U.S. Army and he took Caleb to a d
iner down the highway. They drank coffee. Hours later, they drove to the recruitment office.

  Caleb went home. He didn’t tell his mother about his day. He didn’t call Allyson. Instead he ate a quiet dinner, and he went to bed, and in the middle of the night he filled his backpack with a toothbrush and a change of clothes and he snuck out his bedroom window into the Missouri cold. He drove straight through Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia and all the way to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where a sign hanging on the wall read: VICTORY STARTS HERE.

  One of thousands and nervous as a bird. They ate shoulder to shoulder. There were fences between him and the world now, long roads, wires, and phone calls and messages still to be read. What he did mattered now. It mattered to the group. Drill Sergeant Barganier—a real mean guy, six-foot-five, skinny limbs—scrambled his brain into something new. The day Caleb was promoted to platoon leader over his class, he felt the addiction of hard work. A thing once unrewarded, now turned into gifts.

  When Caleb finally told his mother what he’d done, the phone was pressed to his ear, greased with the hands of other men. He waited for her to be proud, but she only begged Caleb to call Allyson because Allyson had been calling every night, sometimes at three or four in the morning, wondering where he’d gone. “She’s driving me crazy trying to find out where you’ve been.” Caleb’s mother hated Allyson. Allyson accused her of lying about not knowing the whos and whats of her son.

  In time, he did call Allyson and she said she wanted to be with him, and because he was lonely and away from home, he said he wanted to be with her too. Every day Caleb snuck her these little one-minute phone calls and they’d talk, exchanging apologies and promises.

  Caleb’s mother worried he wasn’t going to graduate basic training. Caleb’s father straight out said he’d fail. The words crowded him. Caleb considered quitting because he didn’t want to lose Allyson. Away from her now, he believed in her. He went to Sergeant Barganier and told him he was having some problems at home. “I don’t think I am cracked up to this.”