Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (7 page)

He told her to put the gun down.

The only way he could stop her from shooting herself, he decided, was to put a gun to his own head.

Caleb ran outside. Krissy chased after him. He got in his pickup truck, shut the door, and locked her out. It smelled like rain. He opened the glove compartment and pulled out his gun, put it in his mouth. She stood at the window, looking inside with blue eyes. “I can’t live with you this way.” They both had guns to their heads. Birds moved around in the trees. Finally Krissy lowered her gun so Caleb wouldn’t shoot.

Everywhere he went, he saw them, their burned bodies, watching him.

These were the days after the war.

P
ART
II

WE KILL OURSELVES BECAUSE WE ARE HAUNTED

I
met Sergeant Caleb Daniels in a parking lot off Lake Allatoona in Georgia three years after Kip Jacoby’s death.

The sky was desolate warm and white. A dock frothed with roped-up boats and water licked the sand, leaving a rim of yellow, glistening foam. It was quiet for summer, no growling motors or tires breaking over gravel, just the sound of a slow breeze. A bird wetted its beak in the stomach of a dead squirrel.

When I arrived Caleb wasn’t there—nobody was. He showed up thirty minutes late, driving a burgundy Chevrolet with rust-eaten sides, wearing a button-up shirt, one-hundred-fifty-dollar jeans, and cowboy boots with a two-inch lift. His stubble sparkled like bits of sand. Six-foot-one. Sideburns thick as duct tape. Everything about him was pale but for his hair, which was black and oiled so that its blackness shined. Nowhere longer than a fingernail. He spit chew on the pavement and it steamed.

Over the phone Caleb told me he planned to buy abandoned factories across Georgia and hire a veterans-only workforce to rebuild old combat vehicles for humanitarian and civilian use; turning the waste products of war into something that would give life instead of destroy it. The veterans would have work if they needed work. They’d have a community if they needed a community. The profits would feed into suicide counseling programs for soldiers, which, I later found out, was a Christian exorcism camp. Caleb would run it. There was a small news clip about him in the
Statesboro Herald
.

The factory he wanted to buy stood alone in the center of a field in southeast Georgia. It was a drab metal thing made grand by the space around it. He’d been building things all his life, unfinished things, trying to make them whole. Caleb relished it, the lives he’d save, the days breaking back, hauling trucks, orchestrating the rise of steel beams. Already he carried notebooks and blueprints; drove a truck with a six-cylinder engine. At night, in his dreams, he saw the vehicles he wanted to build and he gave them names: Brute, Savage, Aggressor. He befriended a broker in Kennesaw, a large bald man named Buck, and convinced Buck to help him write a business proposal for the company. They determined a start-up cost of two and a half million dollars.

It was 2008, and the Department of Veterans Affairs had been caught withholding statistics on veteran suicide from the public. When CBS News began an investigation into the rates, the head of mental health at the VA said, “The research is ongoing. There is no epidemic in suicide in the VA, but suicide is a major problem.” Then he sent an e-mail to his media adviser with the subject line “Not for the CBS News Interview Request.” He wrote that there were a thousand suicide attempts per month within the VA. He wrote
Shh!

Around eighteen veterans were killing themselves every day.

•  •  •

Private Jonathan Schulze, who lost fifty-one members of his unit in Ramadi and Fallujah in 2004, returned home and told his parents he wanted to die. He was number 26 on the waiting list to be admitted to the VA in St. Cloud, Minnesota, when the police found him hanging by an electrical cord in his parent’s basement.

Army specialist Timothy Israel, who had been awarded a Purple Heart after being wounded by a roadside bomb, hung himself with the drawstring of his pants in a jail cell in Elwood, Indiana.

Russell Dwyer, a former platoon sergeant and cavalry scout instructor at Fort Knox, shot his wife in the head in their front yard in Colorado Springs, and then he lay down beside her and shot himself. She was facedown, he chose faceup.

Lieutenant Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, who served in a company responsible for transporting Iraqi prisoners of war, hanged himself with a garden hose in the cellar of his family’s home.

Private First Class Stephen S. Sherwood, a veteran of the casualty-heavy battle for Ramadi, shot his wife five times in the head and neck with a pistol, then took a shotgun to his own head.

Sergeant Lisa Morales said, in an interview in the
New York Times
, that she reenlisted because she wanted to go back to Iraq so that the Iraqis would shoot her for what she’d done.

Private Walter Rollo Smith, a Marine Corps reservist who’d marched to Baghdad in the first invasion returned home to his twin duplex in Tooele, Utah, made love to the mother of his children, washed her in the bath, pushed her head underwater to rinse out the soap, and held it there gently until she died. When I called Private Smith’s attorney to see if I could visit Smith in jail, the attorney said I could not. “Everyone already knows he’s suffering from PTSD.”

Caleb was eager to tell his story, but most were not. The first person I called was the mother of Joshua Omvig, whose son is considered the first suicide of the Iraq war. She had a home in Grundy Center, Iowa, half an hour from where I lived, in a spread of quiet cornfields. Specialist Joshua Omvig of the 339th MP Company shot himself in December 2005, three days before Christmas. What happened was he handed his mother a suicide note that she thought was a Christmas list. She set it aside. She’d look at it later. There were dishes to be done. She returned to the sink and started washing. Joshua was in his bedroom, changing into his uniform, the one he wore on an eleven-month deployment in Iraq. When he was fully dressed, Joshua walked past his mother and headed outside. The suicide note was still unread. Still on the counter. Joshua climbed into the family truck, locked all the doors, pulled out the 9mm he’d stashed in the glove compartment, and brought it to his head. Joshua’s mother was reading the note. She ran outside, arms flailing, and stopped beside the passenger window. He angled the gun just slightly so he wouldn’t kill his mother. He was twenty-three years old. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I’ve been dead ever since I left Iraq.”

Two years after Joshua’s suicide I called his mother. She didn’t want to talk to me. She had this quiz she gave all the newspaper guys before she let them ask her questions. I told her I wasn’t a newspaper guy. She said it didn’t matter. What’s post-traumatic stress? What’s happening to the brain? She wanted medical terms, and scientific reasoning, and I gave her the answers I knew. She said to go read the
DSM,
the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
and get back to her. The
DSM
is the official handbook of mental illness and disorder in the United States. In terms of treatment, nothing’s a disorder unless the
DSM
says it’s a disorder. I had in fact read the
DSM
’s classification criteria for post-traumatic stress and what I knew was that the
DSM
revises its definition of war-related trauma in every edition, and has been revising it since its first installment. It wasn’t until 1980, in
DSM-III
, that the term
post-traumatic stress disorder
appeared as an operational diagnosis. To be diagnosed with PTSD, one must have experienced a traumatic event, and
DSM-III
defines a traumatic event as one outside the range of usual human experience. The DSM does not define usual human experience.

I said I was very sorry for what happened to her son. The mother paused and then asked whether I’d fallen all the way to the bottom of hell and stayed for a while and then come back to earth again. She said that unless you’ve been to the bottom of hell and come back you couldn’t understand young Joshua’s blood splattering on the windshield anyway.

When I called a woman named April Somdahl, the half sister of twenty-six-year-old Sergeant Brian Rand, a marine who believed he was being followed night after night by the ghost of the Iraqi man he’d killed, she told me a story about the day Brian was in Iraq and she was in North Carolina and they were talking on Yahoo! Chat and Brian said he needed April’s advice. He said there was a guy out in the sand, and he’d been out there for hours and he wouldn’t come inside.

“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.”