Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism by Jennifer Percy Page B

carrying a Quick Reaction Force in the Wardak province of Afghanistan, was shot down. Thirty-eight men on board died, surpassing the death toll of Operation Red Wings.
    Sometimes Brady walks down the street and a stranger’s face will shift and morph and become the face of Major Stephen Reich.
    •  •  •
    After the crash, Caleb was still dating Krissy, and she found him sometimes shaking on the floor, watching the crash all over again in his dreams: the choking gray-black smoke swirling with the voices of Kip and Al Gore. Kip, buddy, can you get out? Caleb was always looking for Kip. I’m burning, man. I’m fucking burning .
    Caleb asked Kip: why am I still alive when everybody else is dead? Kip led Caleb down a dark stairwell. He wrote Scripture on the walls in cursive, You were slain, and have redeemed us to God by your blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation; and have made us to our God kings and priests.
    Krissy had enough of the dreams, the visions. The bodies ripped apart. Dreams where there was no more blood because it’s all in the dirt next to you. Dying in the worst ways. The Evil Empire in their bedroom at night, perfuming the air.
    “You see Kip too, don’t you?” Caleb asked. Krissy shook her head.
    Caleb had his eyes turned sightlessly toward the light. Krissy woke him. “Am I so horrible you have to sleep in the garage?” she said.
    She got up and dug under the clothes where their engagement ring still sat untouched, and found a gun. It was a little white gun. A birthday present from Caleb. She walked downstairs. The afternoon sun poured through the unclean windows. He said she put the gun to her head.
    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