Free Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism by Jennifer Percy

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.”
    “I thought you weren’t religious.”
    “Spiritual,” he said. “There’s a difference.” Caleb sucked his lips under his teeth. “I hate religion. I think religious people are worse than people who hate God. Religious means, ‘I read my Bible and I go to church every Sunday and I do this and I do that and the good Lord does this.’ You see. They believe in God but only because their daddy told them to believe.”
    He started to move around in his seat as if there were a weasel in his pants.
    “What’s happening,” I said.
    “Hang on,” he said. Caleb stuck his hand out the window. “I’m getting something.” His eyeballs rolled and he sat straight-backed like an antenna picking up waves from somewhere far away.
    “What is it? What’s going on?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Wasn’t real clear.” He twitched like a fly-bothered horse. “Sometimes I’ll be walking down the street and I’ll have to stop. A text message from God kinda thing.”
    “Intuition,” I said.
    “Call it whatever you want.”
    I wrote sees future in my notebook.
    I asked if he knew any other veterans that were seeing their dead buddies. “My friend Valarie,” he said. “She makes dinner for her dead husband every night.” He whistled and tapped the steering wheel. “But you might have some trouble getting her to talk about it. A lot of guys have a hard time talking about it. They see PTSD, like you say, as when you go back and you experience those memories. I’d say for the majority of guys, they can’t figure out what it is.” He scratched his sideburns and cracked his neck by taking both hands off the wheel.
    We drove on until the land turned from vine-gnarled to barren, and towns bloomed with a stark suddenness into neon strip malls and restaurants with names like Chin Chin China, and a Hummer dealership where a purple ape balloon waved its hand below an American flag so heavy it could hardly lift itself.
    “Think about a girl that gets raped,” he said. “It’s the day-to-day things that start it back up for the raped girl. Like someone holding her wrist, and that’s when the emotions rise up. But see out there, it’s so big and so traumatic that you don’t even have time to deal with it, you can’t process it, your brain can’t process it.” He spread his arms wide and his knuckles clacked the windshield. “The world is just kinda shit for about twenty minutes and then it’s over. It’s mostly just reacting and then you think about it years later when you’re home.”
    He kept glancing at me with large, almond-shaped eyes that blinked heavily as if always in a state of waking. They were canine blue and rimmed with black lashes. “In the beginning,” he said, “I refused to believe I had a handicap—that it was PTSD. I didn’t want it to be PTSD. PTSD means you’re an outcast. It means you’re the crazy one. I probably had PTSD, but there’s always the influence of the demonic.”
    Then I knew that God was just a word he used to talk about other things.
    “It’s something that a lot of people aren’t going to want to hear about. Some people aren’t going to believe it at all. But I think it will change how they understand PTSD.”
    •  •  •
    He took me to Mi Casa, a Mexican restaurant across from a strip mall outside Atlanta, and we ate cheese enchiladas and drank Coke from plastic cups brought to us by a pretty girl with a bee-stung face. We sat at a booth away from the door.
    Caleb told me a story about his ex-wife, Allyson. “While I was deployed,” he said, “the dog got pregnant and miscarried. The miscarried puppies were in a pile on the floor and Allyson had to call me in Iraq to ask