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

what to do. I told her to put the dead dogs in the trash, but she wouldn’t do it. When I got home, the dead dogs were still in the house.”
    He took his fork to his plate. He covered his mouth to swallow.
    “That’s the kind of shit I had to come home to,” he said.
    Not the first time I wondered whether Caleb was remembering what the war made him see.
    When I asked Caleb about his missions, he formed his Copenhagen snuff into a fine ball and told me he didn’t want to talk about Special Forces or ragheads or Saddam. He didn’t want to talk about his buddy who got his skull blown off and how he had to duct-tape it back on, “brains and all.” Or about Fluffy, that cat he peeled and ate dead off the side of the road, “still soft and cat-looking.” He didn’t want to talk about mistaking water balloons for grenades or those women with AKs. He wanted to talk about the day his entire unit died, how he thought he heard their falling, burning voices from a desk in an empty room at headquarters. He wanted to talk about how his ex-wife called him a murderer and then made him take out the trash. He wanted to talk about his friend Valarie who made dinner for her dead husband every night. He wanted to talk about how all of it was still there, every day, the blood in his mouth, the screaming, his dead buddies. He wanted to talk about after the war.
    “When I got home three years ago,” Caleb said, “I’d have this thing come visit me in the middle of the night. You could hear it coming down the hallway.” He stood up in the booth, hunched his shoulders, and started walking apishly in place. Boom, he said, slapping the table. Boom. A few customers turned their heads.
    “This thing,” he told me, “a big dark figure, opened my door. It was so tall it had to lean down to get its head through. In this really deep voice it said, I will kill you if you proceed. It sounded almost like it wanted an answer back from me, and so I started laughing at it and I said, ‘You’ve got to be face-fucking me.’ ”
    The customer across from us got up to leave. Caleb finished his Coke and spit his chew into the empty cup.
    “But it came back every night. One time I’m sitting in my room and it walks in, shuts the door, and comes after me. It starts to choke me. I’m physically choking. My dead buddy Kip comes in and wrestles it off me. But Kip isn’t stronger than this thing either so it chokes him too. Kip was taking the punishment for me. I’m watching this and I’m freaking out.”
    “Punishment for what?” I asked.
    “For killing,” he said, “and for living.”
    The air conditioner groaned and strings of dust swirled in the rushed, grated air. Caleb turned sideways, leaned his back against the wall, and rested his legs on the booth.
    I asked if he’d ever gone to the VA for help and he said he waited in line for two days and came home chewing painkillers.
    “A hundred and forty vets are dead every week because of shit like this. The VA doesn’t do anything. I’m pushing the verge of crazy to save these guys.” He put a napkin to his mouth, and his hands folded into its curves. The white looked clean against his skin. “I was one of the best-trained soldiers in the army. They spent millions training me how to go to war, but they never taught me how to come home.”
    I dug an article out of my purse that I’d been carrying around about the twenty-six-year-old soldier named Sergeant Brian Rand who shot himself after being followed night after night by the ghost of the Iraqi man he’d killed. I’d talked to his sister April on the phone and intended to drive to North Carolina for an interview after I spoke to Caleb.
    Brian had been stationed at a Fallujah checkpoint with his buddy Chris. The guys were bored. Not much had happened that day until a white van started coming up the road toward them, picking up speed. Brian turned to Chris and asked him what he thought they should do. Chris replied, “Shoot him, I