Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism Read Online Free PDF Page A

he would reside and be easily shot, perhaps at close range with great pauses so that he would have time to know the face of his killer. The men didn’t speak. They knew they were going to die. The Taliban would either kill him or torture him, but either way, Caleb thought, he didn’t want them knowing about Isabel. Since it bothered Caleb to be away from his daughter. He carried a printout photograph of Isabel’s smiling face in the pocket of his uniform. Caleb pulled out the picture and looked at his daughter. Then he started eating the picture. He chewed on it. He swallowed it. Eating the picture made him brave. No one, he thought, was going to tell Isabel that her daddy lay down and died in a chopper. That he just gave up. He might die, but if it meant he could live to make it home to see his daughter, then he would be the one biting the esophagus out of a Taliban’s throat.
    Caleb ate the picture from the bottom up so he could still see Isabel’s eyes.
    They all stepped out of the chopper and walked across the hot earth and back to base and they never once saw the enemy in their trucks, staring with gun-dark eyes.
    •  •  •
    Gruesome news about the incident returned to the wives. They’d been gathering in the neighborhood, in each other’s homes, talking about what their men were doing. They heard about killings, and perhaps they talked, and the talking made them imagine the killings were done not with guns, or knives, or objects that divided man from enemy—a function of metal and physics—but with hands and with teeth.
    And so when Caleb returned, he returned home to a wife who feared him. He stepped into the house and Isabel was in her arms, a boneless shape. Maybe Allyson thought his hands would do something awful. She was white and larger than before, and she wore flannel to hide herself. Caleb opened his arms to receive them and she called him a murderer. Outside, through the open window, he heard the sounds of other fathers mowing lawns, their children playing in the cut grass.
    He slept through the day and into the night and in the morning he found a diaper on the bathroom floor, and he was convinced it was the same diaper he saw before he deployed, only now it was ripped up by the dog, spread into pieces, yellow and used. He found his uniform in the trash can.
    They slept in different rooms. Allyson didn’t trust him around Isabel anymore. Caleb explained that he’d just been through the most traumatic experience of his life. Allyson said he didn’t understand what she had to go through being at home by herself.
    “I had to take out the trash,” she said. “I had to take care of the baby. I had to be alone.”
    He wondered if she knew he was happy when he left.
    •  •  •
    He could see faces but he never knew anyone he killed. Most of the time he shot at lights until they stopped flashing. Rarely were there battles. Usually an ammo dump. He held the button down until he couldn’t move anymore. Gross motor skills.
    Six months later, he was at an Afghan compound. He and his crew of Night Stalkers hovered in the warm night air, waiting for an AC-130 gunship to blow up the guard towers so they could drop off the Special Forces soldiers they sheltered inside the Chinook. The signal to land came through, and Caleb and his buddy Shamus Goare stepped off the rear ramp clearing the way for the soldiers and for the four-wheelers. Everyone called Shamus Goare, “Al Gore.” He was thick-cheeked and brown-eyed and he looked too sweet for his job. His life was Chinook #146 and its duties. He was the flight engineer; sometimes working as a gunner, sometimes helping the Special Forces teams down the ropes. On this particular night Caleb and Al Gore stepped outside the chopper’s rotor disk and bombs started going off all around them. With their night vision goggles the rounds of explosions turned the world an impossible white. The compound was gone and the guard towers remained. They blew up