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

the wrong part.
    The men headed back to the Chinook, and on their way, an object, small and bright like the moon, appeared over the Evil Empire . Caleb didn’t know what it was or from where it had come. But it came closer. Then he knew. A huge fireball. The flames held something dark, like a pit. A person in the flames. A charred Afghan on a motorcycle, grinning. It hit the ground and the Afghan disappeared into ashes.
    The crew returned to the base. They’d taken some heavy fire on the way. Blood was all over the floor of the aircraft. The tie-down rings were covered in severed fingers. Bullets took them clean off.
    A few maintenance guys were working their way up the flight path, hauling a big fire hose to spray in the turbine engines and clean all the sand out. When that was done, they would come on the floor of the aircraft and use pressure washers to clean out the dust and dirt. Caleb stepped off and started yelling at them. He looked like hell. He was covered in blood. He was flailing his arms and screaming. “You’re not going to come up here,” he said. The workers told Caleb it was their job to clean the aircraft. So Caleb snatched the pressure washer and stayed there the rest of the day in the heat and cleaned the blood out of the chopper.
    •  •  •
    Caleb’s mother collected articles about Iraq and Afghanistan from USA Today , the New York Times , Vanity Fair . She put them in a folder. On a visit home, she showed him the articles. She said, “Is this frivolous? Are people frivolously dying?”
    Caleb explained things to his mother. He explained that the bombed Afghan wedding wasn’t a wedding at all, and that the press had only thought it was a wedding because that’s what the local Afghans had told the press. The locals weren’t shooting celebratory fire with Kalashnikovs, he explained, a tradition at Afghan weddings, but were shooting antiaircraft missiles, and that after it was all over the Afghans came and took all the guns away, leaving the women and the children dead and unarmed. “That’s all the press had to go by,” he said. “If you ask Special Forces what happened, they aren’t telling you shit, and by no means would they fly over someone and say, hey, let’s kill all these people. And, by the way, do you really think that out of three aircraft of highly trained Special Forces guys, who know they have to write up a report later explaining why they killed everybody, would all three randomly fire onto a village of people and kill all of their women and children?”
    Caleb’s mother tucked the articles back into the folder. She sat down with her thin limbs and long dark hair. Caleb said, “Guess what, Mom. It was my guys. We did it.”
    •  •  •
    Caleb deployed twice to Iraq and eight times to Afghanistan. In the army, his nickname was Dapper Dan, because no matter what the conditions, after combat, after his helmet had been on his head for days in the Middle Eastern heat, his hair was always immaculate, brushed and molded finely with his favorite gel.
    A lot of the war bored him. But sometimes death turned the world into something rare and magnificent. It bonded the men, and pretty soon Caleb felt closer to his unit than he did his wife. They played together as children. When the Evil Empire broke down in the desert, which it often did, they tossed a purple Nerf football to kill time. They threw smoke grenades in a Porta-John. They sang with dumbbells in Delta Forces gyms, “I fucking need you now tonight! I fucking need you now forever!” In Germany, they were drinking at a club and Kip gave the DJ a quiet neck choke—enough to knock him out, keep him down, then drag him behind speakers and tie him with a cord. He switched the techno to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.” Master Sergeant Tre Ponder’s wife sent the crew a box of marshmallow Peeps. Tre hated marshmallow Peeps. It was a joke between them, and when the Peeps arrived to the desert, the men