Daniels Caleb - Demon camp: a soldiers exorcism

Demon Camp is the amazing story of one mans journey to war and back. Its a tale so extraordinary that at times it seems conjured from a dream; as it unfolds its not just Caleb Daniels that comes into comes into focus, but America, too. Jennifer Percy has orchestrated a great narrative about redemption, loss, and hope.

Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Forever War

This is the book Ive been waiting for. Lyrical, haunting, surreal, as fiercely brave as it is fearsome, Jennifer Percys Demon Camp is both damning and redemptive, a shot straight to the hellish heart of war.

Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men

Demon Camp is for fans of Michael Herrs Dispatches or Hunter Thompsons own dark journeys through America; indeed, its hard to describe Demon Camp as anything but a tour de force literary experience: exquisitely written, psychologically deft and nimble, and shocking. Jennifer Percy writes a book that is at once so singular that it speaks to despair and joy yawing over our collective horizon. Here is a new, utterly surprising world we can scarcely imagine being in, except in Percys hands.

Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of Horse Soldiers

Demon Camp is the most urgent, most harrowing book to yet emerge from our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jennifer Percy is a brave and relentlessly powerful witness, again and again confronting us with the monsters of our own making. Written with haunting austerity, this exceptionally important book must be read not only by every voter but by every one of us yearning to be more humane.

Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn

A triumph of reporting, storytelling, and sympathy. Jennifer Percy writes as if possessed, not by her own demons but by the war-torn lives she documents. Like some pilgrim in a latter-day Inferno , with machine gunner Sergeant Caleb Daniels for her Virgil, she has descended into an all-American hell, eyes open, notebook in hand, and returned with this haunted and haunting fever-dream of a book.

Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck

Beneath the taut, wry surface of Jen Percys Demon Camp is a deeply felt investigation that is marvelously disturbinga pitch-perfect blend of reportage, meditation, and outright fantasy that beautifully captures the wounds of mind and heart in ruins.

John DAgata, author of The Lifespan of a Fact

Jennifer Percy has taken a sensationalistic, tabloid-worthy subject and explored it in a remarkably clear-eyed and empathetic fashion, without a trace of condescension. Demon Camp is not only luminously written and exhaustively researched; its an important account of post-traumatic stress disorder in modern warfare.

Teddy Wayne, author of The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

With exquisite patience, a wide-open mind, and a willingness that trembles on vulnerability to immerse herself in her subject, Jennifer Percy recounts the terrible, ongoing struggles of soldiers whom the war has followed home. Writing in lucid, beautiful sentences, Percy exposes the great psychic cost of the Bush-era wars as paid by these young men, and gives us to understand that their demons are Americas demons, their stories, Americas stories.

Michelle Huneven, author of Jamesland and Blame

This wild journey alongside madness leads Percy to the place where myth is conceived and destroyed, our wars overseas brought home as nightmares. You will begin to wonder how much pain is dreamed and if fantasy might be the way to cure it. A unique, fascinating and always surprising book.

Benjamin Busch, author of Dust to Dust

Jennifer Percy has walked far out into the Twilight Zone and leads us into realms of horror and dread, mystery, and high weirdness. I have never read anything quite like it. Are there devils? You might come away from this book thinking its possible.

Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devils Highway

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Copyright 2014 by Jennifer Percy

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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2014

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ISBN 978-1-4516-6198-9

ISBN 978-1-4516-6208-5 (ebook)

Certain names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

For my family, and for Kip Jacoby

To understand original sin is to understand Adam, which is to understand that one is an individual and one is also part of the whole race.

KIERKEGAARD , The Concept of Dread

Dreams remained. For years afterwards in nightmares stark as archive footage, I was what I had been.

JAMES SALTER , Burning the Days

S ergeant Caleb Daniels wanted to save all the veterans from killing themselves. A machine gunner three years out of the 160th Special Operations Regiment, 3rd Battalion, hed tried to kill himself, four or five times, but he was interrupted each timeonce by his dead buddy Kip Jacoby; once by his girlfriend Krissy, whom he met at a strip club; once on a lake by his house in his canoe when the rain stopped and he saw the moon; and once when the demon called the Black Thing came into his bedroom in Savannah and said, I will kill you if you proceed, and Caleb said, No you wont, asshole, because Im going to do it myself.

At first Caleb thought he was crazy because he saw dead people, but then his roommates new stepdad, Wombly, a member of the Lakota tribe, saw a dead kid soldier with Alice in Wonderland tattoos following Caleb around the house. It was Kip Jacoby, whom Caleb had last seen on the tarmac at Bagram Air Force Base, slipping inside the belly of an MH-47 Chinook nicknamed Evil Empire tail #146the same Chinook that would explode in a remote region of the Hindu Kush forty-five minutes later, killing all sixteen men aboard, including eight members of his unit. Wombly took Caleb to a sweat lodge down the street to teach him how to become a medicine man, worship their buffalo god, and talk to the dead soldiers who had followed him home. Caleb saw bodies appearing and disappearing in the smoke, old Indian warriors, crows and bats and wolves. At first Caleb thought hed gained power sufficient to make the Black Thing go away, but the Black Thing didnt go away.

Caleb met another veteran who also saw the Black Thing and knew how to fight it. So the veteran and Caleb drove to demon camp in Portal, Georgia, where the layer between heaven and earth is very thin, and Caleb sat down in a chair in a trailer and got an exorcism from a group of strangers, and he found his ruling demon wasnt PTSD, like the doctors said, it was a six-foot, five-inch buffalo with hornsa manifestation of the war demon known as Destroyer. Thats when he realized it wasnt for no reason he didnt die on that Chinook, #146, the Evil Empire . The mission, he decided, was in America now. He knew the only way to save the vets from killing themselves was to kill the Black Thing first. He started a company, a factory in the woods that would hire a veterans-only workforce to rebuild old military vehiclesmachines that would give life instead of destroying it. Then hed use the profits from this company to counsel soldiers into not killing themselves. Some would recover with counseling, but some would not. Then hed send these soldiers to demon camp for deliverance from the Destroyer. A modern-day exorcism of the trauma of war.