“What stopped you?”
“I would never kill myself as a believer. I would just pray not to wake up in the morning.”
• • •
All day Pam sits quietly in the lawn watching the field. Every day there’s obsessive talk of demons. No one seems to mind that I’m there and so I stay ten days, eleven days, twelve. Katie warns never to ask for anything from her. “You know where the cabinets are. Help yourself to milk. Help yourself to bread.”
On a night out for Mexican food at a place called Sombrero’s I’m the only one not wearing cowboy boots. When I mention this to Eden she says she knows of a place. She says she likes the ones that have colors—blue, snakeskin, and white.
Caleb doesn’t drink alcohol. Caleb turns a little red in the face and stuffs chew in his mouth, repeating the word horchata. “Horchata, have you ever had horchata?” In the military they gave him speech therapy to erase his southern accent because no one could understand him over the intercom, but it’s reclaiming him. His stomach hurts and he picks up a slice of lemon and eats the whole thing.
He crosses his legs and talks about skirts. He hates skirts. “You know what I think about those Frenchies?” he says. “I think they’re a bunch of skirts.”
“I’ve got a joke,” Max says. “So Sigmund Freud is eating dinner with his wife and she says, ‘Honey, please pass the salt,’ and he says, ‘I hate you, you fucking stupid bitch.’ ”
Eden dips her finger in salt and licks. “I don’t get it.”
“Yeah, what’re you talking about?” Caleb says.
“Never mind,” Max says.
“By the way,” Caleb says to me. “My ex-girlfriend Krissy called. She never calls. She hasn’t called since we broke up three years ago.” Caleb thinks it’s a sign. He wants me to meet her. “Only thing is: she’s totally insane.” He reminds me about the gun she pulled on him.
Krissy doesn’t want to talk to me, but days later she calls Caleb back and says she changed her mind. She wants to meet me at a diner in a town called Pooler, halfway between Portal and Savannah. The next afternoon I drive over alone. Krissy arrives straight from her job at the YMCA, wearing Lycra pants and a fleece sweater.
“I don’t really want to talk to you,” she says. “I don’t want to think about those days.” It’s the first time she’s talked about Caleb—about #146—with anyone, for years. “But I don’t want anyone to ever go through what I had to go through with Caleb.”
A thin-haired waitress, about eighty years old, hands us ketchup-stained plastic menus with photographs of food on their insides. She wipes her hands on a tight blue button-up dress. It matches a tiny paper hat sitting atop her hair like a bluebird in its nest.
“So if you can help others understand what was happening to Caleb, what was going on in his brain, I’ll tell you whatever you want.” Krissy puts her hands together. She stays this way, gathering thoughts.
She says Caleb started waking up in the middle of the night and he’d tell her he was watching the crash. That Kip would come in the room and they would talk about the crash together. “Usually, it would be around one forty-six in the morning. Sometimes I’d wake up and Caleb wasn’t in the bed. I would find him in another part of the house curled in the fetal position, rocking back and forth. Sometimes I’d wake up and hear him crying. What is it? I’d ask. Something always with Kip. Caleb believed that Kip was really there—that it wasn’t just something he dreamed. I didn’t see anything. But I knew he really believed it. I thought it was just PTSD.”
Krissy balls up a napkin in her fist and presses it to her lips. “He’d have terrors,” she says. “All of a sudden the light would switch.” The napkin goes deeper into her mouth. “He’d literally just be sitting there, looking right at me, but it was like he didn’t see me. He looked right through me. I’d try to talk to him but he wouldn’t hear me. Then all of a sudden he’d be back. He’d shake his head and say, What just happened? Where am I?”
When Caleb and Krissy went to restaurants, he’d sit in the corner. He couldn’t have his back to anyone. He’d say, If somebody walks in here to shoot up the place, I’ll see it. I’ll know what to do. He had a blueprint in his mind: Okay, if somebody comes in here to do something, I am going to flip this table. I’m going to grab this bottle here and be ready. Sometimes there would be nobody in the place.
On a weekend trip to Atlanta, Caleb and Krissy found themselves lost on a dark road. No one around. No idea how they’d gotten there. Caleb was driving. He had that faraway look. Krissy knew right away that it was Kip. She didn’t realize until they merged back onto the highway, but she’d taken exit one forty-six. “Next thing we know the time is one forty-six in the morning.”
I ask about the gun and Krissy says it was a birthday gift from Caleb. She says she never turned it on herself. “There were times he’d say he was going to kill himself. That’s when I knew he was out of my control. I couldn’t mention anything or it would go quickly from a small issue like doing the dishes to: I’m going to kill myself.” She says this while slipping a purse strap over her arm. “I’m sorry, I don’t really want to talk about this anymore.” She walks away and then turns around. “You know, at the time, I was fighting thoughts of suicide myself. I’d never been like that before I met Caleb.”
• • •
Kristina, Kip’s old girlfriend, and Valarie, the woman who makes dinner for her dead husband, live in Savannah and I spend the day and a night there to talk to them. Valarie, when we meet, hardly speaks. When she does it seems painful, a voice from elsewhere that isn’t really her own, like she hadn’t said anything for weeks. Her hair is cut to her ears and parted very straight in the center. Instead of the thin spread of crow’s-feet on the ends of her eyes, she has dimples, dents that are curved and deep.
Valarie worked for the National Guard and a few months later she was in Iraq. She met her husband, Chris, on the front lines. Valarie tells me stories about how they used to share sniper duty on rooftops. Caleb said they wouldn’t take a shit without being ten feet from each other.
On leave at Hunter Army Airfield, Chris’s friend called and asked if Chris could pick up a wedding dress for her in Mobile, Alabama. Chris didn’t want to waste time driving, so he and two buddies used a military chopper to get the dress. On the way back, the chopper collided with an electrical tower. The men were found in contorted positions on the ground, the wedding dress caught like a web between stalks of wheat.
Many continue on like Valarie, quietly setting plates for loved ones. Their lives slip past statistics.
Kristina asks to meet at a bar called Kevin Barry’s Irish Pub at ten in the morning on a Wednesday, and it’s already full of women drinking. A girl in the back of the bar wearing a wifebeater, and another with purple nails, and one sitting with her arms to her side looking at a glass of rum.
On the second floor, in a high-ceiled room that’s dark but full of amber light collecting in glasses, we sit at a table near a photograph of Kip, alongside photographs of the other seven Night Stalkers who died on Chinook 146 and the others who died in Afghanistan and those who died in Iraq and anyone who died in any wars with Americans in it. Where there are no photos, they’re paintings, some gruesome—bodies ripped apart, men giving water to screaming men, a nameless coffin, an eagle crying. There’s a section of the wall reserved for the victims of 9/11.
Kristina takes her shirt off. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m not going to show you my boobs.” Underneath she has on a pink tank top with sparkle-written words. She lifts her elbow to her ear and below her armpit there’s a chopper tattoo. It says EVIL EMPIRE in thick black letters. “That was the Chinook,” she says. “The one he died on.”
She knows a lot of military wives talking about their husbands as if they were invincible. “But the war is real, people really are dying. Then there’s a lot of couples getting in fights over the phone. Yelling at each other. Hanging up. But you can’t call back. As the wife, you can’t call back.�
� She and Kip had rules: No hanging up on each other. No hanging up without saying “I love you.”
Kristina and her new husband almost divorced last year. He’s an Army Ranger, and between deployments he wouldn’t talk to her, he’d only play video games. He told her all the soldiers have to fill out a psych evaluation on the plane. On a scale of one to ten, how do you feel about this? Do you feel suicidal? Everyone fills out I’m fine, she says, because they just want to get home.
Kristina digs a manila folder out of her purse and sets it on the table. “I call this the Death Folder.”
The Death Folder is full of photographs of Kip, letters from Kip, newspaper clippings about the crash, pages torn from magazines like USA Today and U.S. News & World Report. She hands me a photo of Kip, the last one they took of each other before he died. In the photo, they’re lying on their stomachs in bed, shoulders pressed together, bending their heads just slightly to be sure to fit in the frame.
“It’s military policy. He belongs to the government. So regardless of whether he was burned or shot or whatever, he’s in a wooden box and that’s that.” Kristina points to the photograph of Kip on the wall. “I am sure he was badly burned and probably not recognizable, but at the same time I would have felt better seeing the body. Really seeing that he’s not coming back.” She takes the photograph, slips it back into the stack of clippings. “In my mind,” she says, “there’s always this weird lingering feeling that maybe he’s not dead.”
Kip Jacoby died the same day George W. Bush gave a thirty-minute speech at Fort Bragg about the War on Terror. “Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying, and the suffering is real.” A year before, Tami Silicio, a cargo worker, was fired for photographing flag-draped caskets filling a plane in Kuwait. Bush said the 1991 ban on photographing coffins and war casualties was a law that protected the privacy and dignity of the families. As of 2010, Americans may photograph flag-draped coffins but they may not photograph the bodies of dead American soldiers.
Some psychologists think it’s better to see the body because the fantasy would be worse. It helps the victim recover. It’s evidence that the dead are dead.
There are thousands of American graveyards in Europe, full of sprinklers and bone-white monuments, and miles of green rolling hills and pressed flags. We are here to symbolize America’s commitment to good, they boast. There are no American graveyards in Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq is the first American war in which all the bodies have been repatriated. American soldiers who died in the Korean War were buried in Korean soil near the battlefields where they died. But then later we decided to unearth them, bring them home. Vietnam is the same.
Bodies of dead Iraqis clot the Tigris while acres of U.S. military vehicles hit by IED explosions fill nameless desert graveyards. Like bodies, they are blown apart, burned, shattered, cracked, or seemingly disassembled into constituent parts. It was not men who died, they seem to say, but machines.
Until families complained, bodies flew home on commercial airliners: cold cargo stacked on Nike bags, a casket on a belt loader, a US Airways flight from Denver to Vegas. Now bodies are transported on military planes with escorts. At the airport, an honor guard moves the casket instead of a forklift.
And finally a question from the military for the parents of children who come back in pieces: If more were discovered and subsequently identified, would the mother or the father like those missing pieces returned?
For eight years, unwanted parts were incinerated and dumped in a landfill at the Dover Air Base mortuary. Gari-Lynn Smith, whose husband died in Iraq, said she didn’t want the military putting her husband’s body in the trash. Now mortuary affairs puts unwanted body parts in the ocean.
• • •
The rain from last night has ceased and pooled yellow along the driveway’s ditched sides. The burn pile steams, always alive with smoke. The trailer seeps a green light. Caleb’s lupine eyes watch from the framed darkness of the trailer doorway. He’s been pacing the yard. I see his tracks, the ripped-up grass, the purple roots reaching upward. Now he’s waiting in the doorway; arms gripping the frame. Insects go to the lantern to die, burning and perfuming the air. Moths float dustlike or pound themselves mad for light. The horizon is a long green glow dissolving to night.
Caleb walks about the kitchen looking like a bear just out of hibernation, slow to remember the world. His eyes turn to the field and then back to me.
“What did Krissy say?”
“She said you had PTSD.”
“Krissy saw Kip just as well as I did.”
“She didn’t say.”
“Did you hear about Pam? She was driving the other day and she saw this big huge ape thing cross the road. She described it: six-foot-five with a silver back. It ran past, kinda hunkered over. It looked like Bigfoot but with horns. She recognized immediately that it was a demon. I asked her, well, what do you think it is? She said: angel of poverty.”
I ask what he thinks I would see.
“With you, I don’t know. There are a lot of people who see stuff who aren’t Christians. The only difference is how you interpret it. If you aren’t Christian then it’s very scary to see them. Maybe it would appear in your dreams or you’d sense it, or it’d appear right in front of you like an animal running by.”
He crosses his arms and shakes his head. “Did Tim tell you what happened?” Caleb says. “I can’t believe you missed it.”
He starts to tell me about a flashback, or a nightmare, in which a giant buffalo threatened to attack the trailer, and as he tells it I imagine he exists in the world the way trees do, quietly through wars and upheaval and love, something no longer part of time but burdened with its secrets.
At ten minutes to three in the morning, Caleb says, he woke with a stiff back and wide eyes, looking to the left and to the right. His children were screaming, and they never scream. He gathered them in his arms and brought them to Eden. “Something is here,” he said, dropping a child on each side of his wife. The porch door slammed and he ran to it. He looked out the window. The field was dark, almost as if a curtain had been pulled over it. The green trailer light bathed tall stalks of grass. Solid like a wall.
The foliage moved and a spotlight appeared in the field. Eden’s mother, Katie, in her nightgown, arms spread like a scarecrow. Something’s going on, she said, something’s here.
Caleb says he jogged around to the front of the house and there was a thing standing in the driveway, waiting for him, right where the hump is between the driveway and the dirt road. Right on the line. “My best guess is that this thing was six-foot-five. It was dark. I couldn’t figure out what it was. It had something crazy on its head. At this point, I think it’s a real person. I start yelling at this thing, throwing rocks at it, thinking I’m going to confront it.” He walked toward it to get a better look. “This thing, it’s like a man’s body but it’s got hoofed feet and it’s got a buffalo head. He’s got this big buffalo head on him with two little horns. So it hits me: this is a demon, not a person.”
Caleb shows me how the horns curved on the buffalo by drawing them on his head with his hands.
“Three in the morning?”
He looks surprised. “It’s when all the shit happens.”
Eden steps into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around her head, freshly showered.
Caleb reaches his hand in the air above his head as if grasping for high fruit. “Are the kids both out?”
“I was just there,” Eden says.
“See if Isabel is having a bad dream.”
Eden leaves. She walks down the hallway.
“So I start taking authority over this thing,” he says, “praying against it, and I command it to leave. In the past, because of my authority, it would have been gone like this: snap. But it didn’t leave. This is the first time it didn’t leave. But you know, it kinda had to leave, and so it just turns around and shrugs its shoulders like this.” Caleb turns his back to m
e, and then slowly gives me longing eyes over his left shoulder. “It kind of had an attitude to it, you know? It walked a little ways down the road, ten paces or so, then stopped and turned around and gave me a look like this: What’re you going to do now? So I chased its little ass down the road. You know that shack next to the trailer? It made a left and went through the wall. That’s when I stopped. That’s when the dogs started going ape shit. They were howling. Tim has never heard them howl.
Caleb takes a hissing slurp of Coke and rubs damp hands on his jeans. “It’s the first time since combat that I’ve felt there was a real threat.”
“How do you make sense of it?” I ask.
“Remember that thing that came into my room and said, I will kill you if you proceed? That was him.” He puts the Coke down and grips the sink, hangs his head, and stares into the drain.
“It makes me feel better that it was so big. I can’t fight something that big. It’s been upping its game each time. But I’m okay with it. I like the idea of fighting a big, terrible enemy.”
• • •
I call a clinical neuropsychologist at Fort Bragg whose job is to evaluate the psychological health of soldiers entering the Special Forces. When I tell her about the demons, she asks that I not use her name.
“If he comes into the military, fine,” she tells me, “and leaves messed up, that’s completely understandable. That’s completely normal. That’s a normal reaction to an abnormal event.” The military, she reminds me, is an organization that trains people how to kill other people. “If you arrive with problems, then you’re going to end up a lot worse than when you came in. These people, their resources are capped out when they see their friends blown up.”
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