Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism

by Jennifer Percy

  I’d read about a video game therapy for soldiers with PTSD called Virtual Iraq, where scientists have reduced flashbacks by up to 80 percent in some veterans. The program is a modified version of the video game Full Spectrum Warrior, but instead of watching a screen, patients put on a pair of goggles and a helmet to find themselves strolling through desert towns, dodging bullets, and shooting Iraqi soldiers. Therapists can alter the chaos of the experience by cranking up stressors like grenades and bomb blasts or adding scents such as sweat and gun smoke. Virtual Iraq has had a higher success rate than prolonged exposure therapy—previously considered the most effective treatment for PTSD—in which patients talk through their trauma in excessive detail. Virtual Iraq allows veterans to experience trauma the way they might relive an experience during a flashback. They are exposed to it again and again until the mind is able to assimilate and process the event. I wonder if Caleb has invented his own Virtual Iraq, his own traumatic repetition. Every time he sees a demon, he fights it. And like the controlled redemption of Virtual Iraq, patients cannot die or suffer wounds; Caleb always wins.

  I mention Virtual Iraq to the neuropsychologist and ask if similar programs are being used to train soldiers to kill. I want to know if there’s a relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder and the ways in which soldiers are trained to go to war. I imagine soldiers carrying these simulated environments with them onto the battlefield, overlaying Sadr City with the ruined corners of the National Training Center’s fake Iraqi city in Fort Irwin, now a fake Afghan city, where troops train in Hollywood-style counterinsurgency reenactments full of Arabic-speaking Iraqi-Americans, staged beheadings, goat meat.

  The neuropsychologist says yes, scenario-based training is “let’s pretend.” There’s noise coming from a house over here. The smell of burning tires. Simulated villages. Simulated riot situations. You might be in a course where you have your target and you have the civilians next to the target and you might miss and shoot the civilians. In modern warfare, technology means humans can pretend they’re not killing humans. It’s easier to kill someone when they look different than you. Words used instead of kill: knock, waste, take, grease, hose, zap, probe. Words used instead of person: Kraut, Jap, Reb, Yank, Dink, Slant, Slope, Skinny, Gook, Haji.

  “But I’ve never met a soldier who thinks war is a game. I’ve never heard them say: we’re going out on a raid and this is going to be fun. That’s the kind of antics I see when there’s no killing going on.”

  The amygdala is the fear organ—the fight-or-flight sensor in your brain.

  Sometimes the amygdala enlarges, the hippocampus shrinks. Trauma can cause inflammation, atrophy, neuron death, and shrinkage. Parts of the brain can wither, rearrange, and die. The blast of an improvised explosive device can cause blood to swell, stretch, and break vessels. The biochemical reactions that precede trauma leave cells dead in their wake. The brain, unlike the gray matter we imagine it to be, can bleed.

  The brain evolved from the inside out. The deepest part of the brain is similar to a reptilian brain. It’s responsible for breath, heartbeat, basic survival. The middle layer, the limbic brain, evolved in the first mammals and has the ability to store memory. The outermost layer of the brain, the neocortex, controls the two lower brains and is responsible for morals, inhibition, imagination, abstract thought. Under severe stress, the center of the brain takes over. This part of the brain does not know how to form words.

  “It’s like this,” the neuropsychologist says, “there was a bump in the road when Tom and Jack and Bill got blown up, so now I’m completely paranoid every time I see a bump in the road. I can’t disassociate the memory from the emotion. It’s replayed over and over again. Then you attach other scenarios to that danger zone. If you see someone that reminds you of Jack: emotion, old memory. People start attaching all sorts of scenarios to the trauma: any time someone gets angry with me, that means I remember that time Jack got blown up. Essentially it’s an inability of a person to disrupt those memories. The brain is wired to help that person survive. PTSD is an uncontrollable memory wiring.”

  She says morphine helps. “If you inject someone with morphine after a traumatic event they won’t remember the screaming of other people.”

  “What about a choking sensation?”

  “That’s probably more of a panic attack.”

  “What about his relief in deliverance?”

  “It could be connected to the cult thing because it’s a pretend scene, or pretend scenario, and because these people are really trying to bring out the dead.”

  With PTSD, traumatic memories as old as twenty-five years have been known to resurface with the strength of the original experience.

  “A flashback is an amygdala memory,” she says. “Don’t go down that path because that’s where the tiger lives.”

  • • •

  He was marked for death. His whole life he believed something or someone has been trying to kill him. Seventeen years old and already three car crashes that killed everybody but him. When he was working as a grain truck driver doing 3 mph on an old country road, one tire dipped in a rut and sixteen tons of grain shifted. The truck flipped, rolled into a ravine, and onto the interstate. His head cracked on the glass. Consciousness returned slowly. Gasoline burned into small cuts on his face and lips. Worried he’d burn alive, he made his way out the passenger door, feet hitched to the steering wheel, rising from the cockpit into bright light. Fume-burned eyes saw the blur of the eighteen-wheeler, hauling ass.

  The stories lived in his bloodstream, in the deepest cellular levels of his body, and he lived by them, as if by verse.

  Again, another year, another highway, the rain coming down. An eerie feeling in his bones. The flashing lights of a downed truck up ahead and an eighteen-wheeler on his left. Boxed in. Raining so hard he couldn’t see. Couldn’t brake. A cold, swelling pressure grew in his spine. He felt fingers on his back. Someone was tapping him, trying to get him to turn around. He figured it was his heart. Then he remembered the taps he used to do with Kip in the Evil Empire when everything was too blurry, too dark, the machine noise too loud. A set of white teeth glistening there in the dark. Kip, buddy, is that you?

  • • •

  “Do you think the war has changed the way you remember your past?” I ask. “Or even, being here in Portal?” I tell him gently how sometimes when people convert to new religions they project their faith backward, using religion to explain difficult situations.

  “That’s all very interesting,” Caleb says, “but I have no doubt that this thing has been after me my whole life. I know you think this all sounds crazy, and don’t get me wrong, so do I.”

  He crosses his arms and presses his lips together like a beak.

  “What exactly would be the point of me going through deliverance?” I ask. He keeps telling me to consider it.

  “Let’s say you did. What do you think you might have?”

  I don’t say anything. He continues for me.

  “You’re scared of the dark. What else? You identify the demon by pattern. Childhood. That’s when these things first move in. Demons only inhabit the places you give them permission to inhabit. A dark experience you don’t want to talk about. Could be something small. Would you be willing to share your trauma with me?”

  “I don’t have trauma like your trauma.”

  “Your trauma is just as important as my trauma. It’s not more or less. If I cut off your arm, that’s trauma. If I cut off your leg, that’s trauma. It still hurts. In my book it might seem minute, but to you it’s huge. It will be the thing that persuades you. Your weakness. For me it’s failure and guilt. My father always said, ‘Caleb, you’re a fuckup. You’re nothing but a goddamn failure.’ And, you know what? I always believed him. It was a pattern. In every situation I was a failure and I felt terrible guilt. From letting my guys down in the chopper because I wasn’t there to do anything about it, all the way back to when I had the chance to hit the home run and I let
the old man down. For three weeks after deliverance, all I heard was, you’re a failure. It was a test, but I got through it and it didn’t bother me anymore.”

  “So it’s just a change in your psychology?”

  “Hmmmmpf,” he says. “No.”

  “So there is psychology and then there are the demons. Can you distinguish them?”

  “You can go through deliverance and call it whatever you want. In the classes I teach to soldiers, I don’t call it demons. I call it quantum physics.”

  “Why?”

  “Because demons freak people out.”

  The body of a deer shows itself in the field, grazing with a flickering tail, a bowed head. In the yard, at the edge of the light, two chickens and a rooster claw in the dirt, muddy from the cool places they slept in the day.

  “You know, I prayed that no one would ever have to see what I saw in Afghanistan. I said, God, I’ll go through as many years of this as you want me to go through if you promise me my brother and my son never go to war.” He wipes his face with his sleeve. “Now my brother is a stone-faced killer and my son is trying to get FedEx’d to Iraq. His chin rises as if by an invisible string and he speaks his words toward heaven. “I’m leaving it up to you, God, that some big demon isn’t going to come and crush my factory.”

  There’s a kid in the field, walking around on all fours. The child pauses to look at me and then continue on, its bald head burning in the sun.

  “Did you feel anything after deliverance?”

  “White noise,” he says. “All this white noise. I didn’t even know it was there and suddenly it was gone.”

  He clears his throat. “Listen. I can’t tell you to go through deliverance. No one can. You have to make that choice on your own. But I have an invitation for you.”

  • • •

  The possession experience has deep roots in killing. Prehistoric hunters sought to be possessed by the predators of the animals they wished to kill. In the Iliad, Greek warriors became superior killers when the gods entered them. The Cúchulainn warrior of Irish mythology and the shock troops of the ancient Persian Empire performed possession rituals before battle. Berserkers, or ancient Norse warriors, undefeatable in combat, entered battle in a possessed state. They began with shivering, chattering teeth, chills down the spine, faces swelling with rage. They roared and howled to imitate the bear. Their frenzy grew. They bit shields. The edges of swords. They entered war with bloodlust, hacking and tearing to pieces everything they saw.

  Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former army Ranger, defines the first stage of killing as indecision, and the second stage—the stage of the killing itself—as enthusiasm. The origin of the word possession comes from the Greek word for enthusiasm, eufousiasmz, meaning “inspired by or possessed by God.”

  In Mozambique, since the civil war ended in 1992, it’s assumed that when you return from war, you are possessed by the war; by dead enemies and dead friends. Your blood is contaminated. It can contaminate an entire community. The blood causes insanity. A ghost following a soldier home is a natural part of war.

  It’s easier to forgive a possessed soldier.

  Upon homecoming, the soldier will be asked to reenact the killings. The ritual is called kuguiya and means “to stimulate a fight.” Everyone in the village watches. If the soldier killed a child, he imagines killing the child again. If he raped a woman, he rapes her again. Only through repetition will the ghost leave.

  If the reenactment fails, then the soldier is exorcised.

  • • •

  American society believes the same myth each election, that it is an exorcism of evil. We like simple solutions. In our foreign wars, we rid nations of evil. George W. Bush borrowed the vocabulary of religion for his war. Now Caleb borrows the vocabulary of war for his religion. Caleb sees the heroic, I see the tragedy. Not just because his friends died, but because of the way they’re an emblem of our national tragedy. In primitive cultures if one is sick, it has to be a demon, and finding the one who cursed you is halfway to the cure. Does the exorcist too ever require an exorcism? People see PTSD as a problem specifically of war, but it’s also a problem of our culture. A physical reaction is a sign of societal malaise. Their demons, and America’s demons. For many, the military is not just a way to pay for college, it’s also a way to save oneself from one’s past, from the America you were born into.

  PART IV

  THE WAR ON TERROR IN BIBLICAL TERMS

  Bobby says he was bullied in elementary school, middle school, and high school. He has a sweet, singsongy voice. He says nobody liked him.

  Vivian, Bobby’s wife, a woman with dreams of becoming a dancer, says she cannot dream any longer because her legs cripple and her heart beats too fast.

  A man named Walter sits wide-legged on a chair. He’s wearing snakeskin leather boots and a camo bandanna wrapped tightly around a mop of silky hair. He has a handlebar mustache. Walter doesn’t want to talk about what he did in Vietnam.

  A man with a greased pompadour and a turtleneck sweater steps shame-faced into the room. He has dark, shifty eyes. On his forehead deep lines curve like claw marks. He sits next to me. He smells of whiskey and baby powder. “I’m late,” he whispers. “Call me Brother John.” The Holy Spirit, as far as he knows, has never baptized Brother John. When someone put their hands on him for the baptism he saw dark, ugly faces on the back of his eyelids. He’s never known what that meant. “I think those ugly faces are me. I tried to see a picture of Christ and I could not. I only saw me. Ugly me.”

  Noah, a bearded man in a hoodie, wants to smooth over some marital issues he’s having with his wife, Mary.

  The professor has the voice of a man with a weak throat. He says his father once wrote the word stupid on a gingerbread cookie and gave it to him. He teaches literature at Georgia Southern.

  A seventy-three-year-old man named Ezra says he’s a pretty capable person but that he should have accomplished a great deal more in his life. He says that when he was five years old his pastor raped him. “I thought it was because the Father didn’t love me.” Ezra has been traveling around the country since he was fifteen seeking deliverance, getting different kinds of exorcisms. Nothing has worked. They told him his faith was weak. Ezra thinks it’s because Jesus hates him. Ezra’s mouth opens and closes. “I’m here and I’m alive. I think I’m barely sane. Sometimes I just think this is what life is about. That I’m just going to hang around and wait to die.”

  • • •

  It’s February, and snow falls for three days in Portal, hiding what people know of the land before it melts in a single day, sucked back into the earth. Outside, horses seek ways out of muddy fields, birds bathe in snowmelt, and grass has rotted flat. The continuous thaw of earth.

  We are all at the Bible Covenant Institute in downtown Portal, a drab one-story building with a sun-faded roof. One side of the building borders Main Street. It’s not a Bible institute but a local couple used to run a Bible college out of the building, and the name stuck. Now the Portal community uses it for different events, and the Mathers hold deliverance retreats here when it’s available. Always Friday through Sunday. From one window you can see the Laniers’ ING general store, where women wearing track pants smoke cigarettes and hold their faces to the sun.

  Seven men and woman are here to receive deliverance. They’ve traveled from all over the country. Mostly Georgia, but also Maryland and Washington State. I didn’t tell Caleb I was coming. I didn’t want him to think he converted me.

  Inside, rippled windows make the sky look like sloshed water. An elk head with marble eyes hangs openmouthed above a circle of red chairs. There are two rooms in the building. One in the back with its own entrance. A plain room with two couches and a sword hanging on the wall. The other room is large enough for a thirty-person square dance. Five foldout tables circle the main. In the corner of this room is a kitchen. They will feed us.

  A team will exorcise us. There are generally five to eight people o
n a team. Each team has a leader. The leader decides on the demon. We will be exorcised in the corner, in a place the minister calls “the living room”—an area full of couches and foldout chairs and a coffee table, sectioned off by velour curtains hanging from plastic poles.

  Katie isn’t going to be on any teams. This means we’re allowed to talk to her and tell her why we want deliverance. We aren’t supposed to talk to the team members at all. We won’t be delivered until tomorrow morning, and today, Friday, we will spend learning the basics of demons.

  Katie tells us she had a demon called Jezebel. The slut demon, from the neighborhood boys who raped her as a child. The morning after her deliverance she ate eggs. “I’d never tasted eggs without demons,” she says.

  A very old lady raises her hand as slowly as a body rising from water. Her septuagenarian skin looks illuminated from the inside as if she continuously fed on lightbulbs. “I’m possessed by a demon,” she says. Her glasses are big and reflective so no one knows what her eyes are doing. She talks about cabinets opening, plates shattering, heads spinning, voices appearing. Movie stuff.

  I tell them that Caleb sent me and that he thinks the trauma of other veterans is going to transfer to me.

  • • •

  We break for lunch in the main room, where aproned women remove Saran Wrap from glass trays, chop potatoes, stack floury buns, drain pickles, soften aluminum-wrapped butter squares, peel plastic from single-sliced cheese, and stir iced tea in a blue cooler labeled with masking tape. A woman is cutting onions with a small blade. She is one of the team members who will be giving deliverance.

  “I am the son of Jesus,” she says.

  The son of Jesus has on a sparkly pink shirt. She wears lipstick. Wide blond hair frames her face like wings.