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Demon Camp

The Strange and Terrible Saga of a Soldier's Return from War

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
A "chilling" (O, The Oprah Magazine), "darkly brilliant" (Bookforum) account of "the effects of war on the psyches of the soldiers who fight" (Esquire).
In 2005 a Chinook helicopter carrying sixteen Special Ops soldiers crashed during a rescue mission in Afghanistan, killing everyone on board. In that instant, machine gunner Caleb Daniels lost his best friend, Kip, and seven members of his unit. Back in the US, Caleb begins to see them everywhere—dead Kip, with his Alice in Wonderland tattoos, and the rest of them, their burned bodies always watching him. But there is something else haunting Caleb, too—a presence he calls the Black Thing, or the Destroyer, a paralyzing horror that Caleb comes to believe is a demon. Alone with these apparitions, Caleb considers killing himself.

There is an epidemic of suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, men and women with post-traumatic stress disorder who cannot cope with ordinary life in the aftermath of explosions and carnage. Author Jen Percy finds herself drawn to their stories. Her main subject, Caleb, has been bringing damaged veterans to a Christian exorcism camp in Georgia that promises them deliverance from the war. As Percy spends time with these soldiers and exorcists—finding their beliefs both repellant and magnetic—she enters a world of fanaticism that is alternately terrifying and welcoming.

With "beautiful, lucid" (Los Angeles Times) lyricism, Demon Camp is the riveting true story of a veteran with PTSD and an exploration of the battles soldiers face after the war is over. As The New York Times Book Review said, "Percy's narrative may confirm clichés about war's costs, but it artfully upsets a common misconception that all veterans' experiences are alike."
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 11, 2013
      Tropes surrounding veterans in the public discourse—invincible warriors, heroic patriots—mask the reality of warfare, but Percy peels back the gauze, revealing deeply wounded individuals. Having enlisted to escape hometown oppression or untenably low positions on the socioeconomic ladder, veterans return haunted by the violence they’ve endured. Caleb, Percy’s primary subject, is besieged by apparitions after his closest friend dies in a helicopter crash, and comes to rely on his hallucinations to get him through the day. An army psychologist explains that sufferers of PTSD will relive their trauma “again and again until the mind is able to assimilate and process the event,” experiencing a world of demons more real than physical objects. Caleb and other veterans are drawn to tiny Portal, Ga., where a self-taught pastor engages in “spiritual warfare,” claiming he stopped counting the number of exorcisms he’s performed after 5,000. Percy becomes part of the life of the church, where the veterans and the true believers maintain a measure of distance, treating each other with a mutual wariness. Her sharp, unadorned writing captures the rawness of the congregants’ lives, the permeability of the borderline between reality and imagination —her own exorcism proving to her “how easily, how intrusively, a heightened situation can make us, any of us, slip.”

    • Booklist

      November 15, 2013
      Caleb Daniels was serving in Afghanistan in 2005 when a helicopter crash claimed the lives of his best friend and several other men. After he returned stateside, Daniels began seeing his dead friends, right there in front of him. And he's not the only veteran who sees the dead. It is, apparently, a fairly common element of PTSD. Haunted not only by the dead but by something he believes to be a demon (he calls it the Black Thing), Daniels underwent an exorcism conducted by a minister in the small town of Portal, Georgia, and eventually married the minister's daughter. Now he helps other war veterans find a measure of peace in Portal, where the minister's Christian camp delivers them from their torture. Percy maintains a steadfastly neutral journalistic tone here, telling us Caleb Daniels' story (and the stories of other veterans, too) and taking us inside the camp at Portal, but it never feels like she's passing judgment. Are these men actually undergoing exorcisms, or are they engineering their own psychological cures? It's up to us to determine how we feel about that.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

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  • English

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