Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (3 page)

Some said when Night Stalkers died in the field, they’d be decapitated, the hands removed and hidden in bags, separated from the body to prevent identification. Some said when a Night Stalker died in ways you couldn’t tell his family about, they mutilated the body to launder it. Some said they’d run it over with a jeep, blow it up, douse it with oil, and set it on fire, invent a new truth.

The platoon leaders called on their four newest cherries, and Caleb, with only three months’ experience, was sent over. He was surprised. They jogged in shorts instead of sweatpants and took on dangerous missions, mostly at night. They were a Special Ops regiment, flying Blackhawks, MH-47 Chinooks, Apache gunships, supporting dangerous combat missions of Special Forces recon teams. Caleb never wanted to go back to the 159th. He stayed a few weeks, fixing choppers, observing the men—their camaraderie and intensity.

He stopped by the sergeant major’s open office hours and told him he wanted to become a Night Stalker. “What the fuck are you talking about, you pencil-dick pussy? You’re nothing but a goddamn kid. Get the fuck out of my fucking office on the fucking double.”

The sergeant major spit when he spoke. Caleb nodded at his words but came back every week for six weeks until he was escorted out by military personnel. Special Ops was divided between the guys who do stuff and the guys who don’t. He learned that assessment is the way to get to do stuff. The guys who assess, they fly the helicopters, go into combat, shoot the bad guys. The guys who don’t, they sit at a desk. Finally the sergeant major said, “You’re not going to let me alone, are you. You realize what you’re getting yourself into? You realize what assessment is?” Assessment is the entry point into SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape) school and then the Special Forces. They beat you, drug you, starve you, lock you in a dark cell for a week, play rape scenes on a movie screen for hours, and blast static and screams from loudspeakers, trying to make you break, trying to see if you can hold up.

•  •  •

Caleb decided to assess anyway, and before assessment he went through a five-week training program called Green Platoon. A lot of carrying logs around and walking through mud. Close quarters combat, weapons, medical. Sticking IVs, chest tubes, shots. How to carry tampons to plug bullet wounds. Sterile. Easy to carry. Great blood stoppers. If somebody got shot, he asked:
Super or regular?
Then a lot of what to do with credit cards, how to deal with travel vouchers. Lots of classroom time. Then it was back outside, more close quarters, standing right across from each other and slugging, learning where to hit for trauma, trying to knock one another unconscious. If the instructor didn’t think you were training hard enough, he’d slug on you both and make sure you understood 110 percent. At the end of the week, the instructor put on a foam Red-Man suit and fought the men until they bled. Those weeks were about getting guys to quit.

On the third week the sergeant major lined up all the men. He said, “One of you guys has screwed up and I want you to tell us who it is.” Caleb didn’t know what was going on. By the looks of it, no one else in the room did either. The sergeant major said
okay then
, walked off, left the men wondering. The next day he came back. It was the same ordeal: lining everybody up, accusing them. “Somebody has done something wrong. Are you going to tell me who it is?”

The room was full of Green Berets, Army Rangers, top-notch guys, and an E-2, a low-ranking guy, just got in the army, hadn’t been in the army even a year. The sergeant major looked at the E-2. “Take off your uniform.”

This kid, it turns out, went to the store on base and bought all these badges he’d never earned. The Special Forces badge. The airborne wings. The combat badge. All these extra badges. Later he got drunk and put them on his uniform and went to the strip club.

It’s Saturday night. The women paw at him, dance for him. The sergeant major is at a table, watching everything.

The E-2 kid cussed the sergeant major. “That’s it,” he said, “so now I guess I’m kicked out.”

The sergeant major said no, you’re going to stay in the unit, because it’s going to take a while to outprocess you. He stayed for eight months, and they tortured him, harassed him. In close quarters combat, they used him as a dummy. When it was time to learn a knee strike, the sergeant major nailed the kid, and he’d fall down, and he’d get back up. Every day they trained and they trained by him. When Caleb got to the medical portion of Green Platoon, it was January and it was cold and they were out in the woods and this kid was the one who got stuck with IVs. Guys missing veins on purpose.

•  •  •

When Caleb finally told Allyson about his plans to assess, she threatened divorce, telling him that those were the guys who went to hotel rooms and cheated on their wives. Caleb assessed anyway. When he came home, Allyson wouldn’t talk to him. He found his uniform in the trash, buried in a snowfall of tissue. Dog hair and garbage all over the floor. There were no paper towels.

Eventually Allyson suggested he make up for lost time by watching her cheerleading squad at the Georgia Southern men’s basketball game. Caleb watched. After the game she told him, “The girls and I are going to Hooters and you can’t go. I know how guys are when they go to Hooters.”

He’d finally found a job he loved, something he was good at, and the more he loved the army, the less it seemed that Allyson loved him.

He went to Taco Bell to be lonely. He ordered a chalupa extreme, a cheesy double-beef burrito. He spoke to the drive-thru like a confessional, telling it things, things he would never tell anyone else. The face he saw in the yellow window where he received his food was never what he wanted—something beautiful and waiting. But it didn’t matter. He ate in the dark, facing the restaurant, so he could see inside.

Nights, he slept in the green-lit back of his truck, someplace new every day, the fast-food chains that broke the dark highway with their haloed light.

He bought a gun and considered killing himself. Back at home, he told Allyson, “This is going to make me sound like a girl, but there’s got to be a way to have a relationship besides sex and arguing.” She yelled at him, “What do you mean? What do you think a relationship is? It isn’t always perfect. Yelling is normal. It helps things.”

He got in his car and drove toward nowhere, said he was going to drive until he figured the mess out. While the truck was nagging to start, Allyson was outside in her nightgown, making a scene. He drove all the way back to the base at Hunter, and from there, he drove to SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

SERE school was like a prison camp, preparing men for capture, captivity, torture. Once he was running thirty miles during a training exercise with a broken foot, limping, unsure if he could finish. The sergeant came up to him, handed him a thirty-pound weight from his rucksack, and asked Caleb to drop it on his foot. The sergeant’s foot. “Now I got a broke foot too,” the sergeant said. They continued on their run.

To train, they’d hit the men, kick the men, cover the men with bruises and throw them into a dark room. Someone was always inside, wandering around in the dark. They had to know when they were just a few feet away from the other guy. Then they’d strike.

Caleb made it through SERE school, drugged and beaten within an inch of his life. He was gone a little over a month. That last day he called home and told his father, “I made it. That was the final deal. That was the hardest thing I had to go through.” He mentioned the graduation date and hung up.

Next, he called Allyson and told her the same thing. She said she had something important to tell him but she wanted to wait until he came home. Caleb wouldn’t hang up the phone.

“You’re going to be angry,” she said. “You’re going to be a dad.”

He’d lost thirty pounds from his already-skinny frame. Even his eyes looked smaller. He had yellow bruises on his neck. He ate five green beans for dinner and from that small portion he was full. In a way he was happy about the child because he’d always wanted a family, and so he said nothing at all. He slept for many days and she fed him and he ate and his body re-formed itself.

“Are you still going to leave me?” Allyson asked.

“Yeah, I think so. I can’t live this way. You’re not who I want to be with.”

“I’ll change,” she said. “I’ll change.”

•  •  •

Caleb was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 160th Night Stalkers, at Hunter Army Airfield. Within a week, his pager went off and he was gone to Texas for training at Fort Bliss, four months of flying choppers over the desert. When he got home he took a shower and said harsh words to Allyson. She asked Caleb again if he was going to leave. This time he told her he wasn’t. He said he just got home and he wouldn’t be going anywhere. When he was gone he’d thought a lot about his daughter and he remembered a promise he’d made to himself, that whatever you do, you stick it out for kids.

The following week Caleb went back to the base to fill out forms for a travel voucher. The soldiers were quiet and drinking coffee and the news played on a television in the corner. CNN showed a plane hitting the first tower, and then another plane hit the second. The colonel walked in and told the men, “I’ve been on the phone with Washington, prepare to deploy right now.” He wouldn’t let them leave. He said get your shit and get on the plane. They were to report to duty immediately. Within weeks, Caleb was in Afghanistan, fighting with the 160th Special Ops as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. There wasn’t much time to call home. For days, Allyson didn’t know where he went.

•  •  •

Caleb came to know the war as green-lit and strange, from the back of a Chinook MH-47D, a seventeen-ton hollow beast strong enough to lift an armored Humvee while keeping speeds up to 155 mph. He was a gunner, pointing the M134 minigun in the dark, searching for tracers. Always in the dark, because the Night Stalkers flew only at night, their helicopters painted black so they would disappear into the dark. The hours they worked in the dark matched closely the American hours of light. When they flew, they stayed close to the ground, the chopper’s belly brushing treetops, avoiding ground radar systems. It felt less like flying than moving around things, mountains, buildings, trees, and armies, something elegant, like the flight of bees pollinating pomegranate blossoms.

On his belt Caleb carried a pocket-sized beacon. All of them did. In their pockets, a ten-inch knife for cutting through seat belts and paracord. On their heads, black helmets with a maxillofacial shield to protect from debris, wind back, rotor wash. On their shoulder sleeves, an insignia: a black figure riding a pale horse, carrying a saber. Beneath it, the Night Stalkers’ motto: Death Waits in the Dark.

Caleb became part of a crew that manned a Chinook called the
Evil Empire,
tail #146. The Chinook had two rotors, and the aircraft’s wide rear opened into a ramp, from which they dropped the Special Forces recon team down the woven nylon ropes deployed on either side, letting them slip to the ground quiet as raindrops down leafstalks. There were stories of men falling, crushing the men below. Sometimes men would fall with straight legs and shatter bone, tibia and fibula.

•  •  •

While Caleb was in Afghanistan, his wife’s body grew. She must have worried the child was listening to the silence of the home, that it knew it would be born into a fatherless world.

Caleb was allowed to come home the day before Allyson gave birth. The doctor let him help. He pulled his daughter out. Allyson screamed at him the whole time.

They named their daughter Isabel. At first sight, he feared the girl. He had no idea how to raise one, having grown up among boys. But in the hospital, he held her and she reacted to him and the worry died. Everything he’d ever known in his life, and everything he’d ever loved, he’d either run away from or been kept away from. “And I will never leave you,” he said.

Allyson said having the baby ruined her college years because she wasn’t skinny like the other girls. Isabel cried through the night. Caleb fed her. Allyson rolled around in bed, covered her ears. Caleb called it postpartum depression. Soon Isabel recognized Caleb’s voice and when he spoke she fell asleep to it.

•  •  •

On his next deployment, after Isabel was born, the
Evil Empire
broke down in the desert of Afghanistan and a radio call came in about how no one was coming to help. It was night. Pitch silent. The unit hunkered. Gunfire flickered in the distance. Forty or fifty Taliban, they guessed, saw the Chinook come down. A hoarse voice over the radio said as much. The chopper was now nothing other than a womb where he would reside and be easily shot, perhaps at close range with great pauses so that he would have time to know the face of his killer. The men didn’t speak. They knew they were going to die. The Taliban would either kill him or torture him, but either way, Caleb thought, he didn’t want them knowing about Isabel. Since it bothered Caleb to be away from his daughter. He carried a printout photograph of Isabel’s smiling face in the pocket of his uniform. Caleb pulled out the picture and looked at his daughter. Then he started eating the picture. He chewed on it. He swallowed it. Eating the picture made him brave. No one, he thought, was going to tell Isabel that her daddy lay down and died in a chopper. That he just gave up. He might die, but if it meant he could live to make it home to see his daughter, then he would be the one biting the esophagus out of a Taliban’s throat.

Caleb ate the picture from the bottom up so he could still see Isabel’s eyes.

They all stepped out of the chopper and walked across the hot earth and back to base and they never once saw the enemy in their trucks, staring with gun-dark eyes.

•  •  •

Gruesome news about the incident returned to the wives. They’d been gathering in the neighborhood, in each other’s homes, talking about what their men were doing. They heard about killings, and perhaps they talked, and the talking made them imagine the killings were done not with guns, or knives, or objects that divided man from enemy—a function of metal and physics—but with hands and with teeth.