Read Online Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism by Jennifer Percy - Free Book Online Page B

billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions.”
    He kept saying it, billions and billions, over and over.
    “Please stop,” April said.
    The soldier stopped.
    “There may be billions of pieces of them all over the earth, but do you know those pieces will sink into the earth and they will form new soil or even fossils and they will become part of the world again? That was only their bodies. Their souls had already passed on into heaven. They are probably looking down on you right now, thinking how crazy you are.”
    The soldier said nothing.
    “I’ll tell you what: when I die, you can take my body and throw it over my neighbor’s fence.”
    “Really?” he said.
    •  •  •
    I wanted to talk to veterans and the families of veterans for the same reason that many were telling me I could not talk to them. That as soon as we say words like PTSD or trauma we have permission to ignore the problem because we think we understand it. It wasn’t so much that the familiar narratives weren’t working, it was there appeared to be no narrative at all.
    At the end of the phone conversation with April, she asked, “Was that PTSD?”
    •  •  •
    When I drove into Georgia I called Caleb and asked where we should meet. He said he was busy running errands, trying to find a boat engine for a girl named DeeAnne whose husband had just died of a heart attack. “It’s a piece-of-shit houseboat,” he explained, “but she won’t give it up. It was where her husband liked to go to think. This guy was huge. He ate so much food that one day he pretty much just fell over and died. Just last week she bought a new engine for ten grand, and guess what? Two days later it broke.”
    Caleb knew a guy in a town called Dalton selling boat parts. “Consider this,” he told me. “Once I asked my marine buddy Max to come help me fix vehicles. He didn’t want to meet me. He was on his way to drill. But I convinced him anyway. Guess what? The guys he was gonna ride with got stuck behind a Greyhound, and a big bus tire flew off and smashed their window. They ended up in the ditch.” The way he told it, he was a kind of talisman against death.
    I left my car in the parking lot and stepped into Caleb’s truck. Tobacco dust lined every inch of it. The worn leather scratched my thighs. Caleb looked a bit feverish. At the same time, on the edge of recovery.
    We drove with open windows, feeling the air. He looked at me and sniffed. “You drove all the way down here to talk to me,” he said. “Why?” He had one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on his thigh. “There were other writers that came to talk to me,” he said. “People that wanted to know about me and my guys. But I didn’t like them.”
    A long finger pointed to my head. “You’ll do.”
    At the time I thought he was just surprised that anyone cared. He’d been trying to get people to care for a long time.
    “By the way,” he said, “you religious?”
    I hesitated long enough for him to fill his mouth with a fresh wad of chew. I didn’t want the conversation to come down to this. Finally I told him I wasn’t.
    “Good,” he said.
    He sat quietly, just blinking, but everything inside him seemed to churn.
    In Dalton, Caleb stopped the truck and disappeared into a building that looked coughed up by the earth. He returned engineless. “Wrong store,” he said, and slipped into the truck.
    “So I