Review by New York Times Review
THE SUBTITLE OF Jennifer Percy's first book, "Demon Camp," is "A Soldier's Exorcism," and four of its five chapter titles contain the words "kill" or "war." Despite appearances, though, this isn't really a book about soldiers or killing or war; it's about a certain strain of American religious belief, and one writer's transformation as she documents its effects on its adherents, several of them veterans, and on herself. Still, she starts with war, with Army Sgt. Caleb Daniels and his response to a helicopter crash in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005. Daniels, a machine-gunner, worked with the pilots of the 160th Special Operations Regiment, the guys who flew the MH-47 Chinook shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade that day. Percy describes Daniels's experience of war as "green-lit and strange," the feeling of flying low over land as "something elegant, like the flight of bees pollinating pomegranate blossoms." When she meets him in 2008 he's home, in Kennesaw, Ga. After 10 tours, lyrical visions of bees have devolved into messianic clichés. He sees a friend who died in the crash everywhere. He believes he is possessed. "They spent millions training me," he tells Percy, casual with his facts. "But they never taught me how to come home." He later insists the "Black Thing" that visits him isn't post-traumatic stress disorder. He's Kurtz, with less charisma. Percy is a magazine writer and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop; her talks with Daniels form the book's center. In this, it's intimate. We are far from the front lines, from bands of brothers and the places - Bagram, Khost, Falluja - that defined chapters of these recent wars. Percy doesn't wonder when the fighting will end; she's singularly intent on the return. Or on the men who find they cannot return, and so exist in broken states until suicide, or something else, intervenes. "It's the way that one's own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another," she writes, "how the trauma of war can quietly trickle through our lives, possessing us, in a way, with the lives of others." Trauma doesn't trickle quietly here, for Percy or for her subjects, though it does seep from them to her. Percy's presence in the text is an ambitious stylistic choice, perhaps the most important one she makes and the one for which the book will be remembered. This is participatory journalism, in extremis. The word "save" appears a lot. Daniels wants to "save all the veterans from killing themselves." He believed that the "war was going to save him" - from poverty, from his father, from the "agony of love." Perhaps Percy is equating war with sin: a thing that seduces us then wrecks us, from which we require salvation. Daniels marries the daughter of the minister who "delivered" him from evil, and the narrative moves further from war toward demonology, to Percy's own visions of a crucifix rising and dissolving into her floor. Daniels's life deteriorates as his faith hardens: He jumps from one job to another, starting an unsuccessful construction company before settling into auto repair. Percy follows him to a "deliverance retreat," to the Covenant Bible Institute, to an evangelical exorcist. She wonders whether, if Daniels "sustains one kind of hallucination, then America maintains another - the hallucination of a sterile war. ... I can't help but wonder if the United States as a nation is suffering from a form of cultural PTSD." There are references to brain chemistry, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and "amygdala memories," but there is also reference to the neuropsychologist at Fort Bragg who asks Percy not to use her name once talk turns to demons. This is a story driven as much by feeling as by fact. And intentionally so: Percy's literary predecessor isn't "SEAL Team Six." It's not "The Things They Carried" or David Finkel's extraordinary "Thank You for Your Service," with which it will be casually paired. Finkel and Percy both look at lives in the wake of war, and both zoom through the surface of a subject to its soul. Yet Percy is less concerned with war per se than with lives lived at the edge of American optimism, a slice of the veterans' experience that overlaps with a larger story. Her proper literary predecessor is "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," James Agee's "inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity." Agee redefined perceptions of poverty in America and the limits of liberalism, of new deals; Percy's portrayal of Portal, Ga. ("where the layer between heaven and earth is very thin"), and its Pentecostal fringe questions current correlations of these things. Agee placed himself inside his story, too. He forced readers to ask, Whom are we leaving behind? And then, Wait, who is "we"? In a harrowing late scene, Percy, who teaches writing at New York University, depicts herself undergoing a kind of deliverance. "Red veins bloom in my eyes like coral growths," she writes, and "my mouth foams with toothpaste." Like a train wreck shot artfully by a sympathetic cinematographer, this kind of writing mirrors its subject: It's visceral, seductive, weird. ("Blood everywhere." That's a sentence.) Even if it's not your style, it's hard to pull away. Percy recounts Daniels saying to her, "You know who you are?" and then providing an answer: "Joan of Arc." Speaking of heroes. "It wasn't the plane." That's what an F-16 pilot says in his last radio transmission before flying that plane into a mountain in "Noël," an episode of "The West Wing" that examined PTSD before these wars, in 2000. The presidential aide Josh Lyman's despair after a mass shooting is intensified by the pilot's story, a suicide seen live in the Situation Room. Like Lyman, Percy connects to a veteran's distress, and breaks down. Her book's look at "theophostics," at guys who "feel hot Jesus blood coming down over" their faces, and at places where children pick ants out of swimming pools, and eat them, is the opposite of clinical. It's apocalyptic. And it exposes the risks, and bliss, of empathy. "Noël" ends with a therapist testing Lyman, assuring him that he'll be fine, that "we get better." "Demon Camp" reaches a different conclusion: America is sick, we're not getting better, and there's no clear solution. An estimated 22 veterans commit suicide daily, and PTSD is still an illness in infancy, a "spectrum" disease. We test-drive solutions until one works, and until we reach the limits of affordability - as individuals, and as a nation. If you're suffering, Jay-Z's "six pairs of kicks is my definition of 12 steps" may be as valid as deliverance, on par. Deliverance is cheaper. "Demon Camp" is dedicated to one of the men who died on that Chinook in 2005. They were heroes. What would Marcus Luttrell, that mission's lone survivor, think about how his story led to this one, to a writer who cites rumors that Special Ops crews are "throat-slitters," calls a member of the Office of Strategic Services an "assassin," and, paraphrasing the scholar Judith Herman, equates the study of trauma to an encounter with "the human capacity for evil"? He might take issue. Percy's narrative may confirm clichés about wars' costs, but it artfully upsets a common misperception: that all veterans' experiences of war are alike. As literature adds satire or paradox or pilots flying F-16s into rocks, one plot point of the Hero Story survives: Someone took a risk for a belief. Percy's subjects are her heroes; this is a portrait of their beliefs. And that's the thing about that Story: As history metastasizes, heroes blur. 'The trauma of war can quietly trickle through our lives,' Percy writes, 'possessing us.' LEA CARPENTER'S first novel, "Eleven Days," was published in June.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
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.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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." (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Percy's debut nonfiction work explores the cost of the War on Terror for the soldiers who make it home. Caleb Daniels is a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brought on by the loss of his best friend and many others in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. He struggles with suicidal thoughts and often sees his dead friends nearby, watching him. Additionally, he experiences a malevolent presence he comes to believe is a demon and becomes involved with a religious exorcism group that offers "deliverance" from those demons. Percy digs deep into the sobering truth of the lengths to which soldiers with PTSD will go to alleviate their condition. Detailed accounts about the War on Terror and soldier suicide could be intense for some listeners. Narrator Kristen Potter does a fantastic job of bringing this world to life. VERDICT Best for fans of war-related nonfiction.-Sean -Kennedy, Cleveland Marshall Coll. Law Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop turns her sights on the dark story of a soldier with PTSD who is haunted by his demons. This odd blend of nonfiction, meditation, new journalism and self-expression by debut author Percy wants to be so many things that it becomes difficult to sort it all out. For such a gothic tale of horror, it starts sparingly. In a parking lot in woodsy Georgia, the author met a young man named Caleb Daniels, a traumatized veteran of the war in Afghanistan. As the young writer unraveled the soldier's tale, she learned that Caleb's illness manifests itself as an actual demon that he alone can see, a beast he calls "The Black Thing." For Percy, it becomes a way into a culture that she can never fully understand. "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," she writes. "Does the exorcist ever require an exorcism? People see post-traumatic stress 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." The author became increasingly embroiled in the story of Caleb and a remote Christian camp where he and other veterans swore of liberation from demons like "the Ruling Level Demon of Antichrist," as well as the dangled promise of salvation. The book suffers from its lack of perspective and straight-ahead reportage--names and details have been changed--but the story goes way over the top when Percy decided that she was suffering from the same conditions as Caleb. "I see the bat in the dark and the bat says suicide and the bat rapes me. But those are just the dreams," she writes. Percy wields language with admirable restraint, but her poetic gifts might be better served in fiction.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
