The Iraq and Afghan wars made "embedded journalism," with reporters riding along with soldiers at the front lines, an instantly recognizable genre of reportage. In Demon Camp, Jennifer Percy embeds herself into the post-combat life of Caleb Daniels, a helicopter maintenance enlistee who humped his way through SERE (Survive, Evade, Resist, Escape) school to get into the illustrious "Night Stalkers" Special Forces 160th Regiment.
When Percy caught up with him, Daniels was out of the military after two Iraq deployments and eight in Afghanistan. He brought home not only the typical nightmares of gratuitous, often chance killings but also the vision of his assigned Chinook helicopter--nicknamed "The Evil Empire"--going down in an attack that left eight members of his unit in charred pieces. Haunted, suicidal, unable to work or stay married, he also came home with a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, something no veteran wants: "PTSD means you're an outcast. It means you're crazy." Instead, Daniels was convinced he was controlled by "demons"--his dead best friend, an unarmed Iraqi he killed, even his harshly critical father. At length, he found some measure of peace at a trailer house parish in tiny Portal, Ga., where Pentecostal preacher Tim Mather claims to have exorcised more than 5,000 demons.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop with a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction, Percy seems to have been schooled in the Hunter Thompson/Tom Wolfe style of immersion journalism. She drives with Daniels cross-country, gathering other suicidal veterans to have their demons purged by Mather and his backwoods congregation. Percy joins in, observes and briefly succumbs to the "easy, luminous desire to be saved [where] everything is soft-looking and cries with the Holy Spirit... it's like a residue on me, or inside me, spreading like a bitter pill." But she always steps back from the personal to record what she sees and hears.
If the traditional VA hospital treatments don't offer much to Caleb Daniels and similarly broken vets, the Demon Camp seems to hold their nightmares at bay. In Percy's telling, it's a crazy place--or maybe just a place full of crazies. You can't walk away from Percy's strong debut without feeling like you've spent a frightening moment inside the heads of soldiers who come home from war with nothing but demons, no place to go and no easy role to play. --Bruce Jacobs
Shelf Talker: In an auspicious debut, Percy goes deep into the life of an army veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress to understand the debilitating effects of war on returning soldiers.