Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism
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. --David Pitt