When I was 25, I went to Iraq as a civilian contractor. I worked for a software company and trained users and wrote documentation while I was there. I arrived shortly after they had implemented a new order than civilians were supposed to stay inside the wire aside from transport (since Blackwater kept killing so many people).
I didn’t see much directly. I wasn’t ever outside the wire (unless I was in the air) or in combat whatsoever. The war wasn’t in front of me.
What fucked me up was the exposure to everything in that war zone. The reports, the pictures, the videos, the oral history, the disturbing undertow running under combat culture. I was a young, sheltered, civilian girl. And that seemed to offend the seasoned service men around me. While some wanted to protect me, most wanted to crush it out of me and would compete to see who could share the story that would upset me the most.
When I arrived, I wasn’t completely naive. I had seen the violence of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in front of an elementary school. I had witnessed the tragedy of drugs and addiction eating a person alive. I had seen the ugliness of what men do to underage drunk girls. But even suicide, drugs, and sexual assault were known evils.
What Iraq showed me, what I was not prepared to deal with, was the abject savagery of people. I’ll redact the specifics. It was depravity on all sides all the time. Inconceivable horrors. That ugliness took root in me for years. I wrote Savages about it. I gave up on faith and humans over it.
But a decade and a half of comfort soothed my rage, blunted the edges of my realization. I went back to lying to myself. The release of the Epstein files has brought it all back. The waves of reports and pictures. Again, I will redact the specifics, but I was broken by reading one awful snippet.
Once again, it feels like the curtain on the world has been snatched back. I thought we were savages under the surface. It is so much worse. Everything is a lie, and the lie is so much more depraved and disgusting than in a war zone.
And I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to turn away from the fire hose of awful on the internet. I don’t know how to continue living life as if the foundation is not rotten. With Iraq, I could eventually compartmentalize it back to that place. This is everywhere.
When I wrote Savages, I was the narrator who had lost hope, who just wanted to give up. Maybe I wrote my way into finding hope again.
I wrote Invisible Girls in 2020-ish. George Floyd’s death was very much on my mind. Yet, as I have been reading the proof for it now, it rings more true. The revolt begins with the death of a pedophile. And the only way to survive the world is to burn it down.
Christina Bergling
https://linktr.ee/chrstnabergling
Like my writing? Check out my books!
- Red Walls – When Talia’s parents go after the monsters who hurt her, they never expected real monsters.
- Followers – You never know who is on the other side of the screen. Followers is a mystery and thriller that blends women’s fiction with horror.
- The Rest Will Come – Online dating would drive anyone to murder, especially Emma.
- Savages – Two survivors search the ruins for the last strain of humanity. Until the discovery of a baby changes everything.
- The Waning – Locked in a cage, Beatrix must survive to escape or be broken completely.
- Screechers – Mutant monsters and humans collide in the apocalyptic fallout of a burned world. Co-authored with Kevin J. Kennedy.
- Horror Anthologies
Fiery Pen 