A large part of Iraq is constructed and padded now with T-walls. A T-wall is a concrete block over three meters high, in the shape of an inverted ‘T’. It serves as a protection against explosions, indirect fire, and regulation of movement. A mobile wall, for the games of the masters of fire.

The bars at the top of a T-wall block enable it to be lifted and moved around like a Lego0cube. Whole cities can be made thus in the middle of a desert, or smaller cities within larger ones. The T-walls can be a grave, or a shelter. Concrete. Unfortunate matter for both life and death. Baghdad is a labyrinth of T-walls constructed by the masters of murders and the masters of survival.

The Mansoor Compound is such a city within a city, outside the Green Zone, relatively quiet. Ten months of Mansoor life marked by T-walls. The gaze shipwrecks onto the concrete barriers, ugly and towering monuments of the trouble we brought, we found, we kindled and unleashed.

To open the eyes wide one has to raise the gaze above the edges lining the blazing sky with green embroidery of the palm leaves. The heat is a murder where people move dreamily, as if burdened by an invisible, heavy veil. They are kind, nevertheless. The sun batters the skin with heavy mauls.

I love heat. We laugh with the Iraqi friends because I seek the sun on the terrace in front of the offices, while they seek shade, their women longing for paler tan. Friends. We share the same sense of black humor and shameless political incorrectness.

The view from the terrace is limited by T-walls. A fierce accusation of the human passion to murder each other. Is there anything else in nature that has plagued humanity more than the people themselves? People with faces, like you and me, like the neighbor and the foreigner.

I know. I am human too. A part of this massive suicide and rebirth. Nearly as a T-wall, I observe without a blink. Horrendous, speechless witnessing. And then the hand moves and I start to exist again as the urge contrary to destruction. The fragile and suspicious care for the other, the instinct to be close to those suffer, perhaps to help somehow, in any manner, any way, it doesn’t matter, just to be there, with them, somehow.

To see the other from inside. To see myself. To observe and participate in the great and downcast human drama.

The irony lies in the fact that we are so kindred. This could have happened to any of us. It could have been us.

Each one of us, in different circumstances, or in an alternative life, could have accepted to be a self-interested raving tyrant, a privileged and cruel instrument of devastation. Each one of us could have been born to thirst  and fight, a widow and a killer, a beggar and a fanatic, a cunning robber and a silent soldier, a prisoner and a headman, a powerless witness and an indifferent withdrawer, a hidden string-puller and a vulnerable spokesman, a rebel and a defender, brave and reasonable, excelling and indecisive, proud and invisible, dead and alive.

These are all interchangeable roles that the shackles of circumstances bring forth from within us. Both mortal and lethal role which, once brought forth, seems like the only possible choice in the given circumstances. It appears as if it represents necessity and choicelessness…. The illusions of necessity, freedom and choice.

Some say that everyone opens their life to these possibilities, and that the role they chose to play, no matter how painful, is a decision.

Who can choose other than one’s self?

In the end, is survival an overrated achievement?

The bottom line is that the bullet puts an and to all such questions, follies and illusions.