Proximity to war and minefields left a scar. Will I pass it on to my son?

JUNE 10, 2025

My four-year-old son, Rami, is riding his balance bike. He grips the handlebars tightly and moves forward by thrusting his feet against the asphalt, humming the gentle noises of a well-tuned engine, maneuvering through invisible obstacles.

We are in Stewart Park, a well-designed, vast park built on the eastern shore of Cayuga Lake. It boasts well-maintained playgrounds, sprawling lawns with a gorgeous view of the lake, alcoves for hosting children’s birthday parties. A path along two bridges that hang above Fall Creek extends past golf courses and connects the park to the weekend market. This path is Rami’s favorite biking route.

It is paved save for a small patch by the first golf course. That is where Rami wants to linger the longest. He maneuvers his bike around the sandy patch, twisting and accelerating, kicking up dust, screaming “Baba, watch this!” before every move.

I notice the bump a second before I step on it. With an acrobatic flourish too dramatic for my age, I jerk my foot over it and perform a little dance to steady myself on the other side.

I am panting. Blood has rushed to my face. Veins are pulsing at my temples. It takes me a second to regain my bearings. Everything is fine, I tell myself. We are cocooned in the idyllic uneventfulness of an upstate New York park.

Rami is rolling his bike along the edge of the path, oblivious of my absurd burst of activity.

The bump I took pains to avoid is a tiny bulge, barely distinguishable. It has a crack on the top, about three inches long. This, too, is hardly worth noticing.

Unless it reminds you of something.

✺

The year was 1990. The Iran-Iraq war had ended two years before. My school had already begun taking us on field trips to the war zone, some 30 miles west of Ahvaz, where I grew up on the Iranian side of the border.

Every year the organization bussed thousands of people from all over the country to the old battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war to soak up the supposed spirituality lingering in the air. By then, they had cleared most of the minefields, picked up the bones of the dead, removed the blood-curdled rags — anything that could rub the truth of the war in the face of impressionable tourists.

In the decade following the 1979 Islamic revolution, our education had consisted of little more than ideological sermons about the glory of Islam, the significance of doing prayers in time and the sanctity of Ayatollah Khomeini. This had all but backfired, so the ministry of education resorted to these field trips. They must have thought that once we saw firsthand the evidence of the sacrifice made by Iranian soldiers, many of whom were hardly older than us, to maintain the integrity of our homeland, we would be filled with gratitude, maybe even fall in love with the Islamic Republic and its turbaned rulers.

That was years before the Iranian government officially launched the Rahian-e Noor (Travelers to Light) project in 1997. Every year the organization bussed thousands of people from all over the country to the old battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war to soak up the supposed spirituality lingering in the air. By then, they had cleared most of the minefields, picked up the bones of the dead, removed the blood-curdled rags — anything that could rub the truth of the war in the face of impressionable tourists. They carefully arranged the bombed jeeps and burned-up tanks and ambulances across the landscape to create a striking, Hollywoodesque wreckage that exuded the air of the war without any reminder of its horrors.

In 1990, when our class visited, the frontline was mostly untouched. No one appeared to care much about our exposure to disturbing sights. We had all grown up within the war zone, after all, and seen things no child should see. Some bones and dried blood here and there would not rattle us.

The engine sputtered to life. The bus trudged down the Kianpars neighborhood north of Ahvaz and through the downtown traffic before hitting the road to Abadan. We had been on field trips before, to the ruins of Darius the Great’s winter palace in Susa, or for picnics in the meadows around Ramhormoz. On those trips, as soon as the bus left town, we would pour into the aisle, wrestling, dancing, throwing a tennis ball around, acting like wild beasts let loose from our cage. This time, the bus was dead silent. Everyone sat still, watching the barren landscape outside the window strewn with orange flames leaping from the scaffoldings erected over the oil wells.

By the gate someone had written “MARTYRS ARE ALIVE” in the dirt. At first, it seemed that the letters were formed from small round pebbles. Up close, it turned out that the message was spelled out in bullet casings jabbed tip-first into the ground.

A dozen miles before Abadan, the bus turned onto a dirt road and rattled on over dips and bumps, kicking up dust. Pebbles skidded under the tires and hit against the metal bottom of the bus with sharp cracks that sounded like gunfire.

The bus stopped near the Iraqi border, where watchtowers loomed on hills and armed border patrol abounded. The war was hardly two years behind us, and near the border its presence was tangible.

Our bodies sore from the bumpy ride, we got off the bus and queued up, each kid an arm’s length from the one in front, to file through a ramshackle gate that, in the absence of any fences, served no apparent purpose. By the gate someone had written “MARTYRS ARE ALIVE” in the dirt. At first, it seemed that the letters were formed from small round pebbles. Up close, it turned out that the message was spelled out in bullet casings jabbed tip-first into the ground.

A guide joined us. He was a small, lean man in a dark green uniform, a big knife sheathed and strapped around his hips. He took the lead, sometimes facing us, sometimes walking backwards, as he spoke.

“We are in Talaeiah,” he said. “The very first piece of Iran the Iraqi army occupied in the beginning of the war.” He paused, scanning the open horizon. “These frontline zones — I see them as catapults.” In every corner of this soil, he told us, thousands of souls had laid down their lives to protect our homeland. Upon martyrdom, they were catapulted into the embrace of God. “This is a very spiritual place.”

We walked on along the carcasses of burned tanks and other vehicles twisted out of shape. There was no sign of vegetation anywhere. The ground was pockmarked with craters left behind by mortars and shells.

Two small hills — a strange industrial white, at odds with the pale brown of the land — loomed ahead. The guide didn’t explain what they were. Many years later, I read that thousands of bodies were collected after major battles and stacked together, sometimes up to 30 feet high. Helicopters would dump lime over them to suppress the stench. Over time, as the powder solidified and the corpses decomposed, mass graves in the form of random white hills became a fixture of this landscape.

The path inclined and we crested a hill. Two lines of short wire fences flanked the path, separating it from the land on either side. The land was arid and eerily untrampled, flat and empty as far as the eye could see; it was as though a piece of a far-flung planet had been plastered onto this corner of the earth.

These were uncleared minefields, the guard informed us. He leaned over the fence, gazing longingly at the field.

“I was a minesweeper,” he told us. “I was just a couple years older than you guys when I came here. Within a year, I neutralized some hundreds of mines. Maybe a thousand.”

He let his words sink in. He suddenly looked large, a warrior of mythical stature. He had lived in proximity to death for years, when he was barely older than us.

“You know what,” he said after a long pause, “I’m going to do something that was not originally planned for your visit.”

He found a crack in the wired fence and pulled it to one side, making a hole big enough for a slim man to slip through.

“I’m going to neutralize a mine for you guys today. Remember, these are real mines in a real minefield. If I make a mistake, I’ll be blown up. Now, how’s that for excitement?”

Some of us limply cheered. Most of us remained silent.

To this day, I am not certain whether this spectacle was planned as a part of our tour, or whether the guide went off-script. The latter seems more likely. Later in life, I met many men like him — nostalgic for the thrill of the war zone, missing the frontline fraternity and a life of sleeping in bunkers, eating canned beans and ceaseless adrenaline. They craved a return to that state, and they would jump at a chance to reenact a moment of war, especially if it came with real risk.

The man knelt at the edge of the minefield and unsheathed his knife. It was larger than I expected, somewhere between a dagger and a machete.

He held the knife perpendicular to the ground and started to strike. At every thrust the tip of the blade entered an inch or two into the ground and threw up small puffs of dust. He cleared a half-circle around his knees and edged forward.

Half a dozen feet ahead of him, I spotted a bump. It was a small protrusion from the ground, virtually identical to countless others around it, except for a small crack at the top. It looked as the soil had been dug up, then haphazardly filled and patted down. That must be a mine, I decided.

He kept moving forward, jabbing his knife against the ground like a maniac killer, until he reached the bump. My heart raced so fast my ribcage ached. I stood with dry mouth and stiff muscles, bracing myself for blown-off limbs and an explosion of blood.

At the bump, the knife entered the ground and stayed there.

“Uh-huh!” the man said. He came up on his heels and flashed us a smug smile. He dug a small trench around the bump with practiced agility, then angled the blade against the edge of the trench to use as lever and pushed something up from the ground.

When was the last time I thought about that visit to the minefield? At least two decades ago. It had never crossed my mind since I left Iran. It would have been near impossible for me to consciously connect the bump in the park to the one in the minefield. But my body, which doesn’t care much about my conscious life, noticed it. The invisible eyes in my limbs saw something the eyes in my head failed to see.

A flat metallic disk emerged, a bit larger than his palm. It looked like a miniature UFO. He blew the dust off its surface and held it up to us, then twisted something in the back and pulled out a small metal pin and tossed it aside. He held aloft the neutralized mine like it was a trophy, then let it drop and stepped out of the field to our passionate applause.

✺

A few days later, Rami is riding his balance bike up our street. I am a dozen feet behind him. He is quite tall for his age, strong and coordinated enough to handle a real bike. He already owns one, but he has no intention of making the transition. Embracing change is not his strongest suit. I am as cliché a dad as they come, so I find it incumbent upon myself to pester him into graduating from what he likes to what I deem appropriate.

“I think next time we should take the big bike for our ride,” I suggest. “What do you think?”

“Noo,” he moans, then rides ahead, putting distance between us to preempt my next attempt. He waits for me up the street, rotating the front tire of his bike in a small pile of sand.

“Hey Baba,” he says as I catch up. “Guess what. This bike is going to grow into a big bike for big kids.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I noticed that.”

“That’s very cool.”

“Yeah. I notice everything.”

We walk on. Now that he has artfully changed the subject, he no longer tries to escape. He keeps pace with me, his eyes fastened on the ground, steering the bike in a straight line.

“Aida doesn’t notice everything,” he says, referring to his five-month-old sister. “But I do.”

“Well, she is still very little. Is noticing everything your superpower?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a good one to have.”

“Yeah. It protects you.”

“From what?”

“It protects you from life.”

That stops me in my track.

At four, he has some two years of speaking human language under his belt, and this little burst of philosophical ingenuity is not a novelty. He detects a two-dimensional fishing boat in a half-eaten piece of pita bread. He loves spinning his little tugboat in the swimming pool, but he is wary of doing it for too long because the boat might get dizzy. He harbors all manner of thoughts and ideas about how one should live an examined life and regularly conducts philosophical investigations into the notion of being, resulting in Heideggerian conclusions.

Still, his comment unsettles me. It throws me back to the moment I encountered the bump in the park. When was the last time I thought about that visit to the minefield? At least two decades ago. It had never crossed my mind since I left Iran. It would have been near impossible for me to consciously connect the bump in the park to the one in the minefield. But my body, which doesn’t care much about my conscious life, noticed it. The invisible eyes in my limbs saw something the eyes in my head failed to see. My muscles tensed, my heart pounded and my body performed a maneuver on its own accord. Whatever sort of intelligence I have stored in my muscles flared to life to avoid a harmless bump in upstate New York, fearing that it might pose the same danger as the bump in the Talaeiah minefield.

This is not the first time this has happened in America. On my second evening in Brooklyn, I heard the Sabbath siren, which is eerily similar to the red alarm that wailed all over Ahvaz when an air raid was imminent. I was almost halfway out the door, heading to the basement, before I caught myself and remembered where I was. On my first Fourth of July in New York, oblivious to the scale of the fireworks, I was jolted out of my chair when the cracking began. The explosions sounded very similar to anti-aircraft guns, the soundtrack of my childhood. I scrambled around my apartment for nearly a minute before my mind caught up with my body and assured me that I was in no danger.

Growing up in the war zone carves open eyes and ears all over your body. As I write these lines, countless noticing devices are emerging on the bodies of children in Gaza and Ukraine and elsewhere. For the rest of their lives, they will be noticing-machines, their bodies constantly on edge, prone to the confusion of time and place, to interpreting innocuous sounds and sights as the ghostly return of moments from the war.

Rami is right, in a way: Noticing everything protects you from life. But I don’t want that to be his world. He is living in this sliver of time and place allocated to him, and I am determined to keep it from becoming tangled with mine. But of course, my time and place are already woven into his, a generational quantum entanglement that collapses timelines and makes past and present exist simultaneously. Part of him is carrying the life I lived at his age, and all of me is trying, mostly in vain, to inhabit the life he is living now.