A bombardment was different from a missile attack which usually left nothing after its impact. Those days were really hard and if one has never experienced such phenomenon, one cannot really grasp the feeling of despair and bewilderment that follows it. What I strongly believe kept me alive during those days was literature. I remember vividly how volumes of books I took with me in our escape from Tehran during the War of the Cities helped me and my family to go through the anguish and hopelessness that came with the war. I used to read Hafiz at night inquiring his guidance—as he is known to be a seer in Persian literature—searching for solace in his beautiful verse and trying to find out how to be a decent human being ever-expanding with love and compassion for others.

At the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War when the Iranian death toll reached one million, I could care less for the Iraqis to even bother to find out about the number of their casualties. Meanwhile I enjoyed sufficient amount of judgment and common sense to realize that there should be something—some kind of profit—in this war for those who supplied Saddam’s regime. A few years later, while watching the tumbling of his statue in Baghdad, I was overwhelmingly joyous and festively jolly—the same feeling as I felt when Khomeini died in Tehran—but at the same time, I could not stop thinking and actually worrying about the Iraqis. I could see it in my mind’s eye what they went through on a daily basis and could actually feel their pain and sorrow. It hurt to see pictures of crying men and women on TV and images of burnt children on the internet. It even hurt more to see fighting boots of young American soldiers coming back home in hundreds.