The T-Wall Art Of Iraq

From the moment you first stepped off the bus in Kuwait en route to Iraq, you were welcomed by T-Walls. T-Walls are heavy reinforced concrete blast walls that interconnected to help shield personnel and property from bomb blasts and sniper attacks.  The T-Walls resembled overgrown Jersey Barriers that you are used to seeing on the roadways of America with the exception that they stood up to 20 feet tall.  T-Walls were 9 inches thick and could weigh as much as 6 tons.  Once set in place, they were not going anywhere anytime soon and would become a permanent fixture of the landscape on American Bases.

T-Walls helped to open the doors for a whole new era of deployment art.  As units in the past would paint elaborate images on aircraft and vehicles, the units of today would decorate the T-Walls.  Somehow, with a supply system in place that did not necessarily cater to ordering a plethora of colors of paint, units and individuals would acquire paint and carefully sketch out intricate designs on the T-Walls.  The T-Walls would then be painted to represent the unit in that area, to honor fallen comrades or simply to just add a little color into the otherwise dusty and brown scenery.

With the drawdown of forces in Iraq, and it not being economically feasible to ship all the T-Walls back to the United States, a whole generation of deployment art has been lost with the exception of those that survive in photos.  A facebook page was started in 2012 and although it has not been updated since December 2014, it contains a large amount of photos of painted T-Walls.  If you have the time, check out the facebook page called “T-Wall Art of Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan by Military Service Members“.  Below are some of the T-Walls shown on their facebook page.