The odor of burning tires and running engines, idling army tanks and gunpowder.

It’s not what Mark Erwin sees that brings him back to his time in Iraq. It’s the smell — an amalgamation of scents that will hit him every four or five months, sending him six years back in time.

Back to the front lines.

“It’s not visually seeing something, it’s the sense of smell because it relates,” said Erwin, a 2012 Syracuse University alumnus. “You can see a picture of it, but when you smell it, I think that sense is so much stronger.”

Erwin spent 15 months in a war that lasted more than eight years.

March 20 marks the 10-year anniversary of the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom, commonly known as the Iraq war. Since then, more than 4,000 Americans have died and more than $1 trillion has been spent — a number that continues to rise. Even 10 years later, public policy experts continue to denounce U.S. involvement, and veterans reflect on the lessons they learned in their time at war.

The initial goal of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime, eliminate its ability to utilize weapons of mass destruction and prohibit their spread to other terrorist organizations, according to a 2009 report published by the Congressional Research Service. The organization provides policy and legal analysis to members of Congress. The goal of the operation later changed to helping the Iraqi government establish a system of government, according to the report.

At about 9:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on March 19, 2003, U.S. forces began bombing the capital city of Baghdad. In May of that year, President George W. Bush declared operations in Iraq finished beneath the now infamous banner, “Mission Accomplished.”

But in October 2006 — three years later — Erwin, who grew up in Syracuse, found himself in Central Baghdad. And things were far from accomplished.

In 2007, President Bush sent 30,000 more troops to Iraq in a military surge. It is considered one of the deadliest years of the war, The Washington Post reported.

“I was in Central Baghdad when we made that decision, and it was a big game-changer because after that, that was the turning point, that was when we really started to see a lot more progress,” Erwin said.

But when William Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism at SU, reflects on the initial decision to enter the war, he deems it unlawful.

“The worldwide community condemned it as unlawful, the secretary general of the United Nations condemned it as unlawful, yet we did it anyway,” said Banks, also an SU professor of public administration and international affairs.

Congress approved President Bush’s decision to enter Iraq, but did so based on misunderstandings by the Bush administration about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and their ties to al-Qaeda, Banks said.

Since the war, Banks said the U.S. government has started looking inward concerning foreign policy. Instead of getting involved in international military affairs, U.S. officials have started to focus on cybersecurity and getting a better handle on defense spending, he said.

“It might be several years too late,” he said, “but better late than never.”

Banks said for the first few years of the Iraq war, government approval decreased markedly. Though with the Obama administration came more trust in the executive branch.

While Congress and international leaders debated the legality and logistics of the invasion, soldiers continued to fight the war on the ground.

One morning, at about 5 a.m., Erwin said he awoke to the sound of a large explosion in the distance. Realizing no one else had woken up, he thought nothing of it and went back to sleep. The next morning, he found out 80 people had died after a car bomb exploded less than a mile away.

“But just to think about that, just the human casualty,” he said. “So I think that was — I kind of just learned the magnitude of that.”

The U.S. Department of Defense marks the number of American casualties at 4,422. But various news sources have reported otherwise. The Washington Post cites 4,474 casualties, and CNN cites 4,802 total U.S. and coalition casualties.

The day-to-day challenges were the hardest part for Erwin: missing his family and friends; dealing with mental and physical stress; and trying to find a tangible outcome in a war that was still years from ending.

But with the inevitable hardships came rewards.

When the United States first invaded Iraq, he said, the Iraqi army was disbanded because of its loyalty to Hussein. Afterward, American forces were paired with Iraqis to re-train them to defend the country under its new democratic leadership, Erwin said.

Erwin, who was 24 during his time in Iraq, held two roles in his time at war: a first lieutenant platoon leader and a combat adviser to more than 700 Iraqi soldiers.

While Erwin said he considers his time with the Iraqi soldiers “an incredible learning experience,” he also dealt with cultural barriers.

Erwin said he spoke with an Iraqi soldier who fought in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991 and “loved America.” When Erwin asked why, the man responded: “The Americans shot my tank and then, when they were rolling through, they stopped and they delivered medical aid to us…I just never ever even imagined people would do that in war.”

Erwin bonded with these men, and would eventually receive photos of their families and thanks for his hard work.

“Just to see their progress over time, to see how they were untrained,” he said. “They didn’t know systems, and over a four-, five-, six-, seven-month period, the progress that they made, that was, to me, very, very rewarding.”

For Lt. Col. Michael Kubala, of the Syracuse Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, the lessons learned in the Gulf War were essential in training soldiers fighting in the Iraq war.

In January 1991, U.S. forces entered Iraq to assist the Kuwaiti people after Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. Kubala was deployed to Northern Iraq to assist with the Kurdish relief effort.

“It really opened my eyes to how much I did not know about the organization, and how much I really needed to learn to make myself a better officer,” Kubala said of the experience. While there, he said he had to deal with training and supply shortages.

Kubala remembered the adversities he experienced during his first deployment. As a junior officer in 2004, he was better able to relay those lessons when training younger soldiers for the country’s second visit to Iraq.

“I was trying to make sure that we didn’t go down that road one more time,” he said.

To this day, the United States’ involvement in the Middle East is not finished. Soldiers remain in Afghanistan, still enveloped in that noxious smell of burning tire and gunpowder.

But to the soldiers who came home wounded, and the ones who didn’t come home at all, Erwin says:

“I think those are the ones who we really, truly owe our support to.”

Published on March 20, 2013 at 1:34 am

Contact Maddy: mjberner@syr.edu