Friend or foe? It's hard to tell in the desert. Image: AP

HE can still smell Iraq. He can even taste it.

Iraq tasted like dust, a fine talcum powder which was always on the wind and which eked its way into everything.

The smell was of oil, of garbage which was never collected, and of death. And there is one other smell which lingers. It is the equally repugnant stench of human waste, which was burned for want of a better method of disposal.

Ten years after the start of the Iraq war, David, an Australian security contractor who worked with the US army, cannot remove Iraq from his mind, from his senses, from his very being. He spent just over a year there safeguarding US army convoys and bases. It is a year which has changed his life forever.

Imagine guarding all this against a hostile foe. Image: AP

FORGOTTEN HEROES

David estimates there were close to 1000 Australian security contractors who worked in Iraq. Theirs is the untold and uncelebrated story of the war. They performed a crucial, often highly dangerous role, which went largely unrecognised.

Contractors like David served with the US army in full uniform, but had no rank and were awarded no medal on their return. They were admittedly well paid, but receive no ongoing pension. And they were called 'mercenaries', a term which makes David bristle with anger.

"The biggest misnomer is that word 'mercenary'," he tells news.com.au. "We were not there to fight. We were there to defend and protect the coalition military troops.

"If we saw someone with an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) pointed at us, then we may have fired. There were some cowboys over there, but I heard a lot of people praise the Anzac contractors for their professionalism and control".

Danger was everywhere. David said he went to bed to the sound of falling mortars more nights than he could count. Mortars will kill anyone within a 15 metre radius who is not in a bunker. Image: AP

SCARS THAT WON'T HEAL

Today David suffers from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder). He holds down a desk job in a major Australian capital city and carries on with life as best he can, but there are elements of his Iraq experience which wake him at night, and which he fears will torment him forever.

Many factors contribute to his illness. It was tough living every day with that chilling feeling that anyone, anytime, on any street or highway, could turn a weapon against him. It's a cumulative thing which broke him down inside.

That said, some days scarred David's psyche much deeper than others. Like the day he was part of a US convoy carting general supplies going through the outskirts of a middle-sized town.

"We got hit by an IED that tore the front wheel off one of the security vehicles and substantially damaged the engine," David recalls.

"When the guys exited the vehicle they came under heavy RPG and SAF (small arms fire). They tried to get onto a low piece of ground to maintain cover while we tried to provide covering fire. One of the medics was on his knees helping one of our comrades. He got up to get attention was and hit by large calibre rifle fire. We wore body armour but he exposed the area below his armpit.

"The bullet entered there and exited out the side of his neck. It took a chunk out of his body the size of a softball. He died instantly. He was a father of two couldn't stop talking about his kids. He had left the military because he was constantly moving around and he took this role to set his family up for the future."

Clear and present danger... US troops carry a fallen comrade after a convoy was ambushed

David is haunted not just by his fallen comrades but by the innocent victims of war.

"I was one of the backup medics for our unit and I volunteered in aid stations. I was helping patch up kids who were maimed by IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Those kids were hard. A lot of them didn't cry as they bled."

They suffered in silence. Image: AFP

A FUTILE WAR

When David went to Iraq, he believed whole-heartedly in the cause of reconstructing a country which had been pillaged by its ruthless dictator Saddam Hussein.

By the time he got back to Australia, he was a deeply disillusioned man. The war had been futile. Any of its more noble objectives were not realised. Iraq, if anything, was in worse chaos than before.

David was a security contractor, not a historian. But he saw what he saw and concluded what he concluded. In summary, he identifies three main reasons why the Iraq war turned into one gigantic sandy, bloody, futile mess.

1. BAD LEADERSHIP: David believes the US generals had a blood lust. "They love war, those American commanders. The only one who didn't was Colin Powell, who wanted to try diplomatic means before everything else. Also they kept rotating civilian and military commanders."

2. LACK OF COMMUNICATION: David says America failed to communicate its nation-building objectives adequately to the populace. The US made some monumentally stupid public relations blunders, such as printing leaflets in areas where huge proportions of the populace are illiterate. They also failed to gain anything even faintly resembling a positive run on the notoriously pro-Arabic Al Jazeera network, which goes into virtually every Iraqi home. "I saw mud huts with a 10 foot satellite dish for TV and all they watched was Al Jazeera," David says.

Sometimes, the communications failings boiled down to a single word. "They kept using that damn word 'liberate'. They said 'we're here to liberate you' and off they went. It offended people."

3. RELIGION: According to David, the Iraqi people never got it into their heads that it wasn't a religious war, that it wasn't about Christianity vs Islam. Again, this is pretty much a subset of point two i.e a failure of communication. It is also, he says, one of the key issue of the Afghanistan War.

CONVOYS TO NOWHERE

There are so many scenes which symbolise the wastefulness and futility of the Iraq war. For David, it is the attacks by insurgents on the convoys he was employed to protect.

The insurgents would attack convoys carrying the heavy equipment needed for nation-building on the assumption it was equipment for US bases. Yet again, this was a case of communication fail.

The insurgents, many of whom remained supporters of Saddam Hussein, wouldn't always attack on a mistaken premise. Sometimes they attacked just to cause chaos. One day David was guarding a convoy transporting nearly one million 1.5 litre plastic bottles of water. The convoy came under attack and most of the load was lost.

It was hard to know who to trust. Image: AP

"The vehicles were hit quite badly," David recalls. "There were IEDs planted in the road under dead animals, under human bodies. The insurgents were ingenious and cold blooded in the way they do things. Life is cheap over there. They believe if you die, it's because Allah wanted you to die."

And what David pretty much believes is, the whole Iraq war was one gigantic convoy to nowhere.

Continue the conversation @antsharwood @newscomauHQ

Ten years on, 10 Iraq numbers that say it all

Violence still rife in Iraq