My memories of the country are colored by my emotions- both the fear, anger, and contempt I felt toward the Iraqis and the grief that recalling my time there brings to the surface now.

In all the images I remember from Iraq, the common theme is how dirty and run down the whole place was. Garbage was strewn across every field and piled by the side of every road. Even the intact houses were homely and in need of repair, and wind-blown dirt gave everything a dingy hue. Battered cars with flecked paint plodded down dusty roads. Earth-filled Hesco barriers topped with barbed concertina wire marked the territory of U.S. troops, which Iraqis were forbidden to enter.

They say that smell is the sense most closely linked with memory, a piece of evolutionary biology designed to protect us from ingesting the same poison twice. It's true in my case. I remember Mosul, the most populous city in northern Iraq, for its open sewers, called "wadis." They were slow moving streams of water, excrement and petroleum byproducts that ran between open fields and alongside roads. Their color ranged from a bright, rusty orange through all the shades of brown to a slick, oily black sludge that I'll never forget.