On November 29, 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving, I deployed to be the military legal advisor (JAG) to Joint Task Force-Bravo at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, just north of the capital city of Tegucigalpa. At the time, our country and the University of Texas System were dealing with the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. While UT medical schools were executing their disaster relief and medical assistance plans, thousands of U.S. service members were responding to the nation’s call for duty both at home and abroad.

Before joining OGC in 2002, I had served six years as an active duty Army JAG and about six years as a reserve Air Force JAG. My military profile had identified me as a deployment asset, and so I received orders to Honduras and was placed on military leave at OGC for what I thought would be a short six-month tour of duty.

JTF-Bravo was a small joint service command with Army, Air Force, and Navy personnel — about 1,000 assigned to a Honduran-owned air base. The command’s mission was to enhance the regional cooperative security initiatives and support democratic development in Honduras and neighboring countries, which often included humanitarian, medical, and disaster relief missions.

Not very long after I arrived at Joint Task Force-Bravo, I noticed that my “out of office” reply indicated I was only going to be gone for six months. Those six months turned into almost three years. After about eight months in Honduras, I received orders to deploy to Iraq as a legal officer in the Multinational Force Iraq (MNF-I) Legal Office at Camp Victory in Baghdad.

MNF-I was the senior U.S. and coalition military headquarters in Iraq, commanded at the time by General George Casey. The MNF-I Legal Office was headed by Colonel Mark Martins — a Harvard Law School graduate, Rhodes Scholar, and West Point graduate — who later became the chief prosecutor for military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.

My primary assignment was working in the detainee operations section, overseeing legal compliance for U.S. detention facilities throughout Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, and Camp Bucca. At the height of the Iraq war, the U.S. was holding approximately 15,000 security detainees in these facilities.

At approximately 1400 hours, I was given an order by the Camp Cropper detention officer to enter a makeshift conference room where Saddam Hussein was waiting alone for his meeting with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). With a couple of steps, I was soon standing ten feet in front of Saddam — the only military official, American, and lawyer in the room, with 10–12 guards immediately outside the iron door. He wore a black suit, white collar shirt, and had red eyes from the thick cigar smoke surrounding him.

At this point in my deployment, I had coordinated and escorted ICRC delegates at least a dozen times to inspections of various U.S. detention facilities throughout Iraq, so the MNF-I Commander could report to the Department of Defense, Department of State, Congress, and the President on the status of human rights compliance for U.S. detention operations. My role was to ensure the implementation of all ICRC recommendations — a challenging task given that MNF-I was managing over 15,000 detainees at the time, and the command was still recovering from the fallout of Abu Ghraib.

During my visits to Saddam, I never spoke directly to him. Saddam had been a U.S. detainee since his capture on December 13, 2003, and I knew his days were running short.

Even while the dust was still settling from the controversial execution, the legal office had to turn its attention to the arrival of the new MNF-I Commanding General, David Petraeus, on January 26, 2007. Colonel Martins and General Petraeus were friends — Martins had previously served as Petraeus’s senior military legal advisor during his first deployment in Iraq.

In addition to his “surge” of forces plan, General Petraeus wanted the creation of a new Law and Order Task Force that would shore up Iraq’s judicial system and case processing against war criminals and security detainees. The task force would operate in a secure compound in northern Baghdad where investigators, prosecutors, and judges could work and live with limited external risk to their independence and safety. After General Petraeus signed the order, the task force became operational in about 60 days — with a legal staff of over 100 civilian and military legal officers and support staff.

In some form or another, every JAG in Iraq was involved in a rapidly growing international legal practice known as rule of law — democratic and judicial reform implementation and stabilization following the securing of combat operations in developing countries.

As a result of the National Security Strategy 2002 Report — a comprehensive diplomatic and defense strategic plan following the September 11 attacks — U.S. foreign policy now promotes working with other countries to effectively implement rule of law programs, using available local resources and U.S. funding to improve constitutional guarantees of human rights and judicial principles of fairness and equal treatment before the law.

On April 26, 2007, just two weeks after returning from Baghdad, I deployed again to Colombia as the military legal advisor at the U.S. Embassy. My primary duty was working inside the Colombian Ministry of Defense, assisting senior leadership on military justice and human rights reform. For over 40 years, Colombia had fought an internal armed conflict with the FARC, a recognized terrorist organization that operated out of the jungles and held more than 12,000 hostages — including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three American citizens captured after an aircraft accident in the jungle in 2003.

As the Colombian military made tremendous gains against the FARC, the Ministry had received significant international criticism for extrajudicial executions — killings of individuals associated with enemy forces without affording due process as required by international law. Ambassador Brownfield sought a “full court press” on legal engagement activities to support the Ministry’s human rights reform efforts.

Despite that spectacular success, international criticism resurfaced in September when a criminal investigation opened in northern Colombia involving the Colombian Army’s alleged practice of inflating body counts by shooting innocent civilians and claiming them as insurgents killed in combat. On October 7, 2008, I took my redeployment flight from Bogotá to Houston. During my first week back at UT System OGC, I received an email announcing that General Montoya had resigned following President Uribe’s firing of 27 officers and three other generals implicated in the incident.

Practicing law in a military operational environment — particularly in combat zones — leads you to rapidly identify the important legal issues and create the most practical and effective solutions for your client, which was typically the senior commander. These solutions tend to take the form of a recommended course of action rather than a legal memorandum, so preparation of documents for signature to execute the decided course of action was equally as important as the recommendation itself.

These deployments were the most challenging, rewarding, and interesting experiences I have had as a practicing lawyer and military officer. Since these principles have been tested under fire, I gladly pass them along with the hope that they may assist your professional development efforts, particularly as a public servant in an institutional legal practice.