Georgetown Law Alumni Magazine - Res Ipsa Loquitur
Spring/Summer 2009 - Online Volume 1
Feature Articles
To Serve: Georgetown Law and the Military
By Anne Cassidy
In the spring of 2003, Lt. Karl Blanke (L’07) pushed north to Baghdad with the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine regiment. His platoon was on the leading edge of the invasion, and he admits that he was “a little nervous.”
“At this point, none of us — only some of the most senior enlisted guys — had any combat experience whatsoever,” Blanke says. “We did a lot of training before our deployment but everything was theoretical at this point.”
Blanke and his troops reached Baghdad three weeks after the invasion began. The streets were eerily quiet; the regular Iraqi army had dissolved and the remaining fighters were Fedayeen, Saddam loyalists in civilian attire. Shortly after their initial attack on the city, Blanke and his men were told to find and capture some high-level Baath officials. Blanke and his troops searched door to door. “You’d clear a house that had Fedayeen fighters, then another that had innocent civilians hunkering down, just happy to survive,” he says.
As the men dispersed through the dusty, rubble filled neighborhood, it became hard to communicate. At one point Blanke came upon a few of his men. “Without any direction from me, I saw my own Marines literally put themselves in between innocent civilians and incoming enemy fire,” he says. “My Marines were being fired at, and they were firing at the enemy, but they were still using their own bodies to shield the civilians and get them moved back a building or two away from the most intense fighting.”
It was one of the most memorable moments of two highly memorable tours of duty in Iraq, says Blanke, now an associate attorney at Akin Gump in Washington, D.C. “It just blew my mind. These were kids 19, 20 years old,” he says. “They had never seen combat in their lives … and they were living up to and surpassing any standard you could have hoped they would live up to under the law of war.”
Blanke, who also fought in the first Battle of Fallujah, returned from Iraq a few months before starting Georgetown Law in August 2004. He is one of thousands of students and alumni to whom the pursuit of justice has led to military or civilian service in harm’s way. For every member of the Air Force, Army, Marines or Navy, for every member of the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, for anyone serving their country here or abroad, there is a story — usually more than one. Put these stories together and you have a tapestry of service. The stories here are just a fraction of those our alumni have experienced; we present them not as a final product, but as a work in progress.
A Vital Yardstick
It’s been more than 57 years since 2nd Lt. John Nolan (L’55), who was also in the 1st Marine Battalion, looked through his binoculars and saw what looked like a series of explosions. “First, one Marine and then another was picked up, tossed into the air and dropped back on the ground,” he recalls. The Marines had walked into a mine field. These were shoe mines, he says, “and they take off a foot at the ankle as cleanly as if it had been surgically amputated.” Nolan and his platoon were the first to arrive at the scene; they loaded the wounded onto stretchers and carried them down a narrow twisting trail. When mortars struck, the men would put down their stretchers, seek cover, and then resume their trek once each salvo had stopped. Nolan describes these and other experiences in his book The Run Up to the Punch Bowl, which follows a group of young Marine lieutenants on Korea’s east central front in 1951.
“Some of the experiences I had there I can recall in detail almost as if they happened yesterday,” says Nolan. After Korea, Nolan was stationed in Washington, graduated from Georgetown Law in 1955, clerked for Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, then started as an associate at Steptoe and Johnson, where he’s now a partner. Nolan helped arrange the release of the prisoners held after the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and served in Vietnam as special counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Refugees. But his combat experience in Korea remains a vital yardstick, a way of putting things in perspective: “Whenever I’m faced with some situation that makes me concerned or apprehensive,” Nolan says, “thinking about my early experiences in Korea usually makes the present look like a piece of cake.”
And no wonder, when the line between life and death is so arbitrary and tenuous. Lt. William Sloan (L’11), who started at Georgetown Law only weeks after returning from his second deployment as an infantry officer in charge of 180 troops in Iraq, recounts one time when he walked this line himself: “We were doing a night-time raid … driving ‘black out,’ with our night vision goggles on, so people couldn’t see our lights.” At one point a Marine in the rear vehicle radioed Sloan, who was riding in the lead, and asked if the group could turn on their regular bright headlights. Sloan said yes, and about five seconds after the lights came on, Sloan spotted a pressure plate across the road, evidence of a roadside explosive. “I saw it and my driver swerved to avoid it. It’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t have seen with night vision goggles on, but in white lights you could see it,” Sloan says. And if he hadn’t seen it? “It’s hard to tell with those things,” he says, but there’s a good chance “we would have been killed or seriously injured. It’s things like that that made it interesting.”
Fighting men and women often cite the formative experience of early service; it disciplines the mind and body, they say. It gives them a perspective that they never lose, like a tune in your head that never quite goes away. And it certainly has an impact on their lives in the law.
“Being a lawyer is a continuation of service,” says Tom Anderson (L’10), who retired from the Army as a colonel (after tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan) to pursue the law degree that he’d first thought about getting when he was an undergrad 22 years ago. Anderson, now a 2L, finds “many similarities between the way the military approaches a problem and the way the law approaches a problem.” Both ask you to break a problem down into component facts, analyze those facts and develop a course of action, he says. “And then there’s the personal discipline. The military teaches you to put in the hours you need to achieve what you want to achieve. There was no shock to me of the difficulty of law school. I mean, it’s hard. But I was ready for how hard it is.”
A Reputation of Respect
This confidence continues into the workplace. “The perspective I gained in the military has helped me in this job,” says Simon Latcovich (L’06), an associate at Williams and Connolly in Washington, D.C. “The leadership experience translates well into managing big problems, managing cases, and keeping all the different parts of the case moving. I don’t think you can overemphasize the power of great responsibility at a young age. I think there are lessons taught there that are hard to replicate elsewhere.”
Latcovich, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, served as a lieutenant from 1998 until 2003, the last two years aboard the USS Briscoe, a destroyer that supported operations in the Gulf of Aden and Iraq. One of his assignments was to search merchant ships suspected of moving suspicious cargo. Latcovich was serving as the Briscoe’s officer of the deck, the person responsible for controlling access on and off the ship, on September 11, 2001. His commanding officer ordered an emergency sortie, and the ship left Norfolk, Virginia, and hurried to the coast of New York. “You spend a lot of time off the coasts of foreign countries,” Latcovich says, “but patrolling the waters off the coast of our own country, searching for potential enemies — that was very different.”
Latcovich finished up his Georgetown Law application at an Internet cafe in Spain, where the Briscoe had docked on its way to the Middle East. “Dean of Admissions Andy Cornblatt was kind enough to answer my questions while I was in the Middle East. … I thought the fact that the dean of admissions was willing to e-mail me when I was forward deployed said a lot about what I might actually see when I became a full-time student.” Latcovich was not disappointed. “Georgetown has a reputation that very much respects military service,” he says.
There are many reasons for this reputation — the professors, the clinics, the opportunities — and, of course, the Washington, D.C., location. For students who remain in the service while going to school, coming here offers a wide range of job opportunities. For instance, Marine Capt. Gordon Griffin (L’11) spends his days at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Walter Miller and his nights studying corporations and evidence as a second-year evening student. A former fighter pilot and member of the “Black Knights” squadron, Griffin spent from February 2006 to February 2007 in the Al Anbar region of Iraq and saw things go “from bad to worse.” He downplays the risks of his old job. “Every week we’d have mortar attacks, but after a year, I swear, you sleep through them.”
The military expertise of the faculty at Georgetown Law is another attraction for members of the Armed Forces. Here a student can study international law with Professor David Koplow, who once served as the Defense Department’s deputy general counsel for international affairs. “I teach two courses on international law and we talk about treaty law and international litigation, so my experience at the Pentagon directly feeds into those courses,” Koplow says. Adjunct Professor James Schoettler (L’82, G’82) is not only teaching a law of war seminar but is also editing the Department of Defense’s law of war manual as a colonel in the Army Reserve.
Rules of Engagement
Students often learn from each other, too. “Yesterday afternoon we were discussing the rules of engagement,” says Gary Solis, an adjunct professor who also teaches a law of war seminar, “and two of the military guys in the class were actually involved in writing the rules of engagement for their units.” Solis, a retired lieutenant colonel who spent 26 years in the Marines, 18 of those as a judge advocate, says of his current seminar class: “This semester I have 19 students, five of whom have had active military duty, four of whom have been in combat and one of whom has been a company commander. This provides a very rich source of comment, experience and material.”
Because of its size, Georgetown Law can offer students courses and seminars on military and national security topics that other, smaller, law schools can’t. Adjunct Professor Dave Jonas (LL.M.’05), general counsel of the National Nuclear Security Administration of the Department of Energy and the first judge advocate to argue a case before the Supreme Court ( Davis v. United States ), teaches Nuclear Non-Proliferation Law and Policy: Preventing Nuclear Terrorism. Gary Sharp (LL.M.’88), a senior associate deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Department of Defense, teaches a class called the Law of “24,” which debates torture issues with the sort of hypotheticals used by the television show of the same name. View an interview with Gary Sharp
