Renaissance Soldier: Phillip Carter

By Brad A. Greenberg '04

Published Jan 1, 2007 8:00 AM

Phillip Carter '97, J.D. '04 is a man of many titles — lawyer, soldier, writer. Back in Los Angeles after volunteering for military service in Iraq, Carter, 31, is catching up with the life he left behind, reflecting on the 11 months he spent helping reform the justice system in Baqubah.

Q. Your squad was there to train Iraqi police. Why did you get involved with the judicial system?

A. We saw pretty early on that there was a very close relationship between the police, the jails, the courts, the lawyers and every part of the rule-of-law system in Iraq. If we simply focused on the police at the exclusion of the others, we wouldn’t have any real effect.

Q. What kinds of problems did you see?

A. The jail itself was a facility built to hold 150 people. When we first started this effort, it had about 475 detainees; they literally could not lie down on their backs because it was that crowded. Disease ran rampant through the facility, and it was simply a horrible place. ... A lot of the cases suffered because the police didn't know how to gather evidence or the judicial investigators weren't gathering evidence for one reason or another. A lot of people were put in jail because of a vendetta or personal reasons, but there was really no case against them. Holding those things up to a magnifying glass resolved a number of the cases. We also found that when we asked about a case, more often than not, our efforts had a real big, indirect effect. Simply by shining the flashlight on those, we would push the Iraqi judges and jailers and police to do the right thing on all the others.

Q. You expended a lot of energy pushing for the release of a convicted murderer named Hamid who had been released and given amnesty before the fall of Baghdad, and then was recaptured and incarcerated on those previous charges.

A. We wanted to show them the system could work, even for a guilty person. Because if we could show that it worked for him, then in theory it should work for everyone, especially the innocent. ... Unfortunately, the last day I visited the jail, Hamid was still there. When the judges heard his case, they decided to keep him in jail. There wasn't a lot we could do to contravene that because at the same time we were pushing for the rule of law, we were also pushing for Iraqi sovereignty, which means accepting their decisions even when you don’t agree with them.

Q. In what arenas of the military did you meet other Bruins?

A. I actually bumped into a few of my buddies in Iraq, although it took a bit of searching to find them. ... A lot of us have kept touch over the year via e-mails. When any of our paths would cross at some military base, we'd get together and throw a few beers and tell stories of what it was like at UCLA and what we’ve done since then.

Q. Could the military use more highly educated soldiers and officers?

A. Absolutely. There is a great body of literature that says smart soldiers do better in combat because you need to be situationally aware and intelligent to stay alive.

Q. Who do you consider yourself first — a lawyer, a writer or a soldier?

A. I'm actually having a bit of an identity crisis right now. I love to write, and I love to teach, and I really don't know what I want to do when I grow up yet. I think I am done being a soldier. I’ve done it for nine years now — I can't think of another job that would be as challenging and rewarding as being the operations officer for a task force like mine — and once you've gone to combat, there is nothing left to prove to yourself or anyone else.

Q. You’ve written articles critical of the U.S. government. Did you ever feel uncomfortable as an inactive reservist?

A. I felt that an honest dialogue about our means and ends in the war on terrorism was incredibly important. With respect to some of the things happening at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, I saw the very soul of our military and our country at stake.

Q. How did Abu Ghraib affect your mission in Iraq?

A. It's tough to stand for the rule of law when you have such a blatant violation of the law on your own country's record. Whenever we talked to our counterparts about detainee abuse or torture or telling them they need to take the high road when they felt like they had to squeeze someone for information, they would always pose that counterfactual back to us: Well, what about what your country is doing in Guantanamo?

Q. What was the most redeeming experience of your tour in Iraq?

A. On my way out, I had some long discussions with my colonel, who is just a brilliant man — Col. Bill Benson — about what we had really accomplished and whether it was all worth it, and he told me at one point, "If nothing else, you can say your efforts resulted in the release of hundreds of detainees." There was one case in particular he singled out of a 14-year-old boy held because his brother had committed a murder and the police simply wanted to use him as leverage to get his brother to turn himself in. In his case, I did intervene somewhat directly by calling the judge and making the release happen. He reminded me of that and said, "To that 14-year-old, he'll never forget your actions. And you'll always be what he thinks about when he thinks of America."