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Imagine you are a Princeton graduate and 1st Lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

After September 11th you and every other soldier at Ray Barracks in Friedberg, Germany, is expecting to be deployed to Afghanistan. But no orders come. Months go by. Then one day you’re watching CNN, and the anchor announces your unit is being mobilized in the invasion of Iraq.

After spending two weeks in Kuwait getting acclimated to the Middle East, Baghdad falls and your unit crosses the border into hostile territory. The commanding officer hands you your orders. “Go find s---,” he says.

It is easy for second-year LSU Law student Tommy Leslie to picture this scenario. It happened to him. The 27-year-old Thibodaux native attended the Ivy Leagues on an ROTC scholarship and served 14 months in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Eventually he would provide security for Colin Powell and serve as a scout platoon leader. But things were less than organized when he first arrived.

“I don’t think America knew what it was doing when we got there,” Leslie says. “But my commander was excellent, and he invented missions. His quote to me was ‘Go find s---. Arrest it, kill it, bring it in.’”

For weeks Leslie led a group of 20 soldiers that searched suspicious homes for weapons and arrested curfew violators. Many fired on them when confronted.

In the course of a year, Leslie saw firsthand the tide of Iraqi acceptance of U.S. forces turn from appreciation to acrimony.

“We really wasted our first year there,” Leslie says. “There was a tremendous amount of goodwill in the Iraqi people, and it was fairly peaceful compared to what we have now. We squandered that by not delivering basic services and security.”

Though he admits to being shorthanded in the rebuilding effort, Leslie served in the Baghdad Beautification project, and the rebuilding and reopening of Mustansyria University and several orphanages throughout the capital city. The media largely ignored these positive projects, and that bothers Leslie. But the atrocities of war are certainly there, he says, and he does not discredit the media for spotlighting those.

Leslie flew back to Friedberg July 10, 2004, to process out of the military, which can take up to 90 days. One month later, he was sitting in a classroom at the LSU Law Center.

Leslie is clerking this semester for Kean Miller.

His last post was as a strategic liaison for what became the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. There he mediated a land dispute between two families whose property had been seized by Saddam Hussein. What better preparation for a legal career.