So what's your day job?

(Lt. Erich Almonte briefing his platoon before a mission in Samarra.)

"The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers," wrote William Shakespeare in Henry VI. And this sentiment is well ingrained in Western culture.

But how many young guys holding law degrees from good schools, the ones who could be making six figures stateside, are stationed in Samarra, Iraq, sweating in camouflage, juggling an M-4 rifle and a radio, commanding a platoon of young-faced infantrymen and trying to help reform the city's court system at the same time?

Lieutenant Erich Almonte, 27, of Miami FL. was a college senior at Georgetown University when 9-11 struck. Like many young men who've deployed overseas, he felt called to serve. "I was going to enlist," he said, outright, but a buddy recommended he do ROTC in grad school, law school actually, which was his original plan.

Picture attending classes at Georgetown Law in an Army uniform. He was one of three in ROTC.

"I hated law school," he said, but not for the reasons one might think. "A bunch of law schools wouldn't allow Army recruiters on campus because of don't ask, don't tell. Georgetown was leading the charge on this," Almonte said, "but even with that going on, I felt nothing but support. DC is liberal, but it supports soldiers," although he added, "I know I like practicing the law, (but) I didn't enjoy law school as much as college."

Now he's putting the classwork into practice in places most new lawyers wouldn't even comprehend. "I get to work on the Samarra court system," Almonte said with an almost boyish enthusiasm. When his company, the 2nd/327th, first got here, (around Nov. of 2007), there were no judges, no courts. It was a corrupt pay to release system, he said. Not to mention that Samarra was a very dangerous place for U.S. forces.

With Almonte's help, Charlie company has been able to convince the province to assign Iraqi judges to Samarra, and over 339 prisoners who had never been tried in an Iraqi court, have been released.

"There used to be three major complaints- electricity, water and relatives in jail," Almonte said. "We (the Iraqi judge and myself) went to the provincial judiciary to press our case for more investigators and equipment, and they answered."

Now there are four more investigators working at the courthouse, and the judges are participating in Samarra's reconciliation program. "It's not perfect, but the system is running," Almonte said.

And Iraqis are out shopping on the streets at night. The same streets that used to be empty, even in the middle of the day. The mayor had fled to Syria. In their first month Almonte's platoon got hit by an IED while trying to aid another platoon that had been hit by an IED. It's called a complex attack. And there were a lot of them.

"Just a couple of months later, I saw kids playing soccer in the same field," he said smiling.

There's something in Lt. Almonte that loves the challenge of it all. "Being from Miami and going to Georgetown, I've dealt with a lot of different people," he said. "Picking up Arabic wasn't as difficult as it could have been," he added it doesn't hurt to shock the locals, when he starts speaking Arabic mid-sentence.

"It shows were not some occupier," he said. "Infantry (skills) are not always the biggest part." In Iraq, he said, "Art history is sometimes just as important as military history class."

But the decisions they have to make are by no means like selecting a college class.

"At my level we do tactics. Generals do strategies, but corporals have to make decisions on the strategy level," Almonte said. "If one of my corporals kills someone, it might be right tactically, but the negative outcome could effect the whole city."

A 19-year old stopping to think about negative outcomes of pulling the trigger is probably more ingrained than one might think. But the everyday routines are grinding. "It's hard to motivate soldiers to put up T-walls," Almonte said.

Almonte believes people in the States have long made up their minds about the war. Not that he has time to worry about whether people back home can separate supporting the soldier from supporting the war. He has just enough time to worry about the soldiers in his platoon.

The young ones who came in as boys and the older Sergeants who they all look up to. This past July, his platoon had its biggest test.

"I was about to go on leave," he said. "I was in Kuwait, had my plane ticket home, when I heard by chance that something had happened...I was back at (Patrol Base) Olson in eight hours."

Lt. Almonte's roommate First Sergeant Steven J. Chevalier, 35, had been killed in a grenade attack while on patrol in the city. First Sgt. Chevalier was on his third deployment to Iraq and looked up to by everyone. It was the company's first fatality.

"The soldiers knew that most of the Iraqis were not involved," Almonte said. "They knew that overreacting and harming innocent people would not bring Chevy back. They knew that Chevy, despite all his jokes, always did the right thing. I never worried about them doing something immoral. We just wanted to get out, gather intel, find the guys who did it, and arrest them."

But going into such a difficult mode of action was harder without one of their natural leaders. Even exhausted and drained as they were, Charlie company had to go back into the city where they were attacked twice more the same day. They had to deal with one local who told them that they hadn't been attacked, that something inside the truck blew up and it was their own fault.

"I wanted to hit this guy," Almonte said, "I know my team leader wanted to. But I kept my cool, explained that he was wrong...These are professionals, they did their job."

The city went from a place of very few attacks, a city where they regularly put up concrete walls, conducted censuses, and met with local Sons of Iraq leaders, to a place that felt very dangerous again.

It was almost as if, "attacks were not supposed to happen," Almonte said. "And now all of a sudden we lose such a great leader and strong personality and the city seems more dangerous than ever."

"Anyone can be a good soldier or leader when things are going well, but you see your true nature when things are going poorly."

These hardships are hard to imagine, but the sweat and tears must also make the good memories stand out more strongly. Lt. Almonte shared a few of them:

"Seeing over a hundred people at the courthouse, seeing an Iraqi entrepreneur set up a copy machine and chai stand outside the courthouse (he's making a lot of money copying court documents), seeing Samarra with a working legal system for the first time in five years, maybe more."

"How the young Soldiers have developed and the young leaders have turned into some of the best in the battalion."

"Seeing some locals throw a party on a random night at 22:00, versus when we arrived, and no one left their homes after nightfall, and it had been that way for years."