John Morgan says he wanted to do two things in his life: be in the military and be a lawyer.

He’s done both those things as an attorney for more than 30 years, first in the Navy and now in the civilian arena. After joining the Navy in ’68 and doing a tour in Vietnam, he eventually went to law school, became a JAG for 16 years, and served both at Bangor and the naval hospital among other places.

“I hung up my shingle here in Silverdale after I retired,” he says. A partner in Silverdale-based law firm Liebert Morgan & Fleischbein PS, Morgan focuses on family law and handles some employment law and court-martial cases. He finds practicing military and civilian law quite different.

“When you’re in the Navy, you’re acutely aware there’s some bigger mission than yourself — there is the mission to defend the people of the United States of America,” he says. “As a civilian, you don’t have a sense of overall mission; sometimes you can feel like your life is lacking a sense of direction.”

Morgan, who is very proud of his military service, says he can’t imagine doing anything else but being a lawyer. He likes to hang out around other lawyers, he likes the uniqueness of every case, and he loves coming to work every day to help fix someone’s problem. He says being a lawyer is a trade like being a mechanic — he’s just fixing different things. At the same time, he likes to tell his clients he’s not a doctor — meaning he has no bed-side manners. “They get their advice from me unvarnished,” he says.

Morgan is unapologetic for the stereotypes and the stigma that sometimes surround lawyers, and says legal associations trying to improve the lawyer’s image are wasting their time. It’s a profession that deals with unpleasant issues, and in every court battle somebody wins and somebody loses — or in case of family law, no one truly wins. Those sorts of battles don’t always earn lawyers positive marks.

At the same time, the legal profession is a necessary one. “We are the guys that took the resolution of disputes from people throwing spears at each other and shooting at each other out of the street and into the courtroom,” he says. “We are, in a sense, the gatekeeper of civilization.”

One thing that is less understood by the public, in Morgan’s view, is the fact that lawyers follow a code of ethics, but those ethics may be different from everybody else’s because the legal system is an adversarial one. Attorneys handling crime cases have to set aside their personal feelings or morals and give every client their best effort. “I can’t set a moral judgment on my client,” he says. “You have to compartmentalize and set aside personal revulsion.”

Another stereotype is that people in the legal field have high aspirations for power or money, he says. Being a lawyer is “not a guarantee to riches” and there are more lucrative jobs than that, he says, and while it’s true that many lawyers move into political office or similar positions, so do doctors and any other professionals. To him, it’s more about the craft, and using the right strategy and tools to represent his clients the best way he can.

Morgan has enjoyed his career and found it better than he thought it may be. “There are few things you can do in this world that present a daily intellectual challenge, and being a lawyer is one of those things,” he says. “There is no humdrum. I never feel like I’m in a widget factory.”.