West Point grad recounts tense moments in Afghanistan

Only a few weeks ago, West Point graduate 1st Lt. Chase Giacomo of Kalispell was with his platoon taking Taliban fire from the mountaintops in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

Then the enemy came down the hillsides, walking their machine-gun fire and mortars closer and closer to Giacomo and his men.

“That was probably the hardest moment of my deployment,” he said. “I was like, OK, I want to shut the movie off. Then I realize I’m in charge. If I quit, we’re done. This isn’t a game — this is life and death.”

In the last three months, Giacomo survived two combat encounters, got air-lifted to Germany with a back injury, brought the body of one of his best friends home to California and returned to visit Kalispell with his wife Carmin and young son Graham.

“It’s surreal,” he said, sitting in the morning sun at his family’s home overlooking Foy’s Lake.

Although just 24, Giacomo has traveled a long road since he and Matt Krause accepted appointments to the United States Military Academy at West Point, making history as the first Whitefish High School senior in memory to join “the long gray line.”

At the academy, Giacomo said he struggled through near failure the first semester, but said he leaned on God during those difficult months.

“It definitely pushed my faith. It was tough but I turned things around. I endured,” Giacomo said. “I was on the debate team and a law major and really ended up excelling. I did a semester abroad in the Ukraine and did an internship in the UN in Switzerland with the legal adviser’s office.”

Six days after graduating in the top fifth of the 2010 West Point class, he married Carmin, his seventh-grade high school sweetheart. The two had their first son, Graham, almost a year later in August and expect a baby girl in December.

“We want a big family — that’s one of our goals,” he said. “My wife would like eight, but we decided to have four or five, enough for a basketball team for me to play with.”

After training at various locations around the country, he was stationed at Fort Lewis in field artillery. In April, Giacomo and his platoon replaced an infantry and cavalry unit covering 450 square meters in Southeast Kandahar province. Although artillery units conventionally shoot giant howitzers guns, they never touched one in Afghanistan.

“There’s a lot of risk for collateral,” Giacomo said. “I was at a COP — a combat outpost. Just two platoons. We just dug dirt up for walls. It’s just a little thing out in the middle of the mountains.”

He and his platoon patrolled with the Afghan National Army on missions, gathering intelligence and helping local Afghani police provide security from the Taliban to the multiple villages in their area. His platoon also was tapped to help clear villages of weapons or ammunition in other areas.

Often he met with village elders or brought them together with officials from the state department or Department of Agriculture. Agriculture experts worked to wean them from growing poppies that feed the opium trade, while the state department assisted them with establishing a government.

Meetings followed a format of eating a meal or at least having chai, their word for tea.

“It didn’t matter where you went, someone brought me chai — it’s 100 degrees out and they still want to drink boiling hot tea,” Giacomo said with a laugh. “Overall, that was what I did on a daily basis, meeting the locals.”

He landed in Afghanistan just before the start of the fighting season, which runs from May through September. Just because of timing, the units they replaced saw little action and no combat.

“So May 1st, it kicks off. We started finding lots of IEDs, improvised explosive devices,” he said. “Honestly, a lot of them were targeted at local police because there are a lot of local police checkpoints everywhere now.”

One visit to an important village and police checkpoint turned into much more than a chai party.

To reach it, Giacomo, his platoon and the Afghan Army members had to drive up a steep creek bed through trees and rocks the size of couches.

“It was an important place for me to go,” he said. “They would fight the Taliban often because it was so hard to get to.”

On the way, they encountered a bunch of yellow jugs that forced them to call in a unit to clear them, even though it turned out they weren’t improvised explosive devices. Just as they finished, information came in that the Taliban was planning to overrun that police checkpoint just before nightfall.

“It just worked out great,” Giacomo said. “Normally, if I was on an outpost, by the time we got our gear on and drove 30 to 40 miles north, got through the creek bed, we would get there for the aftermath.”

Their sister platoon took off and his followed five minutes later. They found the checkpoint and then they themselves were under full attack so Giacomo called in an F-16 jet and an attack helicopter.

“They were on scene about 20 minutes in,” he said. “I was talking to them, giving them grid locations where we were taking fire. Once they saw the massive air support, they kind of backed down.”

During the battle four policemen who had been captured managed to escape and get back in the checkpoint.

“It was a big victory for us. None of us got hit. We were pretty happy,” Giacomo said. “It was an emotional event. It was definitely a realization that the fighting season is in full swing.”

He said fighting together helped them build credibility and a relationship with the Afghan army. He called them an awesome group of people.

“They are kind of like cowboys in that they don’t necessarily do things the way we do,” he said. “But in a fight, they are pretty steadfast.”

In June, he and his platoon were flown in the middle of the night to join special operations forces and others to clear villages in one of the most dangerous areas of Kandahar Province.

Giacomo said he usually gave soldiers the option to pray before a mission, but this time he was ready to push off quickly when his soldiers reminded him. He was surprised when one of his roughest, toughest soldiers volunteered to pray.

“I think he dropped a couple of f-bombs and a couple of other swear words in his prayer,” he recalled. “It was really funny but it was from his heart. It was pretty cool to see because it brought everyone together.”

During a series of hair-raising encounters, soldiers in the company were hit and were air-lifted out, but the rest — including Giacomo and his platoon — stayed behind to continue the fight after getting resupplied. Just as they started to move one night, another attack started.

On this mission, Giacomo had a commander, so he served as the platoon leader.

“My guys, we can see rounds hitting the rocks by them. They see two guys crawling up so they shoot those two guys, then run down to us,” he said. “We’re taking fire from all over. I’m firing now. I’m the platoon leader so I’m trying to conserve ammo too because we still have to move to an extraction point.”

Just minutes after his men had run down to his location, a mortar blew up that spot. As the enemy moved closer to their location, Giacomo had that hardest moment of his deployment with the heavy burden of leadership when he again reached for his faith.

He said he had been reading Psalms 91, which says “A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand at your right hand, but it will not come near you.”

“So I had been praying that over and over. In that moment, I sort of strengthened myself — and the mortars got closer,” he said.

Giacomo and his men shot their own mortars, grenades and other fire power, then a helicopter provided air support, ending that battle. But that night, his commander sent him out with a squad to try to find them using night-vision optics.

They spotted the enemy, then began firing while helicopters came in to support them but the Taliban went undercover to escape. Giacomo and the squad returned and the commander decided to evacuate them.

“At this point, I’m hurting pretty bad,” he said. “I had pushed a disk on to a nerve. I was taking 800 milligrams of ibuprofen every hour just to get through the pain.”

A surgeon sent to check out the platoon insisted that he fly to Kandahar City for an MRI, which sent him to Germany and then home to Fort Lewis for rehabilitation and therapy. He had just started therapy when his close friend from West Point,1st. Lt. Sean Jacobs, 23, was killed by an IED.

He asked to accompany his body back from Dover Air Force Base to Redding, Calif., where the whole community turned out.

“I wanted to see his family and relate to them. His mission was the same as mine. We were one helicopter ride away — the same battalion, the same unit. He was in my wedding,” Giacomo said. “It was intense. It was my job to open the casket, inspect his uniform, make sure everything was right, even though it was a closed casket funeral. It’s a military thing. You want him to be at his best.” For Giacomo, it was more confirmation that he had followed the right path to become a military leader, then become a lawyer and one day run for elected office, even president. He said others start working for political candidates right out of college to get a jump on their careers.

“That’s awesome. That’s their route. For me, I want to see how things actually work,” he said. “War, you watch movies and you see it but when one of your best friends is killed and you fought alongside of him, it totally changes your view on it. Not that you’re anti-war. It’s just not a movie. There’s no reset.”

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by email at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.