Attack served as wake-up call for Utah soldier entering Iraq
Three weeks after the United States first attacked Baghdad, the Blanding-born man and his platoon drove out of Kuwait in a convoy of Humvees and 5-ton trucks into the relative calm of southern Iraq. The guys were sitting around, talking, making their way down the bumpy road.
"We had the perception that things were going to be OK, that we were going to be safe, that we'd missed the big battle," he said.
But six hours into their travels — about halfway to Baghdad — the convoy was pounded in an attack.
The event served as a wake-up call to La Giglia, who joined the Army National Guard at 17 while still a junior at Monticello High School in San Juan County. "When you start seeing RPGs flying, you realize this is real," said La Giglia, now 28. "This is not just on TV anymore."
None of the 20 men La Giglia supervised in his platoon were hurt. A rocket-propelled grenade hit a vehicle nearby and did not detonate. "It just stuck in the side," he said.
Thankfully, that incident served as a lucky theme for his tour. "I had a year's worth of those kind of blessings," La Giglia said.
"Time after time, guys shouldn't have come back, but they did," he said.
Once a group of guys was taking an armored Humvee out on one of its maiden patrols. They'd just got the vehicle, which had replaced one of the less-protective "light-skinned" Humvees.
"They didn't get a mile outside of the gate before they took a direct hit by an IED," he said.
The improvised explosive device detonated, blew off the Humvee roof and tore the hood away. "Some guys had broken eardrums, some had bloody noses, but no one was killed," La Giglia said. "There were even a bunch of ammo inside the vehicle that caught fire and started throwing off rounds inside the Humvee. No one got hit."
His love for the service goes back to when he was a teenager. "I always wanted to be a soldier," he said. La Giglia joined the Utah National Guard at 17. "I knew I couldn't afford college, and the Army was a good way to help me out with that."
In February 2003, he was co-opted as a platoon leader. He was training as part of a special forces unit when the 1457th was deployed, but the platoon of 20 soldiers from Mt. Pleasant didn't have a leader and hadn't for years. They were used to doing things a certain way, La Giglia said. "It was a tough transition at the first."
Through war-front dangers and humanitarian missions, the men grew together. One of his most satisfying efforts during the year was cleaning up munitions, rockets and bombs from the countryside. "They were just laying around everywhere — on people's farmland, in their yards. There were just huge cachets of this stuff. We would fill bunkers and huge rooms with the stuff."
You can be the first to comment on this story.