Malverne native is promoted to Air Force chief master sergeant

When Malvernite Thomas Carpino joined the Air Force in August 2001, his parents, the Rev. Thomas and Kathy Carpino, recalled, he was as eager as any teenager to serve his country. A 2000 graduate of Valley Stream North High School, Tom attended Nassau Community College for a semester, but decided that he wasn’t a good fit for college.

“He jumped right in and signed up for six years to serve,” his father said of Tom’s decision to volunteer for service. “He went in at a peaceful time, thinking that he’d be able to go in and experience the military life. As you can imagine, everything changed.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Tom was quickly deployed overseas to Iraq. His passion and eagerness, however, never wavered.

“For us, as parents, we prayed him through a lot of those deployments,” his father said. “In all honesty, his character fit him well for the responsibility that he ended up having, especially the danger that he faced. His temperament and his personality went well with the challenges that he faced out there.”

Carpino, 38, who is now stationed at Fort Dix in Trenton, N.J., was promoted to chief master sergeant last month. His parents said they were amazed at how fast he progressed up the ranks.

“I think he moved up faster than most people because of the experience he had in ground-force specialist training,” his father said. “We were very proud of him to see him achieve that, but it was scary at the same time, because the danger was there.”

When Carpino returned to Fort Dix from overseas in 2006, his leaders asked him to write up a training manual for military combat in a residential zone. He spent the following four years training troops at Fort Dix who had completed boot camp elsewhere, preparing them to fight in Iraq.

“You’re talking about military combat in an urban zone,” his father said. “We’ve never had that before until this war, and that requires specialized training. That was hard for him, but he put his time in and he did the hard work.”

Carpino went on to earn an associate’s degree as an instructor in technologies and military service at the Community College of the Air Force in 2008, a bachelor’s in workforce education and development at Southern Illinois University in 2014, and a master’s in organizational leadership at Colorado State University in 2017. He and his wife, Pamela, have a 5-year-old daughter, Lucy Anabelle.

His mother said that watching him become a man so quickly was a remarkable experience. “I guess that for me, that’s been much more telescoped because of his leadership abilities,” she said. “He’s taken so many different classes and courses in leadership, and that has propelled him to where he is now at such a young age.”