“I knew I needed to get back on a regular track to serving in the military, and I didn’t know anything about the military,” he said. “So I tried to go see the Navy guys. They were never there. Army guys told me they had special forces. The Marines said they had force reconnaissance, which I had never heard of. I’d never seen a force recon movie, but then they said they had snipers. So I was like ‘That sounds super cool. How do I do that?'”

He signed up in 1995 and went to boot camp expecting a drill sergeant like R. Lee Ermey’s character in “Full Metal Jacket,” but in his view, it wasn’t as bad as he expected, though still “pretty tough.” After that, he headed to Hawaii and spent a year in the anti-tank assault infantry before completing his first deployment in Japan.

Once he had finished that, he had a chance at sniper indoctrination — a weeklong haze fest, as he put it.

“They beat me down. I was hallucinating after the third or fourth day, just tired, but I made it. I went to sniper school (and) failed, which is a big kick in the rear because you spend three months, lose 20 pounds and you fail,” Perez said.

contributed photo — Perez is pictured at the Regional Embassy in Basra, Iraq in 2006 during his time as a private military contractor with Triple Canopy.

He got another chance to attend sniper school at Quantico in 1998 and passed this time around. He was one of just four who graduated. He spent another two years as a sniper and got to teach sniper school, extending for two more years and finally getting out of the Marines two months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“All my friends are getting called up and they’re getting activated, so I was like, it’s just a matter of time before I do. But I never did, and everybody that I know that got activated just went to another base to babysit the base while active soldier Marines went out,” he said.

His military career, however, was far from over. Upon leaving the Marines, he was contracted by the Navy for anti-terrorism force protection training on a friend’s recommendation, and as a Marine sniper, he felt “out of his league” surrounded by Special Forces, Navy SEALs and Delta Forces.

After a two-week training, he headed off to Iraq with Triple Canopy. Perez was handed a stack of AK-47s and a stack of pistols with the instructions to figure out which ones worked and fix them. On one of his first official jobs in the country, he hopped in a Mercedes and rode down “Route Irish” in Baghdad.

“It’s heyday, and there’s literally smoking cars on the side of the road and smoking holes from IEDs, and this is my first experience rolling down the street,” he said. “Route Irish used to be the most dangerous road in the world, and that was my first trip… I’m in the thick of it in one of the worst neighborhoods in that whole province, and it was a blast.”

The biggest difference between the military and private contracting, according to Perez, is the level of efficiency and hyperfocus private contractors are able to achieve.

“We were technically and tactically proficient and didn’t have to do a lot of the kind of filler work that you’d have to do in the military,” he said. “In the military, you find yourself sitting around and waiting. You always do some unnecessary things. You might almost feel like you’re bubble wrapped because you’re wearing shoulder pads and cuffs, but you can never maneuver like that. Wear what’s gonna save your life, so the streamlining is the biggest difference.”

In all, Perez was a contractor for six years, but he said it started to wear thin on him toward the end when he felt the government bureaucracy creeping back into the work. As active combat operations in Iraq were winding down, he wrapped up his contracting stint in 2010 and welcomed his first child with his now ex-wife, who hails from the Marshalltown area.

Because of that connection, Perez relocated here and quickly realized that he wasn’t going to find a job in the high-threat security field in Iowa — state troopers handle most of it when it is needed. Instead, he took a job putting fertilizer on grass and went back to college while joining the Army Reserves.

After another stint working long days as a Schwanz delivery driver, Perez decided he needed a change while balancing that job, the Army Reserves and school. He got his degree and heavy equipment certification and found out M. Gervich and Sons, a scrap business with a 120-year history in Marshalltown, was hiring an operations manager. He started in 2011 and still holds the position to this day.

“Doug and John (Gervich) have enabled me to be successful both on the Army side and the other, so I’m currently getting ready to retire out of the Army,” he said.

He currently serves as Company First Sergeant for the 411th Engineer Company out of Cedar Rapids, which recently returned from an 11-month deployment from CENTCOM with troops supporting missions in Kuwait, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. With 14 years in the reserves and another six in the Marines, Perez has 20 years of official service to the U.S. under his belt along with nearly a decade in private contracting. It’s been a long and winding road, but he’s learned a lot in the process.

“Whatever you put into it, you get out of it. The military is unique to where the harder you try, the more they’ll let you do. So if you’re willing to take risk and put yourself out, even if it means failure, as long as you’re doing good, you will advance — whether it’s opportunities for training, career advancement. If you put in the effort, they’ll get it out of you,” Perez said.

On the contracting side, he added, he learned to stay proficient to stay alive.

“You have to be ready. You have to know your first route, second route and third route through a war zone, because when plan A goes down, you need plan B, and when that goes down, you still need another one. You need to know where your hard point’s at,” he said. “In the military, you get out what you put into it. When you’re doing the tactical environment, you’re deployed, you don’t rise to the level. You fall to your training.”

Currently, he’s training for a sniper competition in North Carolina set for next year.

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com