'What keeps me going is my job'

Carlos Gomez-Perez’s skin has mended.

The yawning hole once in his shoulder has closed; his face bears a small scar.

He looks healed.

To some, his scars might be invisible. But they’re evident nonetheless.

“If you’re talking more of the physical, then yeah, I’m healed,” the 24-year- old former Marine says into his cell phone after ordering french fries for breakfast one Tuesday morning at a fast-food restaurant in downtown San Diego.

He suffers nightmares. His temper at times scares his nearly 6-year-old son.

“I’m not liking people too much some days,” said Gomez-Perez, who suffers from residual post-traumatic stress disorder. “If it were up to me, I’d stay home all the time. I wouldn’t go out of the house. But what keeps me going is my job.”

The Iraq veteran receives mental health counseling, but prefers to keep the details private. Instead, he talks about his good job teaching a rigorous two-week self-defense, force protection and anti-terrorism course to deploying sailors at the 32nd Street Naval Base in San Diego.

“I give them my best so they won’t be surprised when they get over there, so they’ll be able to take care of themselves.”

Gomez-Perez finds solace, he said, in his new mission to prepare servicemembers for missions to the same war zone that scarred him, and yet produced a war hero.

A war hero for others.

He doesn’t see it that way.

“Please don’t call me a hero,” he says. “I’m not a hero. I was doing my job.”

During an intense firefight with insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq, three years ago, he rushed back into a building under siege by insurgents to rescue a dying friend. In the midst of the firefight, he had been shot in the face, and had a gaping hole torn into his shoulder — an injury that eventually meant the infantryman needed to be medically retired from the Marine Corps.

For his actions in braving hostile fire on April 26, 2004, Gomez-Perez received a Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest military citation for bravery.

“I’m not a hero,” he repeats. “I’m just another dude.”

Ask him about what happened on the hot April day, and he launches into a long tale that would make Hollywood screenwriters drool. And yet, there is no hint of bragging in his tone, as the former infantryman recounts tales of how some 150 insurgents surrounded “the 27 to 30 of us … attacking from the north, south and east, leaving us only to the west to go.”

But leaving wasn’t an option. The Marines of Company E, 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment stood their ground.

Gomez-Perez and others made it to a second-floor patio as they worked their way toward the rooftop in an attempt to gain control. “They shot at us from all directions. I could see bullets clearly hitting the concrete in front of me.”

His buddy, Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin, had been shot repeatedly in the chest by AK-47 fire. Gomez-Perez was shot making his way toward his dying friend. He tried to stop Austin’s bleeding, to get him off the rooftop.

“But Austin died in my arms.”

Amid the confusion, Gomez-Perez was evacuated.

He went kicking and screaming, not wanting to leave his men behind, said Lt. Col. Gregg Olson, the battalion’s former commanding officer.

When Olson saw him, he wasn’t struck at all by Gomez-Perez’s first words to the leader. “His first words? He expressed concern for his fellow Marines, asking ‘How is everyone else doing?’

“Not only were his actions selfless that day on the battlefield, but his thoughts later were selfless as well,” Olson said in an interview last year.

The younger Marine is a modest man, one who doesn’t take well to accolades for accolades’ sake, Olson said.

“He’s a very likable person,” Olson said. “And a humble man. He thinks of himself more as a team member rather than an individual. He’s a solid citizen and a good American Marine.”