Glance at Mission Valley resident Cody Perron and he might strike you as a fit, young professional, with a well-trimmed beard and hairline threatening to recede \u2014 a mild-mannered man with a pleasant Louisiana drawl. And you\u2019d be wrong. This man is from Cajun Country.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen it comes to rough and tumble, we\u2019re outdoorsmen and fighters, and we like challenges,\u201d Perron said during a recent interview. \u201cThat\u2019s the mentality we have down there.\u201d<\/p>\n That is also the mentality Perron carried with him when he left Louisiana to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1998.<\/p>\n \u201cMy thought was that the Marine Corps was the best and the toughest,\u201d he said, \u201cand I wanted to be the best and the toughest, so that\u2019s why I joined.\u201d<\/p>\n However, after serving on protection duty at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, Perron wanted a different challenge than those offered by the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a great assignment. It kind of catapulted me to the [U.S.] State Department and what I wanted to study \u2014 with a focus on Russia and Central Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n Perron left the Corps after about five years, earned a global affairs degree at George Mason University, and in 2008 became a special agent with the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), the U.S. State Department\u2019s little-known security and law enforcement branch.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s on the frontlines,\u201d Perron explained, \u201cbut nobody knows what we do. About one third of DSS agents are former military. It\u2019s federal law enforcement, but also diplomatic. It\u2019s a little bit of everything.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Perron resigned from DSS late last year, the experience remains close at hand. His responsibilities with DSS included both protection \u2014 think the likes of former Secretary of State John Kerry and Britain\u2019s Prince Andrew \u2014 and personnel recovery.<\/p>\n Perron described that latter: \u201cWe\u2019re utilizing any and all assets to recover American personnel in any country \u2026 We find a way to access them and recover them. My role was more of a facilitator. I developed all the plans. I was investigative and logistics. I combined the assets I had with intelligence and defense organizations, and handed that higher up so they could take action.\u201d<\/p>\n At DSS, Perron thrived on \u201cthe diversity and the versatility of the job,\u201d so much so, that after resigning, he wrote and published a book about it, released in May, \u201cAgents Unknown: True Stories of Life as a Special Agent in the Diplomatic Security Service.\u201d<\/p>\n While Perron spent a lot of time protecting U.S. and foreign dignitaries in far-flung locales, one of his most compelling stories is about recovery, set on the border of Iraq and Syria. Two former ISIS hostages, Yazidi girls, had escaped and made it to a United Nations refugee camp. At the same time, U.S. forces had been attempting to find and rescue U.S. humanitarian aid worker Kayla Mueller, who had been abducted in Syria. Perron\u2019s task was to glean as much information from the girls as possible, with the hope of aiding in Mueller\u2019s recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat an experience.\u201d Perron paused for a moment. \u201cI interviewed these two girls. It was difficult. They were 15 or 16 and they\u2019d been through brutality, but they were resilient. Their parents were executed. One girl was separated from her sister. She had been sold four times \u2014into sex slavery. It was heartbreaking, but it was important that we got that information.\u201d<\/p>\n Such missions don\u2019t leave much room for family, logistically or emotionally.<\/p>\n \u201cI chose to remain single throughout that time and that made life a lot easier,\u201d Perron said. \u201cI\u2019d had a lot of freedom, but it could get lonely, and I was required to leave again. So, I left the department to start a family \u2014 with a young lady from San Diego and her soon-to-be 5-year-old.<\/p>\n \u201cI miss it completely,\u201d Perron continued, \u201cand I had a blast doing it. But there\u2019s an end to everything and this is it. To be honest, I missed out on being a dad and now I get to be a dad.\u201d<\/p>\n So Perron is now off on his next challenges, marriage in November, parenting, and promoting his book, with the same sense of discipline he learned in the Corps or perhaps earlier:<\/p>\n \u201cMy mom got me a journal years ago and she said I could write a book someday. And when mom says something, you do it.\u201d<\/p>\n For more information about \u201cAgents Unknown,\u201d visit agentsunknown.biz<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014Kit-Bacon Gressitt is a San Diego freelance writer. She is also publisher of ExcuseMeImWriting.com and WritersResist.com. She is host of Fallbrook Library\u2019s monthly Writers Read author series and open mic and teaches Women\u2019s, Gender and Sexuality Studies in the Cal State system. Reach her at kbgressitt@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Por Kit-Bacon Gressitt<\/p>","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":234889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11557","_seopress_titles_title":"Marine, special agent, author and dad","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11557,11551,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-mission-valley-news","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Marine,](\"https:\/\/missionvalleynews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/1-Cody-Perron-courtesy-of-the-author.jpg\")
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