Growing up in Middletown, Dustin Hill never dreamed of becoming a U.S. Congressman.

Now, the Wellsville-Middletown graduate is one of five Republican candidates for Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District, which includes all of Montgomery County.

Hill joins a group of Republican candidates that includes current 3rd District Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer, Josh Ciskowski of O’Fallon, Brandon Wilkinson of Fenton and Richard Skwira of Lake St. Louis. There are also four Democratic candidates. The primary is Aug. 2.

Hill said the current Russia-Ukraine War inspired him to run for Congress. He filed on Feb. 28.

“It just felt right,” Hill said. “It felt like, ‘Hey, this is the time to kind of give back.’ I tell the people around here a lot that this is about Missouri getting a return on its investment.”

Hill said one of his biggest issues is the country’s current inflation rate, which is 8.4 percent, the highest in 40 years.

“There are only a few ways to fight this kind of inflation,” Hill said. “Sadly, one of them is recession. You can kind of see with our current course that’s kind of the way they’re going with it. One of the other ways to get through it is warfare. It’s a mess. But out of this kind of chaos, people get serious and find those leaders who emerge for whatever reason. They come out of the woodwork. If things were going well, I’d be kicking back on the farm and not run. I’d be doing something else.”

Hill spent many years in the military. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps until he was honorably discharged in 2007.

“Every time someone tells me, ‘I appreciate your service’ and ‘Thank you for your service.’ I’m very humbled because it means a lot to me that they would say that,” Hill said. “It might get my foot in the door, but I still have to back it up with something else. I can’t just run on being a veteran. I have to run on the ideas of the modern world that we’re living in.”

After graduating from W-M in 1998, Hill spent a semester at the University of Missouri-Columbia before enlisting in the Marine Corps.

“Ever since then, I’ve been working with or for the federal government in some sort of fashion,” Hill said. “The people of Missouri and the people of the United States paid tens of millions of dollars to train me and to educate me and send me around the world.”

Hill attended Marine Recruit Training in San Diego, Calif., the School of Infantry in Camp Pendleton (Calif.) and Amphibious Reconnaissance School in Fort Story (Va.).

Hill was on his first deployment in Australia on his 21st birthday on Sept. 11, 2001, the same day of the 9/11 attacks. He immediately deployed to Pakistan, then Afghanistan. Hill transferred to 1st Force Reconnaissance Company and deployed for the invasion of Iraq.

“I’m very lucky that through those 20 years, I didn’t get shot and I didn’t get blown up,” Hill said. “A lot of guys aren’t that lucky.”

Hill later worked as a privately-contracted operations specialist. He received a Bachelor’s degree in business administration at Georgia State University in Atlanta in 2015. He attended a business school in Norway in 2017 before returning to the U.S. in 2018 to take a domestic contract position in Washington, D.C.

In late 2021, Hill returned to Middletown, where he was raised on a horse farm during his childhood.

“I owe my parents a tremendous amount of gratitude because they could have lived in the city,” Hill said. “They were both in the Air Force and they could have moved anywhere. But they bought this farmhouse with 60 acres in Middletown and it has three rooms. When I was 10 years old, they cut a hole on the side of the house and they pulled up a trailer to it so we can have some extra space.”

Hill said he has been getting plenty of support from the Montgomery County community since he decided to run for Congress.

“I don’t think I had a single person shake my hand and say, ‘No, way’ or ‘Sorry, I’m voting for X.’ The community gets it,” Hill said.