Carol Roquemore

Carol Roquemore

Good Sunday morning to you. Pancakes with the grandkids in Tucson sounds good this morning.

She served her country and experienced horror few will ever know. Now a local group that practices "Service Above Self" has stepped in to assist Murrieta resident Vanessa Lerma Jones as she returns to the civilian world.

Recently the Temecula Noon Rotary Club, working with Menifee-based Canine Support Teams, presented Jones with Booker, a service dog trained to assist the former U.S. Navy corpsman as she deals with the memories not easily left behind.

Canine Support Teams is a 22-year-old nonprofit organization that provides service dogs to people with all kinds of disabilities, except blindness.
"We're a very small organization," said founder and executive director Carol Roquemore. "We do a lot of work with returning veterans, no matter what their disability is."

That includes veterans such as Jones, who've been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
"We're seeing more of that all the time," Roquemore said.

Jones served from August 2001 until January of this year as a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy. Corpsmen provide medical care to both sailors and U.S. Marines.
Jones made four deployments to Iraq, often finding herself on the front lines treating wounded Marines and, at times, carrying the body bags containing her fallen comrades.

"I was exposed to many things that have not left my mind and I doubt ever will," she wrote in her application for a support dog. "I have nightmares several times each week about the things I saw and did while I was there."

Jones is now a pre-med student at Loma Linda University. This spring, she served an internship at the new vets center in Temecula, which offers counseling to combat veterans.

Counselors at the center put her in touch with the canine support group.

This year, the Rotary Club sought to assist a local veteran, and Roquemore, a member of the club, put the two together.

"They really picked up the ball and ran with it," she said.

Through fundraisers, the club raised a significant amount of money to offset the cost of training one of the dogs, said Jeanne McClellan, club president.

Jones also wrote on her application that she hoped to acquire a support dog for "mental soothing and emotional support that I haven't found in counseling and medications over the past five years of treatment for PTSD."

"I talked with Vanessa the other day," McClellan told me. "She told me she'd gotten the first good night's sleep she'd had in years. That alone was enough for me."

In this case, "Service Above Self" certainly applies to everyone involved.

- John Hunneman

 

www.caninesupportteams.org