When Jerome Jaques first saw the giant, gangly black lab retriever-mix he’d been paired with through K9s for Warriors, he wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision.
Jaques is a husband, a father of three, including a son with autism, and the caregiver of a menagerie of household animals. He is also a U.S. Army veteran dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, so adding this giant beast to his already busy life might be more than he bargained for.
“I wasn’t skeptical that the program worked, I was just worried that my lifestyle might prevent it from working,” Jaques said.
But given the alternative, Jaques was willing to try anything.
Jaques spent over 20 years in the Army, starting out in the infantry with the Rangers and ending up in military intelligence, learning to speak Russian and Serbian. He deployed to the Balkans several times, spent seven years in Germany, went to Warrant Officer School, becoming skilled in interrogation techniques, and eventually ended up on deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Naturally, given the nature of his service, Jaques experienced things many couldn’t imagine, and the veteran said he could pinpoint a couple of incidences in particular that contributed heavily to his PTSD.
In 2009, about a year after returning from Afghanistan, Jaques said he really began to display symptoms of PTSD. In 2011, he was medically boarded out of the Army. After his discharge, Jaques received help from the VA through an in-patient treatment facility, and support group therapy. But after moving a couple of times, and starting a family — twins in 2015, a daughter in 2016 — he was unable to keep up with regular support group sessions and his PTSD symptoms began to progress again.
When the family relocated to the Nocatee area in 2017, Jaques noticed the K9s for Warriors campus while driving around checking out his new home base. Then, in 2018, his wife ended up meeting a friend of K9s for Warriors CEO Rory Diamond, and she thought the Ponte Vedra-based nonprofit might have some solutions to help her husband manage his symptoms.
After taking a tour of the facility, and having his application accepted, Jaques decided to look at the opportunity as just another tool for handling his PTSD.
That was, until he met Roger.
K9s for Warriors’ process for pairing a veteran and canine is very deliberate. The warriors speak with a series of experts, trainers and other employees at the program to match veterans with the right fit for them, There are multiple interviews with multiple people to see that the veteran gets a dog that works best for them, specifically.
But at first, Jaques was sure they had gotten it wrong.
“He was just this big, giant, goofy dog,” Jaques said. “I was really worried at first.”
For the next three days, Jaques fretted over the situation, a plight certainly not helped by PTSD. He wondered how the dog would fit in a car with his family of five. How he could take this giant dog to the family’s regular visits to Disney World? Would the dog even be able to ride in his golf cart on trips to nearby locations?
“I was so panicky by the third day, I went and talked to the lead warrior trainer,” Jaques said. “Instead of focusing on the dog, I was focusing on ‘how am I gonna get rid of this thing?’”
Jaques said the warrior trainer listened to his concerns, and explained how it could work out, even sharing the ways Disney accommodate animals, and allowing him to practice with Roger on a golf cart to make sure it would work.
“He really helped alleviate my concerns which allowed me to focus on just playing with (Roger) and bonding with him, and training with him,” Jaques said. “And through the training, you’re tethered to him everywhere, for three weeks. You just build up a bond.”
And that’s the priority of the training at K9s for Warriors. Sure, there’s learning commands, and teaching the dog to learn the commands. But the bond between the warrior and the canine is key.
“They can teach you a command, and the dog knows the commands, but just learning that, the program would only be three days,” Jaques said. “But it’s going through and doing it over and over again, and learning when it doesn’t work, and how to work through it, and having that trainer available to you to help you work through it.”
By the time graduation came around in April, Roger had won Jaques over. Although he also displayed his own unique personality.
“He’s a big sweetheart,” Jaques said. “He’s just so mellow. The only time he really gets excited is when people are clapping. He goes insane when people are clapping, so at graduation where we’re supposed to have these nice, calm service dogs, and everybody’s clapping, my dog’s going crazy.”
And the training became all that more crucial upon leaving the program. In the first few days after leaving the program, Jaques began to have doubts again. Roger wasn’t comfortable on hardwood floors, and the family had to learn to see him as a working service dog and not the lovable Marmaduke-looking animal they saw in front of them. It was a process, but one he was prepared for.
“We worked through it, and that’s one of the things they teach you,” Jaques said. “They teach you, your dog has a personality, it’s an animal, so you may have issues, but you have to work through them. That’s why we practiced so much. Different things would happen and we had to work through it, and I had the confidence to do that because of the program.”
And through that effort, Jaques is reaping the benefits already, something he really notices when driving, because Roger likes to stand behind Jaques and rest his head on Jaques’ shoulder while in the car.
“The first thing I noticed is I drive a lot slower,” Jaques said. “I used to drive like a madman, and now I drive nice and slow. Not only because I’m calmer, but I don’t want to throw this big dog around in the car, either.”
And at the grocery store where Roger uses a little reveres psychology to keep Jaques’ PTSD symptoms at bay.
“Some of the other dogs, when the veterans would get nervous or anxious, the dogs would approach them to try and calm them down,” Jaques said. “With Roger, if I get anxious, he gets anxious, so then I have to focus on calming him down.
And Roger’s dislike for hard-surface floors has actually been a benefit because Roger make sure Jaques takes his time and paces himself during shopping duty.
“We walk real slow like this nice old couple on a Sunday stroll through the meat section of Publix,” Jaques said. “But because of that, I’m not stressed out at the store, and it forces me to slow everything down. It makes me less anxious.”
It’s been couple of months since graduation, and Jaques and Roger are still figuring some things out, but they’ve both found a way to calm each other’s nerves and it seems, despite his early misgivings, K9s for Warriors really did know the best for him after all.
“We’ve changed some of our routines to have him fit into our lives,” Jaques said. “But for me, it’s been a blessing.”
