Larochelle is not on social media, and he isn’t much for paying attention to the news. “He saved a platoon of men, but he has paid for it dearly, and if I know Jesse, he would do it all over again for his buddies.” She turned and asked if Larochelle would stand with her. Her nerves frayed as she was called to the stage. His widow, Jacqueline, met Larochelle at an event a few years later, where, unbeknownst to her, she was being honoured. Six weeks after the Canadians were ambushed in Pashmul, chief warrant officer, Bobby Girouard, was killed in a suicide bombing just outside the base at Kandahar. “It is a difficult memory for me,” Larochelle said. He has good friends who keep tabs on him, and on his best days, he may even fire up the ATV, though it rattles his back something awful. He has a pontoon boat, and his smile is never more evident than when he is in the captain’s chair, bombing around the lake.
Larochelle still finds joy in the outdoors. “It is not how I pictured things being,” his father said. Larochelle is present and at the same time gone, somewhere into “the blue.” His father said Jesse often seems “lost.” They could be sitting together on the couch, say, but there is a distance between them. His mother cares for him now, making sure he remembers to take his medication, and doing his shopping, banking and pretty much everything, including helping to look after his new Labrador puppy, Hemi. He tried living on his own, but bills got overlooked, or went unpaid, and he couldn’t manage it. Courtesy Jeremy Leblancįifteen years later, on a late September day, Randy Larochelle was sitting at his son’s bedside in a third-floor room in North Bay Regional Health Centre about 10 days before his subsequent discharge.įor Larochelle, time moves forward while it also stands still, with the ghosts of the past haunting his present. Blake Williamson and Jess Larochelle at Strong Point Centre. Larochelle kept the injury to himself until after he helped carry the coffins of Williamson and Tedford during a ramp ceremony at Kandahar Airfield the next day. Just a young private, whose back, it was later discovered, was broken in the initial assault. “We are talking one guy with a pile of rockets and a machine gun.” “Jesse was the only thing holding the Taliban back at that point,” Leblanc said. He emptied one machine gun, grabbed another and emptied it before grabbing a rocket launcher to sustain the barrage. He could see the Taliban fighters sifting through the grape rows.
Larochelle returned fire from his elevated position. A campaign is afoot, spearheaded by Valour in the Presence of the Enemy, a non-profit mostly made up of Afghanistan veterans and others, including retired general Rick Hillier, to have the Canadian Forces Decoration Advisory Committee re-open his file and consider upgrading Larochelle’s decoration to a Canadian Victoria Cross. “But Jess is home now, and he is doing much better.” “It is too early to be certain,” his father said. Doctors were initially unable to pinpoint what was wrong, but the working theory now is that the battery of medications that physicians have had him taking for his conditions - both mental and physical - are causing internal complications. Larochelle was hospitalized in recent months. Why the parties aren't talking about veterans issues this election.Canadian veterans hit hard by Afghanistan's return to Taliban.More than 6,700 Canadian veterans from Afghan war receiving federal assistance for PTSD.“It is as though a part of Jesse never came back from Afghanistan,” his father said. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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