Camp helps returning vets

July 10, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Cincinnati Enquirer

LOVELAND, Ohio

The seeds of an inspiration were planted after Lisa Dunster swung a knife at her husband.

“I was in the kitchen when Sean [her husband] touched me on my shoulder, and I just missed his chin with the knife,” Dunster recalls. “I dropped it and broke into tears.”

Dunster, an Ohio National Guard veteran, had returned from the first Gulf War where she’d worked as a mechanic with a water- purification unit from 1990 to ’91. Her reflex reaction with the kitchen blade brought a scary realization about the effects of war.

“I can joke about it now,” said Dunster, 44, of Loveland. “But I was realizing there were parts of me that had changed. My family had to catch and deflect a lot of things. Such as ‘don’t walk up behind me when I’m holding a knife.’”

By 2004, when the United States invaded Iraq the second time and opened a front in Afghanistan, Dunster was an English teacher at Sycamore High School.

“I started paying attention to the effects on veterans’ families as this war progressed,” she said. “The divorce rate is through the roof. The veterans sacrifice, but their families do, too. As a teacher, I see how it filters down to the kids.”

Dunster hatched an idea for a nonprofit to help National Guard veterans and their families readjust after war duty. Two years ago she submitted her concept to a contest run by O, The Oprah Magazine. Dunster was among 80 winners the magazine invited to New York for three days of leadership training.

Her idea evolved into the Compass Retreat Center, which welcomes National Guard veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan along with their spouses and children for retreats at SpringHill camp in Seymour, a southern Indiana city about 95 miles from Cincinnati.

The center had a pilot program in December and plans six-day retreats in August and October.

Funded by private donations, Compass offers psychological, spiritual and social nourishment through workshops, support groups and ministerial service as well as recreational camp activities such as swimming, horseback riding and paintball.

Dunster quit her Sycamore teaching job after 14 years to devote herself to the project, which allows her to tap a range of background skills. The Dayton-area native once worked as resident director of a camp on Cape Cod. She holds a communication arts degree from the University of Cincinnati and a master’s in education from Xavier.

She and husband Sean, an executive producer at WCPO-TV in Cincinnati, have two daughters, age 10 and 9. The retreat center, she says, is about “the recognition that the whole family has paid a price. If you stabilize the home environment, you can better manage whatever else life throws at you.”

Laure Shoemake of Batavia participated in the December retreat with her husband, recently retired Marine reservist Lt. Col. Thomas Shoemake, and two daughters, age 5 and 7. Lt. Col. Shoemake served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Laure Shoemake helped develop the Compass curriculum after she heard Dunster speak at a Clermont County meeting of “Hole in My Heart,” a support group for military mothers.

About Compass, Laure Shoemake said: “My kids would go back in a minute. It’s a very nourishing environment, with the arts and crafts and other recreation. The kids don’t know it, but [facilitators] can watch for coping skills and for maladjustments in coping skills.

“It’s a healing atmosphere. When your spouse comes home from war, he’s not really home. That person has changed, home has changed, relationships have changed, children have grown. People don’t understand the stress that goes along with it.”