From Combat to Creativity – Rob Akers’ Journey
In this episode, you hear from my good friend, Rob Akers. Rob is a professional pilot, a father, a husband, creative writer and combat veteran.
In this wide-ranging, intimate wisdom conversation, you’ll hear about:
- What it feels like to be shot at while flying an airplane;
- How this brave man deals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); and
- How the creative writing process looks from within the creative mind.
More About Our Wise Guest – Rob Akers
Rob Akers is not a speaker, thinker, teacher, philosopher, intellectual psychologist, preacher or entrepreneur. Rob is just a regular guy who is trying to get through life by making his world a little better every day.
Rob and I recorded inside Parkwood Studios in Charleston, West Virginia.
Resources
Rob’s published story in Spurs & Six Shooters: Tales of the Old West on Amazon.
Connect with Rob on Facebook
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Episode Chapters
[0:03:02] – Being shot at while flying an airplane
[0:06:07] – How Skip and Rob are connected
[0:06:40] – Rob’s career in aviation; military service
[0:09:56] – Rob shares his Main Thing wisdom
[0:13:24] – Survival, love and the will to live
[0:15:46] – PTSD, forgiveness and healing
[0:18:19] – Importance of having a counterbalance on the aircraft and in life
[0:19:14] – Rob pulls back the curtain on his creative writing practice
Episode Keywords
Aviation, Pilot, Combat Veteran, Creative Writing, PTSD, Faith, Love, River Ridge Church, Top Gun, Military, Wisdom, Newsletter, Podcast, Exclusive Content, Healing, Forgiveness, Self-Love, Human Will, Shooting War, Anger, Survival, Projects, Community
Full Transcript of Episode
0:00:00 – Announcer
Wisdom. It’s an incredibly valuable asset, some would say more precious than gold. It’s attractive, appealing, admirable. Conversely, a lack of wisdom is the basis of immaturity, blind spots and bad decisions. Wisdom, it can be gained over time, but it can’t be rushed. But wisdom can be shared. That’s precisely what we are here to do right now. Today. We are here to hack wisdom, to distill it, to understand it and to process it. Why? To get better at life. Welcome to the Main Thing. This is your new nine-minute podcast. I’m your host, skip Lineberg, and I’ve set out to interview the wisest people I know. We’ll see what we can learn from each one when they’re faced with an incredibly difficult, soul-piercing question.
0:00:59 – Skip Lineberg
Hey, hey, welcome to your Main Thing Podcast. I’m Skip Lineberg and I’ll be your host today, twice a month, you know, we bring you a concise, high impact wisdom lesson, fresh insights and unique perspectives from the wisest people around, studying their wisdom and learning. Together. We all get a little better at this thing called life.
From Combat to Creativity Rob Akers’ Journey
In today’s episode, you hear from my good friend, Rob Akers. Rob is a professional pilot, a father, a husband, creative writer and combat veteran.
In this wide-ranging, intimate wisdom conversation, you’ll hear about what it feels like to be shot at while flying an airplane, how this brave man deals with PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder and how the creative writing process looks from within the creative mind.
But first, a special shout out of gratitude to our newest patron, Jon from West Virginia. Jon, thank you so much for your generous financial support that helps underwrite the costs of producing this program.
Now here’s a little bit more about our wise and very humble guest. Rob Akers is not a speaker, thinker, teacher, philosopher, intellectual psychologist, preacher or entrepreneur. Rob is just a regular guy who is trying to get through life by making his world a little better every day.
Rob and I recorded right here inside Parkwood Studios in Charleston, West Virginia.
From the cockpit – now all call and cross-check, as we prepare for departure on this wisdom journey. Over the next 25 minutes you will discover why Rob Akers is one of the wisest people I know.
0:02:40 – Skip
Rob Akers, welcome to the Main Thing Podcast. So great to have you on the show.
0:02:46 – Rob Akers
Thank you. I’m super blessed and honored to be here.
0:02:52 – Skip
Absolutely, Rob. Folks will have heard in the bio and the intro that you are a military veteran. I want to ask you a really weird question what’s it like being shot at?
0:03:02 – Rob Akers
Nothing like starting off slow for an icebreaker, is there. Every time I’ve been shot at, I’ve been in an airplane, so there was no sound or noise to that. I’m not going to get into specifics because I haven’t researched if things are still classified or secret or whatever the tactics that we would use to avoid the missiles. Generically, um, being shot at is like being in a kayak in the ocean on a beautiful day. And you’re paddling along and life is nice and easy and you have all the wonderful sounds and smells of the ocean, and then a shark attacks, oh, and it jumps out of the water, like on Discovery Channel, right. And you have about a five to seven second period of this is real. And then the shark goes away and you’re back to normal.
0:03:59 – Skip
But that adrenaline, I’m sure it immediately kicks in.
0:04:04 – Rob Akers
It does later. So when the missile warning system would go off and there’s tones and there’s things that the airplane is doing automatically to defeat that missile that’s in the air, and there’s a set of procedures that, as a pilot, we are doing up front to put the missile warning system in the most advantageous position to defeat that missile. Five to seven seconds later, as long as there’s no explosion, you survived. You go right back to doing whatever you were doing before.
Now, for me personally, it made me angry, not because the insurgent was shooting the missile at me. That is their job, right. Their job is to protect their country. That did not make me angry. What made me angry was I flew in such a way that aircraft that somebody was able to get a missile in the air against us. So it was an internal at myself anger, not external at someone else.
In 2003, when Iraq started, we got shot um a handful of times. Okay, 2004, that, that handful of times multiplied by 10 okay, because the insurgency was growing. By 2005, 2006, it was a daily event for flying from Kuwait into Iraq, back to Kuwait, into Iraq, back to Kuwait, into Iraq multiple times every day, and it was not uncommon to have at least one missile shot at you every day in ’05 and ’06, because of the rules of engagement had changed. The environment had changed.
0:06:01 – Skip
Thanks for pulling the curtain back and giving us a little peek into that part of your life.
0:06:07 – Skip
Let’s talk a little bit about how we’re connected, and I would start with the phrase “church.”
0:06:15 – Rob Akers
Yes, we both attend a church called River Ridge and it’s kind of weird, at least in this area, to have one church and two campuses. So you attend the Charleston campus. I attend the Teays Valley campus.
0:06:33 – Skip
Yes, that’s how we’re connected,
0:06:37 – Rob Akers
Rob, what inspired you to want to fly and become an aviator?
0:06:41 – Rob Akers
Wow, it’s almost embarrassing to say it, but that stupid Top Gun movie in 1986 with Tom Cruise. If he made made a movie about somebody inventing an app and making a billion dollars, maybe I would have done that instead. But he made the Top Gun movie, and and, quite honestly, that was the motivation that made me want to join the military.
And I gotta say this: my experiences in the military and in life in general and aviation have nothing to do with that Top Gun movie.
0:07:27 – Skip
That was all Hollywood hype?
0:07:29 – Rob Akers
It was Hollywood hype, yes!
I started flying in 1991 after I graduated college, and I got my … on the civilian side … my private pilot’s license, my instrument rating and my commercial pilot’s license.
And then I joined the Air Guard here in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1995. And they sent me to pilot training. So even though I had all these ratings, I still had to go through Air Force pilot training. So I went through that, came back in early 1998.
And then I was in the Air guard until 2008 okay flying C-130’s … larger military aircraft, four engines, transport category aircraft … crew of six. So two pilots, navigator, flight engineer, two load masters, and we went all over the world. And it was just great adventure, it was fantastic.
0:08:30 – Skip
Yeah, and now today, are you still making a living off of flying?
0:08:35 – Rob Akers
I work for a major airline that’s based outside of the state, and I fly a Boeing 767 as a captain.
0:08:47 – Skip
Awesome. Rob, before I get any further and forget to mention this, thank you for your service in the military. Really appreciate you defending our country and all of the sacrifices that you’ve made in doing so.
0:09:02 – Rob Akers
The honor, the pleasure was all mine for serving. I joined to have an adventure and I joined to experience all the things. And I got to do that and more.
0:09:20 – Announcer
Hi, it’s Skip here. You’ve heard about our merchandise store for the Main Thing podcast and I want to tell you about our bookshop. It’s an online independent bookstore where you can find and order the books that were written, recommended and discussed by guests of the Main Thing podcast. Just check the show notes for a link that’ll take you to our BookShop. Buy some books, support independent, local booksellers and support the guests of the Main Thing Podcast.
0:09:56 – Skip
Rob Akers, what’s the main thing you’ve learned in your lifetime so far?
0:10:02 – Rob Akers
Skip, the main thing I’ve learned in my lifetime so far is that all you need is love.
0:10:08 – Skip
Take us through that, Rob. Tell us why that’s the main thing you’ve learned and how you came to that.
0:10:13 – Rob Akers
For me, it’s a conscious choice that we all have to make. And it’s not necessarily the natural choice or the obvious choice or even the easy choice.
I believe that everything that we do in life is motivated by love. Could be love for self. You know, I wanna do whatever. Blah, blah, blah because I wanna do it. That is love for self. Quite honestly, I’ve lived that life and it’s a lonely existence when all you do is live for yourself.
I’ve found, as I have gone through life, that my love for others is infinitely more rewarding— but much harder to do. And it also help … it motivates me to search out spiritual connections, the love for my Creator.
It’s also what motivates me to get out of bed in the morning to go to work, to do things at the house. My love for my family the list goes on and on of everything that I do. I think can be boiled down to love.
0:11:28 – Skip
Take us through some of those elements and maybe break those down for us a little bit.
0:11:32 – Rob Akers
A hundred percent of us live in the in-between world, like I’m doing things for others, but I’m also doing some things for myself. Because you know, my love for myself or my desires override my love for others or what their needs are. Right?
I mean, that’s all of us. None of us are perfect lovers, if you will. But if you examine what you’re doing in the moment and honestly with yourself, analyzing why you’re doing it, I think you can come down to: pick a side—is it for me or is it for somebody else?
Okay, you know, the world is a dangerous place.
0:12:18 – Skip
Well, you talked about being shot at, so I’ll grant you that, that you have authority in that area.
0:12:23 – Rob Akers
Well, since there were cavemen and saber-toothed tigers, the world has always been a dangerous place. Okay, we don’t have saber-toothed tigers today, but it’s still a dangerous place. And what keeps the world from imploding? I think it’s love.
You know this mythical … we always watch the movies, when the guy is going to push the button and then launch all the nukes and the world ends. For some reason, that doesn’t happen in real life, because whoever has their finger about to push the button, they still love their family, they still love their country, their teammates, their life, their, whatever it is that they hold value in, that they love. And they know if they push that button, it’s over. It’s over for everybody, but specifically for them too. I think that comes back to this human will to survive.
0:13:22 – Skip
Okay, tell me about that.
0:13:24 – Rob Akers
I went through survival school, through the Air Force, as a three-week course. And they talked about the will to survive and once a person has lost the will to survive, their life is over. So I’m going to ask you a question and anybody that’s listening, you can answer this mentally and I’ll tell you what they told us.
Once a person loses their will to survive, what is their life expectancy? How long do they have to live?
0:13:52 – Skip
Oh gosh, I’ll say 12 months.
0:13:56 – Rob Akers
How about one second!
0:13:57 – Skip
Oh my gosh.
0:13:59 – Rob Akers
Because that’s when you jump off the bridge or you do whatever it is that takes your own life, right? So all the way up to that point,
0:14:05 – Skip
Whoa, I was way wrong.
0:14:07 – Rob Akers
Well, we all are. Now, I would have thought the same thing, too. But totally losing the will to survive, is a total loss of love.
And they told us stories of like pilots in Alaska, the bush pilots, or whatever. They would crash, you know somewhere in the wilderness, right? And this guy, this one story they told us. The guy lit the cigarette, and then killed himself. And the rescuers, or whoever, found him a minute later. The cigarette was still in his mouth burning. That’s tragic. That makes me sick to my stomach, because that individual lost their will to survive. And boom! That fast, and it’s over, right?
0:14:55 – Rob Akers
So if you have love, and you can have the will to survive one more second … if you can string enough of those seconds together, you have one more minute. If you can string enough minutes together, you have one more minute. And if you can string enough minutes together, you have one more hour. And enough hours together, you have one more day. And one more day leads to one more week, and one more week leads to another month. Another month leads to another year and your circumstances will change. But you need love to do that.
0:15:26 – Skip
Someone’s listening out there right now, Rob, and they hear your phrase love is all you need and they feel like that’s a throwaway.
0:15:34 – Rob Akers
Well, everybody and every situation is different, so I can’t speak to this person on the other end, into the details of their life, because I don’t know them.
0:15:46 – Skip
Sure.
0:15:46 – Rob Akers
I can speak into the details of my life. There was a lot of hate, there was a lot of anger, there was a lot of unresolved conflict. Actually, participating in a shooting war, I’m an active participant. I’m not dropping bombs on people because we didn’t carry bombs, but other than that I was a very active participant in that life. And it is difficult to be in that life and have love in your heart.
And I would carry that intensity from when we were deployed. I couldn’t leave that there. I would bring it home with me and then that same intensity is now in the house in the United States in West Virginia. Everything was so intense. Everything hurt, if you will.
Love does not hurt. Love forgives. And love helps me forgive you or someone else, but also love helps me forgive me. And that’s the place to start, I think, with anybody. That’s where I had to start.
0:17:06 – Skip
That sounds so simple, but I know that’s huge.
0:17:10 – Rob Akers
It is huge, it’s the key. It was huge for me to forgive myself and give myself grace.
0:17:18 – Skip
Talk to us about the role of faith in your life as a husband, a father, as a worker.
0:17:26 – Rob Akers
The role of faith is … it’s a counterbalance to what I am naturally, or the way that I was made. I firmly believe that I was made exactly, perfectly, the way I should have been …with no mistakes okay by my creator, but, and yet, semicolon.
I would not have made myself this way. I’m not an optimistic person by nature. I can have a dark and negative personality type. I get bogged down in the difficulties of life. I can get wrapped up in dramas. Love is something that I give willingly, as my identity of a child of God.
0:18:19 – Skip
It’s really cool and curious to me that you used the word counterbalance, because I’m thinking about you flying a big aircraft, a huge, massive aircraft, and your payload, or your, or your, your load of passengers is not balanced right. You don’t have a proper counterbalance. Let’s say you’ve got a heavy load on the back and now the front’s light, yes, and that plane’s not going to fly very well without a counterbalance, is it?
0:18:45 – Rob Akers
As you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about times in my life when I have flown a plane that’s been out of balance. It doesn’t fly like it should. It doesn’t operate the way it’s intended.
0:18:56 – Skip
There we go, yeah.
0:19:02 – Skip
Hey Rob, I want to talk about writing, next. I know you write. I write. Many of our guests on the show and many of our listeners are writers. Some have published books.
0:19:14 – Rob Akers
Before we start specifically about writing, let’s talk about why.
All humans, we need a creative outlet for our lives, and it doesn’t matter what that creative outlet is.
We need a creative balance. We have a left brain and a right brain. The left brain is the everyday, the order, the logical side of our head. And life, all technology, everything pushes us into that left brain area.
So to counterbalance our lives mentally, we need to spend some time on the right side, on the right hemisphere of our brain, in the creative side, in the imaginative side, in the fun side.
And you can paint, you can draw, you can do whatever write, music, make podcasts, pottery, anything. It doesn’t matter what that is for each individual, but we all need that. And the more that we can be in the right side, that balances out the left side too. Right? I had an experience when I was in Iraq, and it wasn’t traumatic, it was just a …. We went to a place in Iraq and it wasn’t traumatic, it was just a …. We went to a place. It was really cool and there were.
You know some isolated base in the middle of the desert in another country. I don’t know that I can say it, say the name of the place, because I don’t know that it’s out, it’s out in the public. But we spent all day there and met some really neat people.
And that put a story idea in my head. It just went into the, in the creative side, and I could not get that out of my head. In 2008, I’m like—I gotta just start going. I’d never written anything. It wasn’t going to go away. It had to come out. I had to purge that out of my body.
So I got on my computer and opened up a Word document and started. Because I type with two fingers … and I’m banging this thing out. And 20,000 words later, the story was out on the computer. Then I read it, and I’m like—this is not what I want. Select-All-Delete.
And I did it again.
0:21:42 – Skip
You’re kidding.
0:21:42 – Rob Akers
No. And I did it again. And this is not what I wanted. Selet-All-Delete. And I did it a third time.
Ten years later, I’ve got a story. Actually I’ve got two stories Okay, cool, and they’re not published, but they’re full length novels, both of them 90,000 words each. Wow, and that was the original 200,000 words. I have had two short stories published in anthologies.
0:22:07 – Skip
Would you be willing or able to share a link with us that we could share with our audience, those stories?
0:22:13 – Rob Akers
Yes.
0:22:14 – Skip
Awesome. I’ll put a link to those in our Show Notes for our listeners to explore.
0:22:18 – Rob Akers
Awesome, thank you.
0:22:20 – Rob Akers
So all of this writing over the past, what?
0:22:25 – Skip
What is that now 17 years?
0:22:26 – Rob Akers
Yes 17 years, and it’s not every day. I do more writing when I travel for work. Because that creative outlet keeps me from exploring self-destructive behaviors. And it’s a positive thing in my life and something I enjoy.
0:22:46 – Skip
Do you find a therapeutic effect to the writing?
0:22:50 – Rob Akers
Can we talk about PTSD? Is that …?
0:22:53 – Skip
I can, if you can.
0:22:56 – Rob Akers
So post-traumatic stress disorder is what PTSD is, right? And again, everything that I know about it is mostly 98% self-taught or or self, self-researched, or I experienced it. Okay, so I’m not a professional in this at all.
0:23:17 – Rob Akers
When I define that term PTSD— so it happened in the past. Do you know what they call it, if you’re having issues, trauma, stress in the moment? Do you know what they call that? It’s a technical term: it’s called life.
So it happened in the past. It was traumatic, right? Whatever it was, it was traumatic. And trauma and being involved in something traumatic … the natural extension of that is stress. So when I go through something that’s traumatic, it’s naturally going to produce stress.
0:24:03 – Skip
And so the creative writing, the right brain writing, that you do is that counterbalance.
0:24:08 – Rob Akers
Yes, it gets me from the analytical side, the logical side, into this fun side where I can say: well, what if so-and-so gets put in this situation? What would they do?
0:24:20 – Skip
Rob, thank you for everything you’ve shared today. All the heart, all the thought that you put into it, all the love that you’ve shared with our audience and with me today. Thank you so much.
0:24:29 – Rob Akers
Thank you, Skip, and I love what you’re doing here at The Main Thing. I love the heart and the passion and the desire that you have to make the world a better place. And I appreciate that.
0:24:41 – Skip
Thank you, rob. So long for now.
0:24:44 – Rob Akers
So long.
0:24:45 – Announcer
That goes by incredibly fast, doesn’t it? Time flies when you’re hacking wisdom.
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Well, that’s a wrap for this show. I’m your host, Skip Lineberg, signing off for now and inviting you to join us again next time for another special delivery of wisdom.
