Rob Ward has known adventure.
That’s not so strange seeing as how he spent 25 years in the Air Force, retiring in 2018 as a Lt. Col. After all, adventure is part and parcel of the military life. That’s what attracts many to it.
His military adventures, however, did not necessarily involve combat, or at least a whole lot of it. He was briefly deployed to Iraq in 2011 and shortly after his arrival a mortar round managed to land in the unit’s field hospital.
But Lt. Col. Ward’s adventures took him down a different trail in the Air Force. For one thing, they included the unlikeliest and perhaps the rarest of military trysts. In March of 1998, he met a fellow airman, and the following March, they were married. That would be Danna Ward.
Marriages between active-duty soldiers come fraught with risk, most obviously the risk of long separations as they are assigned to different duty stations. This particular marriage, which is still going strong all these years later, had a twist in that the pair of enlisted personnel made an unusual decision: If they were both to stay in the Air Force, which they fully intended to do, one of them should be an officer.
They agreed that the “one of them” should be Rob. So he went back to school, earned his degree and was commissioned in December of 2001. So now, the marriage had become that of a commissioned officer and an enlisted person, which, considering the rather severe imbalance of power there, nevertheless didn’t seem to hinder the success of their marriage at all. In fact, when Danna Ward retired in 2015, she retired as a master sergeant, so it’s not like she didn’t have more than a handful of power herself..
Even how the one-day-to-be-Lt.-Col. Rob Ward wound up in the Air Force at all proved to be something of an adventure.As it turned out, the Air Force was actually his third choice. His older brother, Mike, came home from Korea, a corporal, in his full dress uniform. Rob was impressed.
Their dad was a marine pastor, so Rob announced to the family he was going to join the Marine Corps just like his dad. So what was his dear old dad’s response? “Son, I love you, but you’re no Marine.”
That turned Rob’s attention to the Army. The recruiter regaled him of tales about combat engineers, how they built bridges and all the impressive work they did to support the combat troops. Construction sounded good to Rob, so he went through the first step of signing on the dotted line to be a combat engineer in the U.S. Army.
While he was there with the recruiters and before he raised his right hand, however, a pair of the dirtiest, muddiest soldiers he had ever seen came traipsing in. Answering his questions, they told him they were combat engineers. But the recruiter had told him they didn’t get dirty. They just laughed at the naive kid.
So Rob, all 22 years of him, turned around, went back to the recruiter and told him he had changed his mind. Needless to say, “ballistic” is a mild way to describe the recruiter’s reponse.
Next up? The Air Force recruiter, who was in his office, had witnessed all this and called Rob over. “You wanta fly?” he asked. There was one problem. No college degree. But, the recruiter said, delivering his best pitch, “You can fix stuff. And that’s a whole lot more fun than digging ditches as a combat engineer in the army.”
Rob Ward joined the Air Force.
Once he was commissioned as 2nd Lt. Rob Ward, the promotions and the assignments came with regularity. First Lieutenant in 2003. Captain in 2005. Major in 2011. And Lt. Col. in 2016.
And those assignments weren’t exactly the typical jobs most airmen receive.For instance, he started what was his real military career with multiple deployments in support of counter drug operations and as an AWACS communication specialist. He was in charge of 17 personnel with the mission of keeping the AWACS planes (Airborne Warning and Control System) flying. They are crucial to the nation’s security, by acting as our country’s eyes in the skies, allowing friendly aircraft to fly unabated and alerting the proper organizations when enemy aircraft broke in-flight rules.
Then there was a deployment as a missileer that sent him two hundred feet underground behind a 16,000-lb blast door. He and one other airman would drive two hours into parts unknown to sit in a silo as a two-man crew in charge of ten nuclear weapons at a nuclear launch facility. They served 24-hour shifts in a narrow room that basically had the missile monitoring system and the security alert system, a bathroom and a couple of cots.
This was the launch facility that movies often make so much drama of. In other words, on his shift, Rob Ward faced the possibility — no matter how remote — of having to launch a nuclear missile. And, yes, there were some security incidents, such as the time a group of protesters managed to break into the base aboveground and used a hammer on a 32-ton blast door. It didn’t work. Most of the time, Rob said, the incidents involved rabbits.
An assignment that landed him a promotion to major involved the Shared Early Warning System (SEWS) and deployment to the systems office at Peterson AFB in Colorado. Here Rob traveled extensively around the world briefing other countries that were seeking to purchase the SEWS system for their own defense. This wasn’t some shady, illegal deal such as movies like Iron Man depicted. He had to clear every purchase through the U.S. State Department.
During this time, he had a brief deployment to Iraq. He found inspiration for his time in the war zone by a Bible verse he found attached to the wall of where he stayed. It was Jeremiah 17:7: “Blessed is the man whose trust is in the Lord, whose confidence is in him.”
About that mortar round landing in a hospital while Rob was there. Naturally, the place descended into chaos, primarily because there was blood everywhere. Everyone naturally assumed a good percentage of the hospital’s patients had been killed. With so much blood, that was the only logical conclusion.
But it turned out to be nothing of the kind. The mortar had hit the facility’s blood bank; no one was dead though it certainly appeared someone had to be.
A stint as an instructor at the Air Command and Staff College, during which he was named the college’s “Best Instructor” was instrumental, Rob felt, in getting him his promotion to Lt. Col. His final assignment came in May of 2015 as an associate professor of aerospace science at Virginia Tech. This is what brought him to his current residence in Christiansburg. He taught at Tech until his retirement in November 2018.
And about all those separations officer Rob Ward and NCO Danna Ward had to face? It turned out that only for a brief time while he was at Tech were they ever separated by much more than 20 miles or so. In fact, the only time they were separated for any extensive period was while Rod was assigned to VT’s ROTC detachment. Their son was a senior in high school when Rob had a chance to move closer to Danna, but he made the decision to stay and retire here to provide a stable situation for their son. So was their lack of separation the result of a surprisingly beneficent Air Force? Possible. But Rob and Danna knew there was another reason.
“We just prayed and crossed our fingers,” he said. “It was God’s hand in our lives. The whole thing, the way it worked out, was just a blessing for us both.”
And so, his military adventures behind him, Rob Ward looked to another source for adventure. He found it in an unlikely place: writing. Years before in an English class, the professor instructed his students to write a short story. Rob wrote 30 pages and then put them away and forgot about them.
After he retired, Rob’s brother, Tom, ran across those pages Rob had written what was now 37 years before. He encouraged Rob to start writing again.
The first result was a novel titled Terror on the Trail, which Rob finished in February of this year. It may sound like a Western, but the trail in this story is the Appalachian Trail, and a predator is on the loose. Rob’s childhood in Midlothian, Va., and his later years asn an avid hiker provided the background for what became a full-fledged thriller.
He followed that up with a pair of shorter, fantasy-based novels for younger readers:The Emerald Stones, which grew out of those original 30 pages, and Charlotte’s Ring, a sequel to The Emerald Stones.
He has now begun work on a fourth novel.
And just to continue his lifetime of service, he has applied for a position with the Virginia Tech Police Department (His son is now at Tech.) and is awaiting the completion of his background check.
“I have served my whole life,” he said. “This is another opportunity to save.”
And so the adventure continues.
