Still Serving Others: Veteran helps others through outreach efforts

Whether as an ordained minister, disaster relief volunteer or soldier, Robert Wake has spent most of his adult life serving others.

Now, thanks to his education at Southeast Missouri State University, the 55-year-old Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient says he will be able to help many more veterans like himself who were wounded in battle and are facing a variety of post-service challenges.

Wake, who grew up in Kennett and now lives in Malden, Missouri, will be among 1,401 Southeast students who will receive undergraduate and graduate degrees Saturday at the university's spring commencement.

Graduating from college is something he didn't envision 15 years ago when he was fighting insurgents in the Iraqi city of Nafar near the Iran border.

"I just kinda knew I was going to be wounded," he said. "We went through nine ambushes in 12 days. Too many conflicts, and too many battles."

Robert Wake, left, shakes hands with Army veteran Sam Conrad of Cape Girardeau at the Southeast Missourian on Wednesday in Cape Girardeau.KASSI JACKSON

In the early morning hours of May 16, 2004, Sgt. Wake and other members of his squad were taking heavy enemy fire. "We had been in a massive 17-hour gun battle and were on top of an Iraqi police station when two bombs were fired at us," he said.

"The first one came in and didn't explode. It just bounced, but that was bad enough. Then I heard the second one coming. It exploded about 5 feet between me and a medic. If it had been any closer it would have killed us," he said.

Although not lethal, the explosion broke Wake's nose, cracked two front teeth, perforated his eardrums and damaged his right ankle and left knee. "I remember a bright flash and feeling like my body was on fire. That was the shrapnel," he said, adding the explosion also resulted in a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, as his frontal lobe was torn, resulting in memory issues affecting him 15 years later.

It took more than a year for Wake to recover from his physical injuries and return to civilian life.

"When I got out of the hospital in July 2005, I was kind of in limbo for a little bit, dealing with flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder," he said. However, he didn't realize how serious his memory and mental functions had been impaired "until I got up one morning to drive from Malden to Dexter and eight hours later I found myself at a rest stop in northern Ohio wondering how in the heck I got there."

Wake said he "freaked out and drove like crazy getting back to Southeast Missouri. I went to the VA hospital, where they did some tests and said I was having some major flashbacks."

As a result of that incident, he said he went through "a lot of 'in your face' in-depth counseling" to help him understand and cope with the effects of his PTSD and TBI.

Realizing how much it helped him to talk to others about his experiences, Wake began making public speaking appearances. "It took me a while to get through the PTSD and TBI, and then I started traveling in 2007 or 2008, speaking about head trauma," he said. He spoke to civic clubs, medical organizations, military groups "and just about every school" in Missouri.

"The more I was open to getting out and talking about my own experiences, the better I was able to cope," Wake said. "The best thing a veteran can do is to talk about their experiences with others."

Through the course of his public speaking, Wake said he realized there were other veterans like him who were dealing with physical and mental war wounds. "I started seeing the needs of our veterans and how they weren't being met," he said.

It was at one of his speaking engagements in 2010 that Wake met Dan and Barbara Cooper from Mountain Home, Arkansas. "They suggested that I do something to help support wounded veterans, which was how the Robert Wake Foundation got its start," he said. In the years since, his foundation has raised thousands of dollars and sponsored numerous events to benefit veterans both on a regional and national basis. "What a lot of people don't realize is that the events we sponsor and that veterans go to, somebody's got to pay for them, and that's where the foundation comes in," Wake said.

"PTSD is killing so many veterans," he said and noted veterans die by suicide at a much higher rate than the general population. "One of the things I tell people is that war changes people. When I came home, even my grown kids said 'Dad, you're different.'"

As his foundation began to grow, Wake said he realized he needed to further his education in order to keep it growing.

"I had a history of public relations, but I didn't have the education," he said. "And regardless of what anybody else says, education is a big issue. I had the know-how, but I didn't have the credentials."

Having served as a volunteer in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 as an ordained Assembly of God minister and as a relief worker following several Gulf Coast hurricanes, Wake said he knew he wanted to pursue a degree in public relations "because it goes hand in hand with what I do."

Wake completed an Associate of Arts at Three Rivers Community College in 2017 and then transferred to Southeast where he said he "fell in love" with the University's Department of Mass Media. "I chose (Southeast) because of its mass media program, and it has been worth every bit of the time that I have taken out of my life to complete this degree," he said. "My knowledge has increased so much in this program" which he said will help him "with fundraising, networking, working with social media and building strong relationships with different community groups."

Wake said he intends to use what he has learned as a public relations major and political science minor to further expand the Wake Foundation. He said what he has learned has already helped him understand the legal processes of running a not-for-profit foundation and has given him the skills he needed to expand his fundraising from $20,000 he had been raising annually to $200,000.

More information about the Wake Foundation can be found at wakefoundation.org.

jwolz@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3630