Still Answering: An Air Force veteran who left weeks before Desert Storm spent four decades answering the same oath
- Camille D. Ford | Founder & Editor-in-Chief
- May 13
- 15 min read
SUMMARY
Terry Sabo spent four years in the United States Air Force preparing for something that never came. He left in 1990, and within months, the friends he’d trained alongside were deploying to the Middle East. That unfinished feeling followed him through 25 years of police work and firefighting in Muskegon, Michigan, through six years in the Michigan state legislature, and into the director’s office of the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency, where he now carries responsibility for nearly 486,000 veterans. This is not a story about what Sabo did. It is a story about what that feeling made him do, across four decades of service that never stopped and a debt he has been trying to repay ever since.
The Moment He Missed
He did not know the war was coming. That is the part he still carries.
In 1990, Terry Sabo was 23 years old and four years into his Air Force enlistment. He had trained alongside men and women who would form the operational core of his adult life, people who showed him what belonging to something larger than a zip code actually felt like. But family was pulling him back to West Michigan. The enlistment was ending. The decision was his to make, and it was not a reckless one. He came home.
Within months of his discharge, the Persian Gulf became a flashpoint. The friends he had served alongside were shipping out. Sabo watched from Muskegon. He had done everything right and still missed the moment.
That absence calcified into something quieter and more persistent than guilt, a sense of obligation that had never been discharged. He owed something to the version of himself who had been ready, and to the veterans who had gone where he had not. The feeling had no clean resolution. It could only be carried forward.
“I missed it. And I’ve been trying to make up for that ever since.”
He had been 19 when he signed. The Middle East had been, by his own account, a region he could not have located on a map. By the time he understood its geography, his friends were already there and he was watching from home.
“A very short time after I got out, my friends were being deployed to the Middle East,” he said. “It just blew up right after I got out. I missed it. And I’ve been trying to make up for that ever since.”
Over the next three decades, he would try to pay that debt back in the only currency available to him: continuous service. Each new role was a different angle on the same unresolved question. Each new uniform was another attempt to close a distance that never fully closed.
What Four Years Actually Built
The Air Force did not give Sabo combat. What it gave him was harder to name and far more durable.
He had grown up in Ravenna, Michigan, a small, predominantly white farming community in West Michigan’s agricultural corridor. He was surrounded not just by parents but by grandparents, aunts, and uncles who were present in the kind of daily, unremarkable way that produces a sense of accountability before a person has language for it. Service was not something people talked about in his household. It was simply what the people around him did.
“The military, 40 years later, is still opening doors for me.”
He was not preparing for war when he enlisted at 19. He was preparing for adulthood. College had not felt like the right fit, neither academically nor mentally. The military was the structure he reached for, and the structure held.
The Community College of the Air Force gave him credentials. The hierarchy gave him a spine he would carry through every role that followed. And the relationships, the ones he would still be describing 40 years later with visible feeling, gave him something he would not fully understand until long after he had left.
He was sitting in the director’s chair when he said it. “The military, 40 years later, is still opening doors for me.” Those doors swung open through police departments, firehouses, a state legislature, and ultimately an agency responsible for nearly half a million veterans. The four years he spent in the Air Force are the foundation beneath every floor of a building he never planned to construct.
The word he kept reaching for when describing what the service built in him was not authority or discipline or readiness, the words recruitment materials prefer. It was respect. For peers. For country. For the weight of what it means to show up and do the job in the presence of people who are depending on you to hold your ground.
He also brought back something he could not have named at 23: an understanding of how the military works from the inside, what it asks of a person, what it provides, and what it withholds. That understanding is not replaceable by research or briefing materials. It lives in the body. It informs the way he listens when a veteran describes a system that failed to recognize them, because he knows from his own experience that the system, for all its structure, does not always find the people it was designed to serve.
Uniform Without Rank
The transition from the Air Force to first-responder work looked seamless from the outside. From the inside, it was a deliberate continuation of the same oath with different clothes.
Sabo went to work as a police officer in a predominantly Black community near Muskegon. The contrast with the Ravenna he had grown up in was immediate. He was a young white officer in a place where the texture of daily life, its rhythms and resentments and solidarities, was nothing he had been given a framework for.
“That was a life-changing time for me,” he said of those years, “because I was actually able to see the differences in how people grew up, how they lived, how they thought. But there’s also a lot of similarities that people don’t realize.”
What he was learning, though he would not frame it this way for years, was that the credibility required to serve a community is not conferred by a badge. It is built, slowly and specifically, through the kind of patient attention that asks what someone’s life actually looks like before deciding what that person needs. That lesson would follow him through every department and every firestation he worked, and eventually into the offices where veteran policy is made.
He spent time in multiple departments before adding firefighting to his portfolio. Each uniform fit differently, required different reflexes, demanded different things from the body and the mind. The police work was reactive, grounded in situational awareness, in reading a room before the room could turn. The fire work was physical, an extraction from the body of everything it had in reserve. The military, he said, was the earliest layer, when every day was a lesson in how the world worked and the only goal was to absorb it. Three distinct phases. Three different schools. One ongoing curriculum.
“To me,” he said, “that was just another way to serve. And it was the goal of mine all along, was to serve in uniform.”
The muscle he developed in that predominantly Black community, the capacity to suspend the assumption that familiarity equals understanding, became load-bearing infrastructure. It would carry him through legislative hearings where veteran needs he did not personally share required him to listen rather than project. It would carry him into the director’s office, where the veterans he now serves have been to places he has not, done things he did not do, and carry weight he cannot fully measure.
What 25 Years of Wrong Moments Costs
Twenty-five years of first-responder work accumulates differently than most people understand from the outside. The overtime, the shift work, and the procedural details of the job are visible. What is not visible is what happens to a person who spends a quarter-century arriving at the moment when something has already gone catastrophically wrong.
Sabo described it plainly. “It’s a beat down,” he said, “from a mental aspect.” He has scenes burned into him that he will carry for the rest of his life, things he encountered as a police officer and firefighter that cannot be processed through ordinary conversation because ordinary conversation was not built to receive them. He mentioned carrying children out of a swimming pool on Mother’s Day. He did not say more. He did not need to.
“Just because you’re cold to doing it doesn’t mean that the people you’re responding to haven’t experienced it before. This is their emergency.”
“Just because you’re cold to doing it doesn’t mean that the people you’re responding to haven’t experienced it before. This is their emergency.”
What first-responder culture produces instead is a lateral intimacy, a pulling together of people who have seen the same things and can therefore speak to each other without translation. The team cohesion that develops inside police departments and firehouses is not manufactured by management. It emerges from shared exposure to the unsurvivable moments of strangers, and from the recognition that getting through those moments professionally requires someone standing next to you who already knows.
That architecture would later inform the way Sabo thinks about veteran mental health and about the isolation that veterans carry when they return to civilian life. The first-responder world taught him, through direct experience, that shared witness is not a luxury. It is the structure that makes ongoing function possible. Veterans who have lost that shared witness, who have re-entered a world where no one around them has seen what they saw, have not simply lost the camaraderie. They have lost a load-bearing wall.
From Response to Prevention
After 25 years of arriving after the fact, Sabo ran for the Michigan state legislature in 2016 and won. Then again in 2018. Then again in 2020.
The shift represented a change in the grammar of service. First-responder work is reactive by design. The phone rings and you go. Legislative work operates on a different timeline, one that asks a person to imagine, months or years in advance, what the phone calls of the future might be and to try to prevent them. Sabo served six years in the Michigan House of Representatives and spent part of that time on the military and veterans affairs committee, including as vice chair.
What the legislature gave him was scope. He had arrived in Lansing as a police officer and firefighter, someone accustomed to solving specific problems in specific places. The legislative calendar forced him into rapid-fire fluency across issues he had never encountered, sitting in a 15-minute meeting on one subject and walking out directly into a hearing on something completely different. He had to learn to absorb at a rate the more stable rhythms of first-responder work had never required.
But the committee work on military and veterans affairs gave him something more durable than policy fluency. It gave him a clear view of the distance between the intention of a law and the reality it produces on the ground.
“We have to continue to strive to get veterans connected to their benefits,” he said of what that period clarified for him. “The military is a very small fraternity, quite frankly. Not even one percent of the country’s population. And so many people, for various reasons, don’t want to associate themselves as military veterans. They just don’t want anything out of it.”
The camaraderie he remembered from the committee, the automatic unity among members who had served in various branches regardless of party affiliation, was its own lesson. The shared experience of having taken the oath produced a room that operated differently from others. The question of what to do for veterans was never about politics. It was about the unfinished business of a country that benefits enormously from the service of a very small group and then frequently loses track of where those people go.
The Gap Between Policy and People
Michigan has approximately 486,000 veterans. Not all of them are receiving the benefits they earned. The gap between what exists on paper and what reaches a veteran’s actual life is one of the organizing problems of Sabo’s directorship, and he speaks about it not as a policy failure but as a communication failure with structural roots and human costs.
He told the story of a veteran in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who had been quietly unraveling. Things were going wrong in his personal life. The causes were not obvious. What eventually surfaced was that the veteran had been inadvertently removed from his disability rating. The income had stopped. The supports had dissolved. No one had explained what happened or offered a path back in. The veteran did not know how to re-engage a system that, from his position, had simply stopped recognizing him.
When the MVAA finally connected with him, the path back was accessible. The rating was restored. He moved to the veterans’ home in Marquette. The crisis stabilized. But the crisis should not have been necessary. The benefit had existed the entire time. The program was funded. The law was on the books. The veteran never found it.
“The person that questions my credibility the most is me.”
“The person that questions my credibility the most is me,” Sabo said, when asked whether veterans with combat experience ever challenged his authority to lead them.
He said it directly, without deflection. He leads an agency where people on his own staff carry operational experience he does not have. He knows the gap between his four years in peacetime Air Force service and the deployments of the veterans he now serves is real. A director who overestimates his own experience builds programs based on what he imagines veterans need. A director who understands the limits of his experience listens, hires people who fill those gaps, and defers to lived knowledge when deference is warranted.
He is also honest about which veterans are most invisible in that gap. Women veterans and veterans of color are the two populations he named specifically, people most likely to go unrecognized and unserved not because the system excludes them by design, but because the stereotypes that surround veteran identity were not built to include them.
“We’ve got to do better in getting those veterans connected,” he said. “Not only to their benefits, but in reaching out to them, to have those discussions, to make sure that they’re okay and recognized for the service that they provided.”
The veteran who is already certain the system was not built for him requires a different kind of outreach than one who simply has not yet enrolled. Sabo talked about a county visit where veterans were gathering not to discuss benefits or policy but to do woodworking. No agenda. No formal program. Just veterans in the same room, working with their hands, in proximity to people who had taken the same oath. “They may not even talk much about veteran issues directly,” he said. “But while they’re doing the woodworking, they’re around other veterans. And that gives them comfort.” The connection was the thing. Not the conversation.
The MVAA’s “I Am a Veteran” campaign operates from a similar premise: before you can connect a veteran to a benefit, you must first reach a person who does not yet believe the benefit was meant for them. That is a harder problem than processing a claim. It requires a kind of sustained presence that neither legislation nor a well-designed website can fully provide. It requires showing up, repeatedly, in the places where veterans already are, and waiting. Sabo does not expect that work to resolve quickly. He expects to keep doing it.
The Weight of One Name on the Door
Terry Sabo became director of the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency on February 1, 2026. He had not planned to be here.
He had not planned any of it, not in the way someone positions themselves toward a specific destination. He had made a decision as a teenager to serve, and then spent 40 years following that commitment wherever it led. A family farm he ran for a stretch. A car he raced. A firefighter’s coat. A legislator’s desk. And then, without having deliberately pursued the role, a state agency with 61 staff members and a mission covering one of the most geographically and demographically complex veteran populations in the country.
“I’ve never aspired to be in this particular position,” he said. “I just found my way here, and I owe a lot of people a lot of things for putting me in this very important role.”
What caught him off guard when he walked in was not the complexity of the agency. It was the solitude of the position. Every job he had held before this one had a structure above him. There was always someone to run ideas past, a supervisor to confer with, an institutional hierarchy that shared some of the weight. The director’s office does not work that way.
“There was nobody. Now it is on my shoulders.”
The weight on those shoulders includes a veteran in Marquette who nearly fell through entirely, and a 102-year-old in Michigan who signed up for VA benefits for the first time just a couple of years ago, and the women veterans who leave military service and discover that the system speaks a language that was written for someone else. It includes the summit in Grand Rapids in May, where veterans and advocates and stakeholders from across Michigan will gather to talk about what is not working and what could.
“Once you take the oath, you don’t untake it. I’m still operating off of that original oath.”
“Once you take the oath, you don’t untake it. I’m still operating off of that original oath,” he said. That oath was taken at 18 years old, in 1984, before Desert Storm, before three legislative terms, before any of the rooms he would eventually stand in. It is still the operating document.
What Stays
Muskegon has changed since Sabo was a boy. The industrial economy that once defined it has shifted. The downtown has been rebuilt. The community absorbed the loss of its industrial identity and found a new one, slowly, over decades, by doing the work in public rather than waiting for someone else to arrive and do it.
He has been in the same part of Michigan for all of it. Every version of his service has been rooted in the same geography. He has watched the community change because he has been present for the change, not managing it from a distance but living inside it.
“When I’m meeting people, I’m meeting them for the first time, and I’m gonna know them for probably the rest of my life,” he said of what staying in one place has taught him about service. “I know them, I know their families, I know their kids, and I’m probably gonna know their grandkids.”
That is a different kind of accountability than the institutional kind. It is the accountability of permanence, of having chosen to remain in the place where you serve rather than cycling through it. It is also, not coincidentally, the accountability of someone who missed a deployment and has spent 35 years proving that the missing did not end his obligation.
The Persian Gulf War is over. The friends who deployed have long since come home. The young man who left the Air Force and watched from Muskegon is now the man responsible for making sure Michigan’s nearly half-million veterans do not spend their own decades watching from the outside, waiting for a system that was built for them to finally reach them where they are.
The oath does not expire. He has been proving that since before most of the veterans he serves ever raised their right hands.
Resources
Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency | michigan.gov/mvaa
Michigan’s central coordinating agency for veterans and their families, providing access to benefits, services, and resources statewide.
Veterans Crisis Line | Dial 988, then press 1 | veteranscrisisline.net
Free, confidential support for veterans and their families, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs | va.gov
The federal portal for veterans to access earned benefits, health care, education assistance, and disability claims.
Women Veterans Interactive | wvinteractive.org
A national nonprofit connecting, empowering, and engaging women veterans through community, advocacy, and peer support.
National Association of Black Veterans | nabvets.com
An advocacy and service organization committed to ensuring Black veterans receive the benefits, recognition, and support they have earned.
Vet Center Program | vetcenter.va.gov
Community-based counseling centers providing readjustment counseling, peer support, and mental health services to combat veterans and their families.
American Legion | legion.org
The nation’s largest wartime veterans service organization, providing advocacy, community programs, and support for veterans and their families across all 50 states.
ABOUT TERRY SABO
Terry Sabo is the director of the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency, a position he assumed on February 1, 2026. He served in the United States Air Force from 1986 to 1990 and holds credentials from the Community College of the Air Force. Following his discharge, he served as a police officer at the Muskegon Heights Police Department, the North Muskegon Police Department, and the Muskegon County Sheriff’s Department, and as a firefighter in the Muskegon area, accumulating 25 years of first-responder service. He served as Muskegon County Road Commissioner from 2011 to 2012 and on the Muskegon County Commission from 2013 to 2016, including as chair from 2015 to 2016. He was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 2016 and served three terms, including on the military and veterans affairs committee as vice chair. He subsequently served as deputy director of the Michigan Department of Military and Veterans Affairs before being appointed MVAA director. He holds MCOLES state police certification from Delta Community College, is a member of the Muskegon County Veterans Advisory Board, and volunteers with the American Legion, VFW, Lions International, and Optimist International. He is based in Muskegon, Michigan.
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