Still Answering: An Air Force veteran who left weeks before Desert Storm spent four decades answering the same oath, through Muskegon squad cars, firehouses, and the statehouse, to leading Michigan’s nearly 486,000 veterans
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.
