Legacy Of Service – Part 1: How One Veteran’s Disability Gave Him A New Purpose & Mission

Michael Poyma

For Michael Poyma, a sense of service is as much a part of his DNA as the long lineage of distinguished military service that runs through his family.

His father was an Air Force veteran who served in the ’50s during peacetime, in those years between the Korean conflict and Vietnam War. He had an uncle who was a World War II vet, and his paternal grandmother was first cousins with Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I flying ace who gained notoriety for having shot down the most German aircraft during World War I, notching some 26 victories over the course of flying 300+ combat hours – the most of any pilot in the service at that time.

Poyma grew up in the late ’60s and ’70s, in the era of Vietnam and Watergate – a chapter in our country’s history that was shrouded in scandal and plagued by war and inflation, juxtaposed against the great achievements of the Civil Rights movement and man going to the moon. This turbulent political and social landscape would serve as the backdrop for his generation’s coming of age, and he went on to describe how he and his friends would look to define their own roles in the story that was playing out all around them.

“Of course, back then, guys, men, boys, seemed to be more driven – in terms of an opportunity, or even an obligation – to serve. It was a lot stronger back then,” he explained, recalling those years of his adolescence. “So, I sort of grew up with the idea, in fact, with kids I remember seeing back during that time out on the street, it was very common for them to have older brothers who were going to Vietnam. And so there was sort of a built-in expectation or obligation that, ‘Hey, once you get done with school, you’re either going to go to college or you’re going to go to Vietnam.’ I mean that was really kind of the sentiment back then.”

Of course, that never happened. By the time he came of age, he would end up missing the end of the Vietnam War by a number of years. But eventually he would feel the urge, the pull “Because quite honestly,” he pauses to explain, “At the time that I went in – I think I was 23 when I went in – my life just really wasn’t going in the direction that I wanted it to.” He had always known that he wanted to get a college education, and he also wanted to serve, but as he put it, “I just didn’t quite know how I wanted to go about that.”

Through a very unscientific process of elimination, he ultimately settled on the Army as his chosen branch of the armed services.

“How I decided on the Army, was, for me, kind of simple. I didn’t want to go into the Air Force because that’s what my dad did,” describing how his thought process, was at least partly, driven by a desire to chart his own course, be his own man. And then when he considered the very real prospect of meeting his untimely demise while in the service of his country, a fear of drowning led him to rule out the Navy. That left a tossup between the Army and the Marine Corps. The Marines were actually the first branch of the military to reach out and try to recruit him as a 16-year-old kid. But after seeing the news about Beirut and the attacks on the Marine barracks, all of it seemed just a little too real for him. He politely said “no thanks” to his first suiters, and instead set his sights on the Army.

“One of my friends, who I was in the band with at my high school, had gone into the Army, and had gotten wounded in fact, during the invasion of Panama,” he recalled, before adding, “I just thought that it was really startling at the time, because this actually made the news in the Columbus Dispatch, back in late 1989 or 1990, that a local Columbus man had been injured in Panama.”

The news of someone who he actually knew getting hurt really hit home. Now it was personal. It would end up being the only other motivation he would need. He recalled how he remembered thinking, “They can’t do that,” and how this metaphorical slap to the face led him to the conclusion that, “You know, I think I need to serve. It’s my time.”

So he made the decision to go in, but he still didn’t quite know what he wanted to do.

“I had originally gone in to become a M1 Abrams tank crew member, and when I called my cousin John, who at the time was an infantry company commander in the 82nd Airborne, he had already gone through ROTC and was commissioned and had already been in for a few years,” he explained, thinking back about the memorable conversation with his cousin.

“I said, ‘John, I think I’m going to do it, I’m ready to go in.’ And he goes, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ and I said, ‘Well I want to blow shit up’ and he laughed, because he gets that. Then he says, ‘You need to be more specific.’ So I tell him, ‘I’m thinking about M1 Abrams Tank crew member’ so then he asked me what my ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) score was. I don’t remember what my score was, but my score was high enough that I could select pretty much any job in the Army that I wanted to attempt, or go after. And he said, ‘You know what, you’re a pretty smart guy. You’ve got a good ASVAB score, how long do you think you’ll be in?’ And I said I would certainly do the first 6 years, and then beyond that, I admitted, ‘Well, I don’t know, I’ll have to wait and see.’ Then he said, ‘You know what, you need to be marketable after your service.’ And this was 30 years ago, right? And I’ve been in this business now, if you want to call it that, for almost 19 years now. 30 years ago, he had the wherewithal to kind of warn me that, ‘Look, you need to do something because you’re not going to be in the service forever.’ And he recommended that, because you know, I told him that I wanted something high speed, I wanted to be able to do something that would get the adrenaline pumping, so to speak. I wasn’t quite the infantry type, although I could have done that, but that’s where he recommended aviation. So that’s how I ended up choosing to be a UH60 Blackhawk Helicopter Repair position, and eventually Door Gunner Air Crew.”

Serving On the Front Lines

Michael Poyma was active duty from 1990 to 1993, right around the time of the Gulf War.

“I went in literally like 4 months before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and I’ll never forget: We were in the day room at our advanced training at Fort Eustis in August, well it was 30 years ago this month, just a couple of weeks ago in fact. We were watching TV in the day room and playing pool and just hanging out and doing stuff, and then all of a sudden on CNN it was like, breaking news that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Immediately, among everyone in the day room, everybody got really super quiet, and then somebody finally said, ‘Well, you guys know what this means, right?’ And it was like ‘Wow. We’re probably going to end up going to war.’ It’s like nobody really thought, ‘Well, I’m in the Army now, we just did Panama, nothing is going to happen.’ But sure enough, that all hit.”

So after Poyma finished with his training, he ended up going over to Germany where he found his so-called permanent duty station. But then in early 1991, he was deployed to southwest Asia. “We were sent specifically on a mission that was based out of southeast Turkey and northern Iraq, in the northern ‘no fly’ zone, this was known as ‘Operation Provide Comfort’ and this was sort of the tail end of the whole Gulf War, because really the whole thing did not last that long, obviously. But we were part of the humanitarian mission, at the end of the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein had basically attacked all of these Kurdish people in the northern part of their country and all of them were basically fleeing up into the mountains to escape, I mean, we’re talking, I mean some estimates were as many as a million, million and a half people, and unfortunately at that time of year, there were unfortunately a lot of casualties in terms of just being out in the cold and up in the mountains.”

He went on to explain, “So we got sent to provide relief, support, resources, security – you name it. We basically just went there to do that and I had the opportunity to fly on a lot of these missions in and around the mountains of northern Iraq visiting the refugee camps, flying basically anybody anywhere they needed to go, but also some support and a couple of special op missions and things like that. It was really interesting.”

Eventually, after the hostilities quieted down, the U.S. started to draw down its forces in the region. “We were over there for 2 or 3 months, came back home, Europe was being downsized at that time, right after the Gulf War. Most of us, even though we were supposed to spend upwards of 3 years in Germany, they shipped a lot of us back to the states. That’s where I ended up at Ft. Campbell and was in the 101st Airborne Division.”

But this wasn’t the end of Poyma’s military journey. In many ways it was just the beginning of his service.

“Along all of this I had been hurt. I had been hurt in training. I had a pretty severe back injury and ultimately that is what led me to being medically separated out under honorable conditions in 1993.” He pauses momentarily before continuing, “So I was able to, even though I was disappointed about being away from military service prematurely, I still had somewhat of a plan and I went home, I went back to Columbus, Ohio – which is where I am from. I filed my disability compensation claim with the VA, got my rating and ended up going to the Ohio State University for my degree, and I got it through Vocational Rehabilitation & Employment, VR&E. The very program that I’m working for now.”

The Mission Continues At Home

 Following the 1990s, after having gone back to college and working a brief stint in the private sector, Poyma would find himself out of work from right after 9/11 up until the early part of 2002.

“That’s where I found my first job with the State of Illinois over in the Chicago area, with the Illinois Department of Employment Security. That is where I first started off as a DVOP, the Disabled Veteran Outreach Program. You know, an employment specialist if you will, as a state worker. And that was the beginning of this career.”

He would spend almost 5 years with the State of Illinois, before making a move to Michigan to take a position with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Over the course of the last almost fourteen years with the VA, I’ve been primarily working as an employment coordinator or employment specialist, with really two key areas of work or concentration.”

One of his responsibilities, as he explains it,  is to help his fellow veterans and those veterans he’s serving through the program to be the best job seekers that they can be.

“I combine a lot of personal experience, certainly, some building professional experience, getting a look and understanding and as I continue through the years, I certainly got better at being able to tell vets about best practices for resume development, for cover letter, for interviewing skills and researching companies, but then as the internet grew, particularly in the past ten years with the social media, I have added in networking, and all of that has come into play.”

InvestVets Logo

But admittedly, even with so much government experience, he still recognized that his job at the VA and in federal government certainly has its limitations in terms of being able to take care of all vets. “Being able to take care of a lot of different things, in my current occupation, it makes it kind of challenging to be able to do,” he said, before adding, “that was part of my motivation for helping create InvestVets.”

He went on to explain how “InvestVets is that community-based organization, it is of course not VA affiliated, it just so happens that I work for the VA, but it’s just really been a beautiful thing, we’ve been able to really have free reign in InvestVets when it comes to distributing job postings out to a lot more veterans, hosting our, what used to be brick and mortar , now are virtual networking events, which are really consistent now and picking up in attendance and everything.”

And then earlier this year, Poyma applied for and received a detail promotion for the National Employment Services Team. “VR&E has been going through quite an undertaking of modernization, even going back to a couple of years ago, and I think this whole modernization is supposed to take place through FY 21” he explained, before continuing, “And in addition to all of the other things, a lot of internal stuff, that I don’t even know some of this stuff,

but externally now, like our brand has changed, and instead of Vocational Rehabilitation & Employment we’re now Veteran Readiness & Employment, and our logo has changed, we have a new Director who has been in place now for a couple of years. So it’s a really exciting time to be in VR&E right now, and especially on the employment services side.”

Poyma continued, “We are now undergoing additional modernization and expansion of our national employment service delivery model, and again, I was very humbled, very honored to be selected to be one of eight employment coordinators from around the country selected to be part of this national team. It’s an honor, it’s a privilege, and yeah, there is promotion potential, but that’s not why I’m here, this is all about my impact and the fact that I was selected because hopefully they thought I knew what I’m doing--I think I know what I’m doing--so I’m excited about the opportunity.

I’ve always considered myself a service provider, a mediator, I’m a helper, I love being able to help people. If I have information or if I have knowledge about something, or if I’m in a position to help someone better themselves, I’m all about that. A lot of it is because of my own experience, I’ve been on the other side of that desk, so to speak, and even being a veteran, getting out in the early 90’s, going back home and having to experience some of this disenfranchisement, I mean literally going into places, it could have been the VA, could have been other places, and really kind of feeling like out of place, not just from the transition adjustment side, but from the standpoint of whether these people actually even cared why I was there.”

Poyma went on to provide additional detail about some of his new responsibilities as part of the National Employment Services Team.

“If I go back over the 13 years or so, most of my work has been in the area of helping veterans one-on-one, mostly, becoming the best job seeker that they can be. While balancing that with outreach, and marketing, and networking, and getting out and making connections with employers. Now granted all of this has been mostly in Michigan. What’s changed now, is that now I have a, I guess you could say, national platform, where I have the ability, and this is what I have been doing for the past month, I’ve been connecting with employers, particularly those who have more of a national footprint out there that may offer, or who have job opportunities not just in Michigan, of course, but potentially everywhere, and that has been a big part of my work,.”

Poyma then shifted gears and took a few minutes to describe the structure of the new National Employment Services Team, “At the end of the day, again, there are eight of us that were selected, so two of us are going to be assigned per district. And I guess the easiest way to illustrate that is that we really just have four districts in VR&E, and that’s basically northeast, southeast, continental, and western, it’s basically just the country divided into four sections. My partner and I, his name is Alan, he works out of Indianapolis and Him and I essentially are going to be operating more permanently out of the northeast district, which is essentially, you know, if you can imagine Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and then across Pennsylvania. Then, over to the coast, including Maryland, Delaware, Washington D.C. and everything north of there. That’s kind of our so-called area or territory, but I still will hopefully have a lot of impact on a national basis.”

Poyma sums up the recent changes to the VR&E program as such, “Essentially what we’re doing is that we’re telling employers now, if you have wondered or if you had been concerned or have asked about being able to work with the VA directly in sourcing veteran talent, especially whether it be local, regionally, or now nationally, now is the time. We can offer that now. And for the most part, employers have been really encouraged about that, they’ve been asking these kinds of questions for many years, ‘why isn’t there someone or some place that the VA can help us get veterans?’ This being sort of the anecdotal, the line that seems to always come to mind. Well now VR&E in this new employment services delivery model has helped to put this one-stop-shop concept into effect and again, we have our folks here at the national team, and once the new fiscal year comes into place, all of the existing employment coordinators throughout the United States are going to be transitioned over into what we’re calling business liaisons, and basically what that is going to mean is that the big shift is going to be away from one-on-one case management of veterans, and more in the direction of marketing and outreach of the program, and established business connections.”

Read Part Two of this blog here!