Ohio Department of Veterans Services Honors Godfrey & Wing’s Commitment to Veterans

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In October, Mr. Chip Tansill, the Director of the Ohio Department of Veterans Services, presented United States military veterans employed by Godfrey & Wing, Inc. in its Defiance, Ohio location with challenge coins. 

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Through history, challenge coins have been given to vets to signify special events or actions they have been engaged in and to symbolize unit identity or brotherhood. In this instance, the Department of Veterans Services presented challenge coins to three of Godfrey & Wing’s veteran employees to honor the commitment the company has shown through the years to employ military veterans whenever possible.  

 

The three Godfrey & Wing employees offered coins were John Horvath, Operations Supervisor, Alex Bustamante, and Vicki Woods. Mr. Horvath spent 22 years in the Army. During his time, he served two tours in Germany during the Cold War, deployed to Desert Storm for six and a half months, and served in the first Operation Iraqi Freedom campaign in 2003. Mr. Horvath retired from the Army in 2006 with the rank of Master Sergeant.

 

Mr. Bustamante enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1994. He spent his first years at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina before being deployed in January 1996 to an aircraft carrier stationed in the Adriatic Sea to support the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia & Herzegovina, the peace treaty which ended the Bosnian War, signed at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on December 14, 1995. After more than four years in the Marines, Mr. Bustamante retired with the rank of Corporal. Ms. Woods enlisted in the Marines in 1986 and served more than eight years. She was stationed at Camp Lejeune, at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma in Okinawa twice, and at the world’s largest Marine Corps air station, MCAS Cherry Point in Havelock, North Carolina. She retired with the rank of Sergeant.

 

Godfrey & Wing’s facility in Defiance, Ohio supports General Motors’ cylinder block manufacturing. GW employees perform real time X-ray inspection of powertrain castings for porosity and other conditions. This operation has been engineered to accept inline product flow using state of the art automation and data collection, providing a capacity rate of over 3,200 castings per day.  Whenever he has a need to hire at the Defiance facility, Mr. Horvath reaches out to Mr. Nick Hill, the Disabled Veteran Outreach Specialist assigned to Defiance, Fulton, Henry, and Williams Counties. This is how both Mr. Bustamante and Ms. Woods came to be employed by Godfrey & Wing. In fact, approximately 20% of Godfrey & Wing’s employees have served in the military. It is the company’s belief that military veterans make excellent employees because of their sense of duty, honor, and commitment to the job at hand.

 

About Ohio Department of Veterans Services
The mission of the Ohio Department of Veterans Services is to provide opportunities and resources for the country’s veteran community through advocacy, collaboration, and partnerships. 
Learn more at: www.dvs.ohio.gov