A Friend to All: Josh Poling and Mountain Sky Drones

Part of the 850 Committee’s series highlighting veteran-owned businesses across North Central West Virginia, and connecting them with the neighbors who can put them to work.

Twenty-One Years in Green, and the Business He Flies Today.

Before the uniform, before Iraq and Afghanistan, before the drones that now trace the ridgelines over Morgantown, there was a boy on a creek bank in New Martinsville with an Audubon bird book in his hand.

“My mom had a very strict timeline for video games and TV and would quite often pull a plug and send me outside,” Josh Poling remembers. He spent his free hours fishing, hunting, trapping, “or just getting into mischief young boys do,” crossing the distance from the country to town on a garage-sale road bike. It was a childhood lived outdoors and in motion, and as it turns out, good training for what came next.

What came next started, as a lot of military stories do, with a recruiter who was very good at his job. “A HUMVEE ride through the woods may or may not have happened,” Josh says of the day he got hooked. Athletic and in shape from sports, unsure of a career or a path, he was drawn to the one thing the service promised that civilian life hadn’t yet: a team. In 2001 he enlisted in the West Virginia Army National Guard, a deliberate choice. Coming from a low-income family, he knew he’d be paying for his own education one day. Staying in his state and banking the educational benefits, he says, “made the most sense investing in myself.”

He started out as a combat engineer, and he’s honest about why. It wasn’t a low ASVAB score; he could have picked any field. It was “the $15k enlistment bonus and the dream of owning a brand new extended cab Ford Ranger… dumb haha.” He’d later earn his commission and stay in the Engineer Branch out of familiarity, though he ribs himself about the road not taken: “Looking back I should have gone and flown. Three years at Ft. Rucker, Alabama just didn’t sound fun.”

The Army took him farther than that Ranger ever could have. Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. As an officer, active-duty stretches in Peru and Germany. “The paid travel was great,” he says, “when it was to a country not in a war zone.”

It was Afghanistan, though, that changed him. He deployed as a 1st Lieutenant, responsible for young Soldiers “who reminded me of me.” He came home a steadier man. “After Iraq I was angry and at times not the man I needed to be,” he admits. “I lived closer on the side of being reckless in many ways in day-to-day life. Afghanistan leveled me out.” Standing in a war zone reset his sense of proportion. “Realizing that most things in day-to-day life in the United States pale in comparison… being able to let small things slide and not get worked up, that was what changed for the better for me.”

Ask him the hardest part of two decades in uniform and he doesn’t talk about the heat or the danger. He talks about families. “The hardest part to any deployment or assignment is usually the stress it places on families,” he says, a weight he watched settle on the Soldiers he led. Ask what he’s proudest of and the answer is just as grounded: “Just making it to retirement. While sometimes it seemed light years away, the journey flew by.” Along the way he earned a few Army Commendation Medals, a Meritorious Service Medal, and a Combat Action Badge. “The usual,” he says, in the way veterans always undersell the hardest-earned things.

He won’t name a single battle buddy. “To pinpoint one person would be an injustice to all the great Men and Women I served with,” he says. What he carries instead is the whole of it: “being able to see folks grow, teams mesh and missions get completed.” Many of those contacts are still in his phone; some are still beside him in his work.

Josh retired in 2022, after COVID had made it “a weird time for everyone” and a natural jumping-off point. Having spent much of his career as a reservist, the transition came easier than it does for many; he leaned on “mentors and connections throughout the years of service.” His advice for anyone nearing the door is practical and hard-won: “Dig into all your benefits before you leave. With so many that can carry over, it’s smart to think about this well before you transition.”

These days he works full time as a government employee and runs Mountain Sky Drones in Morgantown, where his wife Nora and son Eli are the center of everything. The business is as varied as the man. He flies aerial agricultural spraying for farmers, aerial mapping for developers and surveyors, and real estate photography that shows a property the way no ladder ever could. He runs thermal recovery missions, using heat-seeking drone cameras that find lost pets, missing livestock, and wildlife. And he still wears the instructor’s hat, contracting to train “our future war fighters on UAS tactics.” The mission, it turns out, never really ended. It just changed altitude.

If any of that sounds like something you or your business could use, that is exactly the point of this story.

That’s also how the 850 Committee met him. “Shawn reached out to me to inquire about my drone business,” Josh says, “and it ‘took off’ from there.” For a man who spent twenty-one years inside the tightest of teams, the worth of a veteran community is plain. “Having a support system of people who understand you is valuable in any aspect,” he says. “Being able to talk with people when you have an issue that understand that issue is huge.” He lives it, too. He once helped a fellow officer-school classmate, miserable and missing the service, get re-enlisted and set up with a plum assignment in U.S. Army Europe. “On the civilian side, I always try to offer an ear to other veterans, to let them know there are resources and they are cared about.”

He’d like civilians to understand one thing about the people who served: “We all carry excess baggage. Everyone has their issues, but it’s how you deal with them that matters.” To a young person weighing enlistment, his answer is immediate, “Do it,” followed by the truest thing a long-serving veteran can offer: “If you had a bad time in the military, it was probably your own fault.” And to any veteran in the dark right now, he offers the same thing he spent a career offering his Soldiers: a way forward. “Good days will come. Find that thing you enjoy and make it a habit. Connect with other Veterans, volunteer, helping others will help you see the good in yourself and others.”

Ask Josh Poling how he wants to be remembered, and the answer is four words, the kind a man earns one Soldier, one neighbor, one veteran at a time: “A friend to all.”

Serving, he says, taught him that “trying is half the battle.”

Over a Fishbowl at Mario’s

A note from Shawn Cosner, founder of the 850 Committee

I met Josh for lunch at Mario’s Fishbowl in Suncrest, and what was supposed to be an interview turned into the kind of conversation only two veterans can have: easy, honest, and somehow already familiar. We talked about service. We talked about what we miss and what we don’t. And we talked about the hardest part of all of it: getting veterans to find each other again once the uniform comes off.

Josh is a member of the American Legion post off the Sabraton exit, out Route 7 toward Masontown, about a mile up on the right. They hold a members’ meeting once a month and gather again every Friday evening for drawings and the kind of low-key camaraderie the military builds into you and civilian life rarely replaces. “All veterans are welcome,” he told me, and he meant it. He invited me to both the members’ meeting and the Friday gathering. I had a conflict that week, but I’m going. I want to see it for myself. His post runs about 350 active members strong. “We’re pretty robust with resources,” he said, and he’s right. Three hundred and fifty is a real number, a real community.

Then I told him about the 850 Committee, about what we’re trying to build across North Central West Virginia, and how badly we want the veterans in our target counties to find their way to us. And just like the leader he was for twenty-one years, Josh didn’t hesitate. He said he’d help any way he could.

Here’s the thing we kept circling back to. By the most recent Census estimates, roughly 3,700 veterans call Monongalia County home, and there are thousands more across the six counties the 850 serves. And yet getting veterans out of the house and into the community, into a Legion hall, into a meeting, into anything, is one of the hardest things either of us has ever tried to do.

I laughed about it, because it’s true: we can get the entire state to put on gold and cheer for the Mountaineers. We’ll follow a team anywhere. But getting the men and women who actually wore the uniform to step back into a room together? That’s the harder mission, and I’ve never fully understood why.

Maybe it’s that the thing we’re really offering isn’t a meeting at all. It’s the thing Josh said he missed most: being part of a team that gets the job done, and people around you who understand. That’s what his Legion gives its 350. That’s what the 850 Committee wants to give the thousands who haven’t found their way back yet, and it’s why we need them.

It’s also why we tell stories like Josh’s. The 850 Committee shines a light on the veteran-owned businesses in our communities and puts them in front of the neighbors who can use them, because when you hire a veteran’s business, you’re not just getting good work; you’re keeping a veteran rooted, busy, and home. If you’ve got a field to spray, a property to photograph, or a lost animal to find, now you know who to call.

If you served, join us. Becoming a member of the 850 Committee takes about two minutes at 850committee.org/connect, and every veteran who steps forward makes us stronger for the next one. And if what you’re really after is that camaraderie, that thing the uniform gave you that civilian life never quite replaces, go find it. Find a post like Josh’s Legion, or another group, another room full of people who understand. Get connected with other service members and veterans however you can. Because “veteran” is the only identity you earn, and the one that truly matters.

Consider this your invite.

Josh Poling served in the West Virginia Army National Guard from 2001 to 2022, deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan and commissioning as an Engineer officer. He lives in Morgantown with his wife Nora and son Eli, where he owns Mountain Sky Drones. The 850 Committee is proud to call him one of ours.