Chris McGhee outside of the federal courthouse in Portland on Thursday. McGhee is a 20-year Air Force veteran, now a lawyer, and helped write legislation to compel an annual Department of Defense report on military suicides. McGhee said the first report released this summer does not follow legislation he worked on. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Chris McGhee had just retired after 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, most of it as an aircraft maintenance mechanic.
He was attending law school to prepare for a second career but also had started a podcast called “20 Years Done” where he discussed military issues with others who served.
The exercise proved cathartic – and prompted some inward reflection. He began to realize that the high demands of the job led to what he considered emotional abuse by his supervisors. And the worst part, he said, is that he eventually became an abuser, too.
“A culture of essentially ignoring people’s humanity and low emotional intelligence created a hostile and toxic work environment that wasn’t even recognized as such,” said McGhee, now a lawyer from Scarborough.
In early 2019, less than a year after he left the Air Force, someone who worked for him theredied by suicide, followed a week later by another member of the same unit at the same base in Arizona.
McGhee immediately felt some responsibility.
That sparked a four-year odyssey to see if he could gather rates of suicide by job title within the Air Force and other military branches and determine, as he suspected, whether jobs like the one he held for years carried a higher risk. It started with filing public records requests and ended with working with U.S. Sen. Angus King to draft legislation to compel the Department of Defense to release detailed suicide data.
His effort succeeded.
For the first time, the DOD this summer released a report on suicide rates by military occupation between 2011 and 2022. King’s office, in a release, touted the report and credited a “constituent” for pressing the senator – a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee – to get it done.
McGhee, though, said he isn’t satisfied.
The report (which was six months late) has some new information, but it doesn’t do what the law asked. The data was supposed to be disaggregated by year and by specific job title, not just category, and it wasn’t.
“What has me especially incensed is, there was a law written and not only did DOD not follow the law, they willfully did not follow the law,” McGhee said. “And it seems to me that everyone on the Armed Services committee is saying ‘that’s fine.’ ”
A spokesman for the Department of Defense, in response to questions from the Press Herald, disputed the characterization that the report did not follow the law and said the report is part of “unprecedented and historic actions in suicide prevention.”
“We will continue to target our prevention efforts to Service members most at risk or in need, and we are grateful to Congress for their support and continuing partnership in doing so,” the spokesman said.
A spokesman for Sen. King said the senator is encouraged that the Pentagon has started to more closely study suicides by job title, but he sees the report as “only the beginning.” He said King is adding a provision to this year’s defense bill requiring that the suicide study become an annual report, which will allow the public to track progress and allow for “smart alterations to the methodology.”
“Continued feedback like Mr. McGhee’s – and engaged Americans nationwide – will be considered as the study gets refined in the years to come,” the spokesman said.
***
McGhee grew up dividing his time between St. Louis and northern California. He said he was the first member of his family to graduate high school, but college was never on his radar.
“I actually wanted to be a lawyer in high school, but I was so limited by my circumstances,” he said. “I didn’t know about need-based scholarships or Pell grants. That’s how limiting the poverty was for what the scope of my life could be.”
The Air Force presented an opportunity.
“It was either that or homelessness,” he said.
McGhee enlisted at 19.
His career was largely a blue-collar one, but he didn’t have to travel as much as some military members. His longest stint was in Arizona, working on an aircraft training base.
“A lot of people think ‘Oh, you’re in a training mission, the work is going to be easier.’ The reality is, jets don’t know if you’re flying a combat mission or a training mission. They break the same way,” he said.
Because the Air Force had a longstanding shortage of pilots, there was always training, and the work was grueling, McGhee said. But he stayed.
“Every time my contract came up, I seemed to be in a good place, so I always hit the button to reenlist,” he said.
In 2014, the federal budget process known as sequestration led to automatic cuts in spending across all government agencies. That included thousands of job losses with the Air Force and more than 10% of aircraft maintenance personnel, McGhee said.
The operational tempo, however, remained the same, which meant longer and more stressful hours for those who kept their jobs.
McGhee feared the pace could have consequences, but he also knew that most military units operate without the same accountability as civilian companies. He explained that military members can’t sue under the Civil Rights Act. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration doesn’t have any jurisdiction. Even First Amendment rights are limited.
“It’s like going to a hospital where the doctors cannot be sued for negligence,” he said.
***
After he left the Air Force in 2018, McGhee for the first time in his life had the chance to choose where he wanted to live.
He was applying to law schools and wanted an area with green grass and trees, four seasons and mild summers. Arizona had taken its toll.
The University of Maine School of Law was on the shortlist.
“I had never seen or heard of Portland, Maine,” McGhee said. “But I was smart enough to do a Google image search first. That was it.”
He was consumed by law school but still thought about his military life, and when he heard about the two suicides in his former unit, he felt compelled to do something.
First, though, he wanted to know if suicides – long a concern among the military writ large – were a bigger problem at his base, and among aircraft maintainers. So, he submitted a federal records request for suicide data by job code for the previous 10 years. That was in July 2019.
A month later, the Air Force publicly announced that the branch was on pace to have more suicides that year than any previous year it had tracked.
McGhee’s records request didn’t come back until February 2020. Officials told him suicides were not tracked by specific job, which he later learned wasn’t true. He decided to submit other records requests but never got full responses.
By December 2020, McGhee’s request for suicide data was rejected a second time – this time by the Department of Defense – citing privacy concerns.
McGhee said his dealings represented “a pattern of obfuscation and lack of transparency.”
By then, he was well into law school. So, he decided to sue to get the records released.
“I was really just trying to attract some attention to the issue,” he said.
***
McGhee kept his podcast going, too, and it had built a following.
That’s how he met Sen. King.
King was working on a project for the Library of Congress called “Answering the Call: Maine’s Veteran Voices,” and a staff member suggested the senator interview McGhee. That was January 2022.
“I did the interview and as soon as it ended and the recording stopped, I said, ‘Hey, I really need your help,’ ” McGhee said.
Sen. Angus King
He explained to King that he had been trying for more than two years to get suicide data by job code. King agreed that it was a worthy pursuit.
“I met with (King’s) staff, and we brainstormed what we could do,” McGhee said.
The best option seemed to be drafting legislation. So instead of prepping for law school exams, McGhee researched how to write federal legislation.
The bill was introduced and debated before eventually becoming a provision of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which is the military’s spending bill.
“When I was looking for this information, it was because I was trying to better understand my experience, but I also knew there were these compartmentalized stove-piped experiences in all of these career fields all over the place,” he said. “And that’s why the DOD has a black eye when it comes to suicides. But they almost want to keep the narrative that it’s an unsolvable problem.”
McGhee aimed to use data to show that it could be solved, either by providing resources or reducing workloads.
The bill was signed into law in December 2022, with language that said the report would be finalized and released by the end of 2023.
It wasn’t.
In January of this year, McGhee called to check the status. A staff member in King’s office said it was in final review and “should be along shortly,” according to McGhee.
About two months later, a podcast listener sent McGhee a message that one of his friends stationed in South Korea had died by suicide. He was in aircraft maintenance.
McGhee called the offices of all 25 Senate Armed Services Committee members and all 59 House Armed Service Committee members, including U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat representing Maine and a veteran himself.
“My message was: This suicide just happened, and this report is overdue. I’m asking what you have done to compel this report and what do you intend to do,” McGhee said. “Because as I far as I’m concerned, any suicide that occurred after this report was due makes them complicit.”
***
Finally, six months after the deadline, the report on military suicides by job went to members of Congress on July 23. It outlined 5,997 suicides by a service member between 2011-2022, broken down by 42 individual job codes and provided suicide rates per 100,000 for each. Infantry had one of the highest rates. Pilots ranked among the lowest.
Chris McGhee outside of the federal courthouse in Portland on Thursday. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
McGhee got a copy July 31, the same day King’s office put out a release welcoming the report.
“This newly released Department of Defense report, requested at the suggestion of a smart and savvy Maine veteran, will ensure that the DOD has the most accurate information to help address the risk of suicide amongst the highest risk groups of the Armed Forces while addressing underlying cultural challenges,” Sen. King said in a statement.
McGhee, however, was not nearly as pleased.
“I’m frustrated because it’s not what we asked for,” he said. “If you are a person suffering in the military, this report symbolizes a chance to be seen, a chance to understand what you’re going through. And for the DOD to say we won’t do it …”
Katherine Kuzminski, a deputy director with the Center for New American Security, a national military think tank made up largely of former Democratic administration officials, said military branches have long-held data about suicide (and other things like traumatic brain injury and sexual assault) but there isn’t any natural coordination across the Department of Defense on compiling and analyzing that data.
“What this legislation did is ask for that information to be shared more widely,” she said.
Kuzminski said she understands McGhee’s frustration.
“My personal take is that this is a really good start, but it raises more questions for further investigation,” she said. “I think that’s something Congress could explore. There is nothing nefarious, I don’t think, but for instance, we can look at the suicide rate for infantry members, but that’s not broken down between the Army and the Marines.”
McGhee also said the law required a year-by-year breakdown from 2011 to 2022. Instead, the data was all lumped together. Additionally, there was no data prior to 2011 because, according to the DOD, “it did not have a standardized reporting methodology and therefore is unable to correlate occupational codes of service members who died by suicide prior to 2011 or provide suicide rates for the years prior to CY 2011.”
The report concludes that there are 14 occupation codes that had a higher suicide mortality rate than the U.S. adult population. The most at-risk jobs in the armed services are infantry, ordnance disposal and diving, combat engineers, medical care specialists, and non-identified technical specialists.
But McGhee said without more specific information, the report “made everyone feel good, but won’t make a bit of difference.”
The DOD spokesman also explained that rates were only reported for job codes where there were at least 20 deaths, largely so invalid or incorrect conclusions about differences were not reached. He didn’t rule out improvements in future reports.
“Within the military environment, we will continue to evaluate any reliable data – including occupational job codes – that may help us prevent suicides,” the DOD spokesman said. “Suicide remains a multifaceted issue unique to each individual that can range from relationship issues to financial stressors and much more.”
A spokesman for Golden’s office said the congressman is aware of the effort and sent this statement:
“Servicemembers deserve nothing less than our maximum effort to protect their health and well-being,” Golden said. “The DoD’s first annual release of more detailed military suicide data is a step in the right direction to better understand this problem. As the Department continues to compile data and release this report annually, I will keep working with my colleagues in Congress and in the Pentagon to ensure the public has the information we need to understand and prevent suicide among service members and veterans.”
King’s spokesman reiterated that the senator will continue to work on all efforts that help reduce the number of suicides by servicemembers and hopes to make improvements to the data and analysis going forward.
McGhee, meanwhile, has since started his own law practice, Falcon Forward Law Group, and has been specializing in veterans’ affairs disability cases. He hopes there’s still time for the DOD to make adjustments in the coming years, and he hopes members of Congress apply the necessary pressure.
“The powerlessness and hopelessness I feel from this is strong, and I will never be in a better position of leverage,” McGhee said. “If I can’t claw back this report and get it done per the law, there is a very strong possibility that I am not going to advocate in this space anymore … I’m just going to be angry, and I don’t want to be angry.”
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