Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times

The tragic story of 1st Sgt. Jeff McKinney

In a home movie, 1st Sgt. Jeff McKinney sings softly to his new son while his wife, Chrissi, gives the baby a bath. McKinney teases tiny Jeremy about this, his first nude video.

Someday, McKinney says, the family will show off the footage to Jeremy’s first girlfriend.

“Cause that’s how our parents did us,” McKinney sing-songs. “You’ll be 15, 16 years old, and you have your first date ... .”

It won’t ever play out that way, though. The McKinneys made the movie during his two weeks of home leave halfway through what was supposed to be a 15-month Iraq war deployment. He spent the break bonding with his new son and talking to his 18-year-old son, James, about going to college.

But everything changed July 11 in the bright sunshine of Adhamiyah, Iraq. That day, while out on a simple meet-and-greet patrol, McKinney stepped out of his Humvee and yelled.

“F--- this!”

He raised the barrel of his M4 to his chin and squeezed off one shot.

The first sergeant — who sang Sesame Street songs to his men and teased them just enough to make them feel like family — left his soldiers shattered.

At first, they scrambled to find the sniper who they believed must have fired the shot. When they realized the truth, they wondered how Top could have deserted them.

“That’s not First Sergeant McKinney,” his driver, Spc. Anthony Seashore, who witnessed his death, later told investigators. “Never.”

His family also felt blindsided. McKinney had no history of mental health issues. But as his parents and wife accumulated documentation from the investigation into McKinney’s death, the case became clearer.

The leadership demands of an Army at war, the untold emotional and physical injuries of combat and the unrealistic stoicism of a dedicated soldier all collided in tragedy.

McKinney had been on the scene after a 500-pound bomb left five of his soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter dead; he was in a vehicle when another bomb blew up just two feet away, almost killing him and his men; he had consoled a soldier who lost a leg to a roadside bomb.

And he had stopped eating, stopped sleeping and become convinced he was not doing enough to keep his soldiers safe.

But even after a soldier found him sitting in a wooden supply shack, staring emptily into space, even after his face grew gaunt from weight loss, even after he was unable to form the thoughts necessary to give a morning briefing, McKinney kept going out on patrol.

And that is the part that everyone — soldiers, commanders and family — must now struggle with, each and every day.

‘Jeff would never do that’

As of May 3, 139 soldiers, 25 Marines and seven sailors have killed themselves in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, according to Pentagon data.

Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, more suffer from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury and other problems. But getting combat vets to seek help is difficult.

Studies by the Army, the Defense Department, Rand Corp. and others cite the same reasons why troops with mental health issues don’t seek help: fear of being seen as “weak,” inadequate access to care, concern that asking for help can hurt a career, and guilt about letting battle buddies go out on patrol without them.

Among the troubling factors is that, like McKinney, many of those who choose suicide aren’t young first-tour junior troops. Forty-seven percent of soldiers who have killed themselves in theater are older than 30. And half were in paygrades E-5 or above. Experts are concerned that it’s harder to spot signs of potential suicide in such war-hardened veterans.

McKinney’s family believes that if his chain of command had paid closer attention to the symptoms, his death might have been avoided. And they hope that by talking about it now, months after his death, they might help prevent other suicides.

“It will not be in vain if it helps just one soldier to get the help they need,” said McKinney’s mother, Kay Watson. “And I want everyone to know what a good man he was.”

Chrissi McKinney had a second reason: If her husband had been in his right mind, he never would have hurt his men like that.

“The most important thing to know is Jeff was not himself,” she said. “Jeff would never do that.”

McKinney came to Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, at the request of a friend. He first met 1st Sgt. Kevin Floyd at Fort Polk, La., where, Floyd said, there was nothing to do but fish and hang out with friends.

This was a guy, Floyd recalled, “who had his act together.” They spent all their time together and enjoyed competing as platoon sergeants within the same battalion — but always helped each other out. Floyd said McKinney liked to play, but he also wanted everything just so.

For example, McKinney had thousands of KinderEggs — chocolate eggs filled with toys that are popular with soldiers in Germany — but they were perfectly spaced and dusted.

Within the new battalion, McKinney quickly earned a reputation for knowing his job. He played the drill sergeant, ragging a soldier until he got it right. But he inevitably earned their respect along the way, according to several of his men.

“He definitely liked to joke with the soldiers — to try to make it feel like they were family,” Floyd said. “As a senior leader, that’s pretty unusual. In Alpha Company, he’d know who was married, who had kids. He had 140 people and he knew all the names and faces.”

Troubling changes

McKinney proved himself long before his arrival in Schweinfurt, Germany, home of the 1-26. He worked his way through all the tabs: Airborne, Air Assault, Ranger. He tried for Special Forces, but a torn knee ligament kept him from finishing and he couldn’t try again because he had passed the maximum age limit during the course.

When Charles McKinney and his wife, Rhonda, talk about him, they never stop smiling, as if even the misery of his death can’t overcome the happiness of the memories. Pictures of him and his family fill their Texas home.

“It feels good to talk about him,” his father said. “He could be so gentle. And patient — like Job.”

Watson said her son “had an inward pride that you don’t see in a lot of people. He wanted everyone to shine, not just him.”

By the time McKinney served with the 1-26 in Samarra, Iraq, in 2004, he had an unbreakable bond of trust with his soldiers.

“Those were his kids,” Watson said. “He looked out for them.”

But after Samarra, he was different. He refused to talk to his wife about what he experienced.

“I’m sure I don’t know 20 percent of what he saw,” she said.

Charles McKinney said his son once told him he went out with a squad, and they took automatic fire from inside a school. The soldiers responded in kind. The insurgents got away, but children died in the crossfire.

“The cries of the mothers stayed with him,” his father said. “He was still talking about it a year and a half later. He said, ‘After Samarra, I’ll never be the same again.’”

But when it was time to go back in the fall of 2006, McKinney and Floyd made plans to serve together as tactical operations center battle captains. They had been pulled from their companies just weeks before deployment for the new job.

And McKinney and his wife made plans to expand their family. They had met 10 years before, although Chrissi, a German, resisted falling for an American.

“I didn’t want to be with an American or a soldier, but then it just happened,” she said. “He made me laugh. He was really sweet and understanding.”

She said the need to keep him with her influenced their decision to have a child. “I said, ‘I just want to have something of you if something happens.’ Now I really have something from him.”

At the tactical operations center, he and Floyd drew up the battle plans. But every time someone died, McKinney put the blame on himself.

“He was depressed because he couldn’t be out there with his men,” his mother said. “That’s all Jeff wanted to do — be part of a team, and he wasn’t getting to do it. Then the casualties hit, and Jeff couldn’t do anything.”

As it turned out, McKinney’s battalion was hit harder than any other Army battalion since Vietnam. In 15 months in Iraq, 31 men were lost. Military Times featured the unit late last year in the series “Blood Brothers.”

Into the fight

Adhamiya, where Charlie and Alpha companies patrolled, was a Sunni insurgent stronghold. Roadside bombs were common. In May 2007, McKinney would get his wish to be out with the troops — he was moved from the TOC to Alpha Company to serve as first sergeant.

In general, McKinney said he inherited a good company, but he realized he had some work to do.

The company commander, Capt. Jesse Greaves, had taken over about a month before McKinney arrived.

“Seems like a pretty good company on the surface, but there are a lot of issues that have come out recently which would make you think otherwise,” McKinney wrote to a friend in an e-mail. “I’ve got guys getting drunk in sector, dudes taking drugs, huffing inhalants, stealing and one who will probably get court-martialed.”

Floyd said McKinney worked quickly to deal with the troublemakers. “It got better, and that was all because of Jeff,” Floyd said.

McKinney also sought to protect his men by trying to take more time to plan out missions.

Greaves “was very new” when McKinney arrived, Floyd said. “He was a young officer who took over a unit in combat — gung-ho, high-speed. Jeff was always saying, ‘Sir, we need to slow this down.’ He was encouraging him to engage in tactical patience.”

Greaves declined to be interviewed for this story, saying only that the investigative report on McKinney’s suicide makes clear what happened after McKinney came to Alpha Company. A copy of the report was provided to Military Times by McKinney’s family.

To Seashore, his driver, McKinney was a father figure. “The first two weeks, he was very aggressive, always making sure the soldiers ... were taken care of,” Seashore told investigators.

McKinney talked with each soldier returning from patrol to make sure he was OK and “always took care of his soldiers before himself,” Seashore said.

At one of their forward operating bases, soldiers struggled with unreliable air-conditioning units in their building. McKinney’s always worked, but even when the heat reached an unbearable 120 degrees, he refused to turn his on if his soldiers’ units didn’t work. If his men were short food or water, he refused to eat.

But he couldn’t always protect them.

Tragedy strikes

On June 21, one of Charlie Company’s Bradleys rolled over a roadside bomb. The explosion flipped the 30-ton armored vehicle upside-down and sent flames so high that no one could get near it to help the soldiers trapped inside.

McKinney and a platoon of men from Alpha Company tried to help, but five soldiers died that day: Sgt. Alphonso Montenegro, Sgt. Ryan Wood, Spc. Daniel Agami, Spc. Anthony Hebert and Spc. Thomas Leemhuis.

“He was out there picking up dead soldiers,” Floyd said. “Having done that myself, it is not an easy job.”

McKinney’s medic, Sgt. Gary Pritchett, told investigators that this “seemed to be the first of a few incidents that affected” the first sergeant.

The second was another large roadside bomb June 24 that went off about two feet in front of his vehicle, Seashore said.

“There is no doubt that if this IED had struck the vehicle, we would all have been killed,” he told investigators.

Then, on June 26, Spc. Jay Fain lost his right leg at the hip to an explosively formed projectile as he was leaving the unit’s forward operating base to go on leave, Floyd said.

McKinney went with Seashore to the combat hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone to check on Fain. Fain’s father worked as a contractor in Iraq and also rushed to the hospital.

McKinney “began to cry, asking for forgiveness,” Seashore said, while Fain’s father “kept telling him this was not his fault.”

But these events — all within the space of a week — weighed heavily. McKinney didn’t sleep or eat for days on end.

“I think all that contributed,” Floyd said. “If somebody had raised concerns, I think things would have been different.”

Pritchett said Greaves told him McKinney had not been sleeping. After consulting a physician assistant, Pritchett gave McKinney Ambien.

Pritchett later found McKinney sitting on a bunk in the aid station, where he had been for 2½ hours. He asked McKinney to go talk with the physician assistant, but, according to the investigative report, he did not.

On July 7, McKinney went on a night mission and acted the way his men like to remember him, “singing the Oreo song and the Brady Bunch song, joking around, yelling at me for not singing along,” Seashore said. “We were having a great time.”

But when they got back, McKinney stayed up all night preparing for the battalion’s change of command the next day, when Lt. Col. John Reynolds would take over.

“He believed if it wasn’t perfect that himself and [Greaves] would get relieved,” Seashore told investigators.

The change of command went perfectly, but over the next few days, McKinney “seemed to be upset,” Seashore said. “I would ask him all day, ‘Hey, what’s up, first sergeant? What’s on your mind? He would just reply with, ‘This place is a mess. I’m failing this company.’”

Seashore reassured him he was the best first sergeant he’d ever had, but McKinney said, “I feel like I’m useless, like I don’t have a real job.”

“That wasn’t Jeff,” Charles McKinney said. “He was squared away. But there was ... death all around him and he couldn’t do anything about it, and he didn’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

The Sunday before he died, McKinney called his wife.

“He was really strange,” she said. “I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I don’t want to tell you.’”

But she pushed him to talk. “He said, ‘I feel really weird. I can’t think straight. I’m not doing a good job,’” she said.

She pushed him to rest. “‘Close your eyes and think of me and Jeremy and James,’” she told him. “He laughed and said, ‘OK. I’ll do that.’” He promised her he would see a doctor.

In the meantime, McKinney visited Greaves to tell him he was failing the company. “His complaints were unfounded and I explained that to him each time,” Greaves told investigators. “He refused to sleep and had, on several occasions, ‘zoned out’ for several hours.”

‘Falling apart’

At that point, McKinney’s family says, he should have been sent to a combat stress unit for evaluation.

“My son was falling apart, and no one helped him,” Watson said.

“They should have sent him to the doctor,” Chrissi McKinney said.

On July 10, Greaves ordered McKinney to take some sleeping medication and get 10 hours of sleep. “I told him he was on the verge of endangering soldiers by not sleeping and that he would not leave unless he complied with my guidance,” Greaves told investigators. “He looked horrible. I knew he hadn’t slept in a while.”

Greaves said McKinney slept from 5:45 p.m. to 2 a.m.

Greaves also said he believed McKinney suffered a traumatic brain injury when the roadside bomb exploded in front of his vehicle June 24. TBIs can cause a person to feel angry by affecting the part of the brain that controls that emotion.

McKinney’s driver said he got a visit from his platoon sergeant, who told him to watch McKinney on the next day’s mission because he had noticed that McKinney “wasn’t himself.”

The next morning, McKinney showed up at Greaves’ room at 2 a.m., and Greaves went over the mission with him, as scheduled. After the platoon had gathered, Greaves asked McKinney to give the final casualty evacuation rehearsal. “The first sergeant gave me a blank look when I asked him to lead us through it, so I conducted the rehearsal,” Greaves told investigators.

Still, McKinney went on patrol.

“I think he just basically showed up at his vehicle and said he was going out,” said Floyd, who took over as Alpha’s first sergeant after McKinney’s death.

Greaves told investigators why he allowed McKinney to patrol. “If I would have sent First Sergeant McKinney back to his rack, I’m afraid his soldiers would have lost confidence in his leadership. … I believe this would have broken him and his self-confidence. There were no apparent indications that First Sergeant McKinney was not capable of completing the mission we had before us.”

On patrol, McKinney shook and acted confused when he got a call on the radio, so Greaves took it.

“He kept looking at his hand mike and taking deep breaths,” his gunner, Pfc. Roberto Lefurgy, told investigators.

He played with a round from his weapon and didn’t say a word to his soldiers. At one point, he seemed to be asleep.

Seashore said he asked McKinney what was wrong. “He stopped playing with the round, threw it to the ground in anger, opened the door, and as he got out, he yelled, ‘F--- this.’ Then he turned around looking at me. He had the muzzle [of his M4] under his chin, and as he pulled the trigger, I saw in his face that he realized what he was doing and did not want to do it.

“He tried to move his head, but still the round caught him,” Seashore said. “We could not believe what just happened. I pushed him over so I could help treat the wound. I watched his eyes close, and I began to shake and slowly back up.”

A wave of disbelief

McKinney’s men evacuated him to Forward Operating Base Apache in Adhamiya, where he died at the aid station.

Floyd heard it was an accidental discharge. And then he got a phone call.

“I was shocked,” Floyd said. “There were so many signs. I think he should have gone to mental health.”

After McKinney died, Seashore and Lefurgy worked for Floyd. “They told me it was almost like he was in a trance,” Floyd said. “They were in disbelief. He’s the father figure. He’s the one who takes care of everything.”

At home in Texas, Charles McKinney watched as military men walked up his sidewalk.

“It’s burned into my mind,” he said. “I knew why they were here. I screamed. I ran to the back of the house and told Rhonda not to let them in.”

The couple expected to hear there had been a roadside bomb or a sniper.

“An IED — you halfway expect that,” Rhonda McKinney said.

But she questions why no one in his command chain stepped in earlier to force her stepson to get help. “For them to watch it happening … it was almost a betrayal. They let him down.”

The family questions it all, poring through files and trying to reconcile what happened in Iraq with the man they knew.

“For me, it’s all just questions,” Rhonda McKinney said.

The autopsy shows no medications in McKinney’s system, causing family members to wonder whether he slept at all the night before he died, or if he came out of a daze as sleeping medication wore off.

One detail remains etched for Charles McKinney.

“I saw him,” he said. “The wound was like he turned his head.”

Investigators closed the case, ruling it a suicide.

Floyd wondered what he could have done differently.

“I’m upset with me for not being in better touch,” he said. “I watched my own men more carefully. I was more in tune to looking out for them.”

He sent a couple of his men, including one who witnessed McKinney’s death, to the combat stress clinic, where they could rest and talk for a couple of days.

“The doctors actually called me to talk about the state the guys were in to make sure I understood,” Floyd said. “I had majors and lieutenant colonels telling me what we should do when the soldiers got back.”

A few days after McKinney died, another Bradley rolled over a deep-buried bomb in Adhamiya, and four more Alpha Company men died: Sgt. 1st Class Luis Gutierrez-Rosales, Spc. Zachary Clouser, Spc. Richard Gilmore III and Spc. Daniel Gomez.

“It’s very shocking to a soldier,” Floyd said. “A lot of them didn’t want to go out in sector after that. But only a couple of times did I hear, ‘Sergeant, I’m not going.’ I was very proud of them by the time we came home.”

When fear did set in, Floyd and Greaves went out with the men on missions.

Greaves “was upset [about McKinney’s death],” Floyd said. “He did show a lot of emotion.”

But for whatever reason, Greaves has yet to speak personally to Chrissi McKinney, even though they have attended some of the same events since the unit returned home. The family feels hurt by that distance.

But Floyd, who also worked for Greaves, holds no grudge.

“Greaves was my commander, and the commander that I worked with was a commander I wouldn’t put the blame on. But I don’t know why he let him go out there,” he said. “I know he saw changes. But it’s not easy for a commander to say, ‘First sergeant, you can’t do that.’ I’ve never had a commander say that to me.”

Reynolds, the battalion commander, said Greaves does intend to meet with Chrissi McKinney but noted that it has taken Greaves time to deal with what happened himself.

“Jesse Greaves is a very warm person and a gentle giant,” Reynolds said. “I do not know why [McKinney] did what he did. Not sure we will ever find out. His duty position and responsibilities as a leader indicate he was very good at what he did — a leader of soldiers and men.”

Chrissi McKinney sought out her husband’s men when they returned from Adhamiya.

“I wanted to tell them I was sorry for what they witnessed,” she said. She met Seashore and Lefurgy, and they talked for a long time. They told her he always sang a special song from Sesame Street on patrol, but on that fateful day, he didn’t sing.

She told them her husband never would have hurt them if he had been himself, and they told her they knew that.

But she saw pain in their faces.

“They were different after that,” she said.

DISCUSS:

How do we recognize a problem to prevent more suicides?

Related reading:

Soldier suicides increase in 2007

Video:

Jeff McKinney’s lasting legacy

———

What to look for

According to the policy printed on cards handed to every soldier in Iraq from the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine, warning signs for combat stress that require “quick assistance” include withdrawal, depression, inability to sleep, anxiety, memory loss and spaced-out appearance. The cards recommend unloading the soldier’s weapon, moving him to a safer place and getting him to eat, drink and sleep. But according to both the Department of Veterans Affairs and the military, there are also signs for service members to look out for in themselves.

Talk to your battle buddy, medic or squad leader if you are:

• Thinking about hurting or killing yourself.

• Looking for ways to kill yourself.

• Talking about death, dying or suicide.

• Engaging in self-destructive behavior such as drug abuse or treating weapons carelessly.

Other signs that you should talk to someone include feeling:

• Hopeless, like there’s no way out.

• Anxious, agitated, sleepless and moody.

• Like there is no reason to live.

• Rage or anger.

• Like giving away possessions.

What to do if a battle buddy is hurting:

• Ask open-ended questions such as, “How are things going?” Be honest and direct.

• Ask if he intends to hurt himself.

• Do not leave him alone.

• Take him to a treatment facility.

• Monitor him.

What not to do:

• Overreact.

• Minimize the problem.

• Create a stigma about getting help.

• Tell him to “suck it up” or “get over it.”

• Gossip about it.