fight oar die

The firearm Chad Miller planned to use that night in 2009 was his standard-issue military service pistol, a 9-millimeter Beretta, black.

The steel handgun was sleek and flat with a textured handle and a length just shy of the height of a grown man’s head, and its single-action trigger-pull pressure was roughly the weight of a sack of sugar.

But Miller did not use his service pistol that night; a friend and fellow service member who saw him leave his desk on base and sensed “something was off” talked him out of it upon discovering that the despairing Miller intended to point the business end of the Beretta at his own head before squeezing the trigger. “Do your best and show them what you’re capable of,” the other man told Miller.

Today, Miller, a Clarence resident, husband, father of three, and Air Force veteran of five tours in the Middle East, is 13 years removed from that “rock bottom” moment and doing all he can to help other service members who may be struggling through emotionally trying times. Miller is a member of a four-person team set to row a 20-foot, self-sustaining boat in a race across the Atlantic to raise money in support of veterans’ mental health. 

The race starts in December in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Spain. It ends in Antigua. In between lie 3,000 miles of wide-open ocean. At the 1,500-mile mark, Miller and his team will be closer to outer space than to land.

Money raised will support a program at the University of Denver that seeks to educate people about and prevent veteran suicides, which are on the rise. Suicides among active-duty service members also have increased–by more than 40 percent between 2015 and 2020–according to Defense Department statistics. And since 9/11, four times as many service members have died by suicide as have perished in combat, according to a 2021 study by the Cost of War Project that cites the unique stressors of military life: “high exposure to trauma–mental, physical, moral, and sexual–stress and burnout, the influence of the military’s hegemonic masculine culture, continued access to guns, and the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life.”

The creation of an independent committee to review the military’s mental health and suicide prevention programs was announced in March of 2022 by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “It is imperative that we take care of all our teammates and continue to reinforce that mental health and suicide prevention remain a key priority,” Austin wrote in March. “Clearly we have more work to do.” Last year the Army issued fresh guidelines for handling mental health issues, but many soldiers fear being stigmatized by admitting to emotional problems.

Veterans need a special kind of support, Miller says. They need help not only navigating the residual emotional trauma of combat but also with the rough transition of coming home. “You get back to your hometown, and it doesn’t feel like home anymore,” he says. Many soldiers miss the galvanizing purpose and familiar camaraderie of being in the service and on the ground somewhere. “When you’re gone, all you want to do is go home and when you’re home all you want to do is go back.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, veteran suicides rose to an average of 22 per day.

Servicemen and women with mental health issues have nowhere to turn, Chad says. “There’s no mental health help built into the military.” His wife, Cindy, adds, “Everybody suppresses everything.”

Cindy Miller is also an Air Force veteran and a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, with a master’s degree she earned after leaving the military. Her support has been an invaluable part of Chad’s efforts to call attention to and raise money for veterans’ emotional issues, he says. The family has sacrificed a lot to help servicemen and women get the help they need. When the military wouldn’t grant Chad leave for the boat race, he separated from the service, surrendering his $70,000 annual pension, and Cindy started a private counseling practice, Strong Minds, LLC, to help support the family. 

Strong Minds, LLC, started with a mission of providing counseling and medication management for veterans. She offers free counseling to veterans not covered by insurance for such services.

The counseling Cindy provides is but one kind of therapy from which veterans benefit, she says. More active recreational therapy such as the boat race and Chad’s team climb up Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks a few years ago is especially helpful for veterans and active-service members alike, who find in such endeavors a sense of family and mission that can sometimes seem lacking in civilian life, Cindy Miller says.

Chad, who isn’t the only member of his cross-Atlantic rowing team to once contemplate suicide, will be recapturing a sense of purpose and camaraderie on his oceanic journey, as will the other three men on his team. The training and preparation, though, hasn’t been so inspiring. On the contrary, it’s often been lonely drudgery–solitary hours toiling on rowing machines and sitting at the dining room table packing on pounds. Eating all freeze-dried foods and rowing, Chad expects to lose as much as a third of his body weight. On a gray, cool afternoon in October, Chad sat with Cindy at their dining room table as their three young children watched cartoons in the adjacent room. He nursed a clear-plastic tumbler full of a mauve protein drink containing 5,700 calories.

The Colorado-based organization Miller is rowing for is “Fight Oar Die.” The cross-Atlantic boat race–the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge–comprises 43 teams from all over the world. The teams vary in number but will all row 24 hours a day. Miller’s team, including Nick Rahn, Tommy Hester, and Will Janssen, is the first all-Air Force team to compete in the race. Each team member will row 1.5 million oar strokes over 45 to 60 days in a 20-foot, 3,000-pound, self-sustaining boat.

Chad’s former employer, Scott Bieler and West Herr Automotive, defrayed the $80,000 cost of the journey for the Fight Oar Die team, including an entry fee of $30,000; the $15,000 cost of shipping their boat from Charleston, South Carolina, to the Canary Islands; and the purchase price of food, life jackets, and oars. 

The race begins December 12. For a couple of months after that, Chad will have the occasional company of his family’s voices, via a satellite phone, and the very real, very near presence of dolphins and sharks.

in print discover issue twenty four

For more information about Fight Oar Die and StrongMinds LLC, visit usvetrow.org and strongmindswny.org