Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  “We’ll just have to prove to them that it was the right thing to do,” said Kelley.

  They explained their situation to Ryan, who introduced them to his pastor, and that Sunday, July 26, he called them to the front of his church. Before the congregation Adam and Kelley said their vows and were married for a second time. The pastor then asked his congregation to bow their heads. “God,” he said, “we pray for a miracle in the lives of this young couple.”

  Adam called home the next day.

  “Dad,” he said, “I have some things I need to tell you and Mom.”

  “Okay,” said Larry. “I’m ready.”

  “Kelley and I got married.”

  “Well, your mom and I love Kelley and we would like to have been there—but that’s okay.”

  “There’s something else. I joined the Navy.”

  Newlyweds Adam and Kelley, during the period Adam was training for boot camp.

  8

  Rising Up

  “THOSE THREE WEEKS BEFORE HE LEFT for boot camp, there was something different about Adam I hadn’t seen before,” says Kelley. “There was an intensity. A focus.”

  In the evenings while she watched television or read, Adam was on the living room floor cranking out push-ups and sit-ups. During the day, every overhanging tree branch and playground monkey bar he passed gave the opportunity for as many pull-ups and chin-ups as his arms could muster.

  When Kelley went to work at the travel agency, Adam swam laps at the YMCA or drove to Wolf Stadium—six years after graduating from Lake Hamilton High—and jogged the track and ran the bleachers. “I could smell the crack sweating out of me,” he told SEAL buddy Kevin Houston years later. “I ran those steps, just like in high school, singing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in my head—‘Risin’ up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances’—I love that song.”

  One morning Adam parked his truck on the eastern side of the 70 West bridge and walked down the trail to the shore. He waded into Lake Hamilton, swam the quarter mile to the western shore, hoofed it up one of the trails he’d used as a kid, and tried to run back to the truck he’d borrowed from Larry. By the time he got there he was stumbling and nearly collapsed.

  Angry at his weakness, Adam returned the next morning to do it again.

  The second week of August 1998, Adam reported to the Naval training center in Great Lakes, Illinois—more than a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. Jeff Buschmann had called him right before he left for the airport to wish him luck. “And hey,” he’d said, “if you think you’re going to screw this up, go AWOL to smoke dope or something, don’t do it. Because my dad really put his ass on the line for you.”

  The following day, twenty-four-year-old Seaman Recruit Brown lined up with a hundred some eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds in his division to get his hair buzzed off, his uniforms issued, and his bunk assigned. Then he had two minutes to use the phone—long enough for him to call Kelley and sing out, “Hey, baby. I’m in the Navy now! I’ll call you again in three weeks.”

  Back in Little Rock, where she had moved in with her father, the new Mrs. Brown was “a nervous wreck.” She knew Adam had what it took to make it through boot camp, but she also knew the likelihood for relapse. Every time the idea of failure weaseled its way into her mind, she prayed for Adam to have strength against his addiction. “That was the only thing that would stop him,” she says. “I couldn’t forget how Adam would tell me, every time he messed up, ‘It calls my name.’ ”

  It gave her hope that all he was allowed to bring with him to boot camp were the clothes on his back, his identification, and five dollars. Kelley had nixed the five dollars. With money in hand, an addict can find drugs anywhere.

  Over dinner with Janice and Larry one night, Kelley could sense their reservations, despite the optimism they conveyed—exactly what she was experiencing. “We didn’t get our hopes up,” says Janice, who had continued to pray that Adam was finding his path. Sometimes the worry consumed her, and then she’d call her now close friend Helen Webb. “Don’t you worry,” Helen told her during one such call. “We are surrounding your Adam with the Holy Spirit. There’s a hedge of protection around him. Those fiery darts of Satan won’t penetrate.”

  Her words gave Janice chills—she could physically feel something like an electrical charge. Her faith was renewed.

  If Adam made it through boot camp, Kelley knew she would be moving to Great Lakes to be by his side on the long journey to become a Navy SEAL.

  Completing eight weeks of boot camp was only the first hurdle. In addition to the normal duties of learning how to march, salute, fold your clothes, and make your bed the Navy way, recruits interested in becoming SEALs held a SEAL Challenge Contract, which gave them three opportunities to pass the SEAL Physical Screening Test (PST):

  • Five-hundred-yard swim, using breaststroke or sidestroke, in no more than twelve minutes and thirty seconds. Ten-minute rest period.

  • Forty-two perfect push-ups in no more than two minutes. Two-minute rest period.

  • Fifty sit-ups in no more than two minutes. Two-minute rest period.

  • At least six pull-ups from a dead-hang position, with no time limit. Ten-minute rest period.

  • One-and-a-half-mile run in boots and long pants in eleven minutes and thirty seconds or less.

  If Adam passed the SEAL PST and graduated from boot camp, his next hurdle would be A-School to earn a Naval Rating. He had chosen Fireman, Interior Communications Electrician Striker (ICFN), the career path recommended by the recruiter because of Adam’s experience as an electrician and that involved almost six months of intense classroom and field training at Great Lakes. He would have to graduate with satisfactory grades before heading to a twelve-day BUD/S—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL—indoctrination course on Coronado Island, across the bay from San Diego, California. This would determine who would attend what was arguably the toughest military school on the planet, the 173-day BUD/S course. Only then would Adam be assigned to a SEAL team. But he wouldn’t truly be a SEAL until six to nine months later, when he had completed advanced SEAL training and earned his Trident—the gold insignia pin worn only by fully trained SEALs.

  More than two years of training were required to become a qualified Navy SEAL. Getting to that goal required that Adam remain completely drug free. The waivers he’d signed made it clear: one drug infraction and he was gone—out of the Navy and perhaps into a military prison. Statistics were also against his chances of success: only about 20 percent of candidates complete BUD/S; those who don’t are assigned to a ship in the fleet.

  All this information made Kelley’s head spin, but it also gave her focus. In the weeks Adam was away, she came to realize how much of her life, her emotional being, she was devoting to him. She herself had been somewhat lost before she’d met him, and Adam, baggage and all, gave her direction.

  “An angel sent from heaven” was how Janice and Larry described their new daughter-in-law. “There was no question,” says Janice, “that she was going to stand by Adam’s side no matter what.” When they prayed for Adam, they wanted him to succeed as much for Kelley as for himself, because they knew she was in it for the long haul. Currently, Kelley was in limbo, poised between her old life as Adam’s girlfriend/cheerleader/baby-sitter and her new life as a Navy wife—which, Janice and Larry joked with her, would be the same as before but with more ironing.

  In Adam’s fourth week of boot camp Kelley received a letter with great news: he had passed the SEAL Physical Screening Test. He didn’t let on how well everything was really going. His year at Teen Challenge had prepared him for the seemingly endless string of rules and regulations, and what the Navy dished out physically wasn’t much worse than the sweltering two-a-day summer football practices with the Lake Hamilton Wolves.

  At twenty-four he was the “old man” of his division, but on the runs he was always near the front of the pack, right there with the recent high school graduates. Adam never took the yelling and ber
ating from the recruit division commander personally, unlike many of the younger guys, who felt the full stinging disparagement of these verbal beat-downs. Being Adam, he’d wait for opportune moments to build his fellow recruits back up, demonstrating the leadership that had been MIA all those years.

  On October 16, Kelley, Larry, Janice, and Heath Vance gathered at the Naval Service Training Command center to watch Adam—who had been named Honor Recruit of his division—graduate. The whole world got a little brighter for the Brown family that day, especially when the commanding officer read aloud from his commendation letter to Adam:

  By virtue of your demonstrated attention to duty, military conduct, responsiveness to orders, cooperation, loyalty and comradeship, you have been selected by your shipmates as Honor Recruit for Division 401.

  I take great pleasure in commending you for your fine performance, which has earned you the admiration and respect of your shipmates and extend to you a ‘well done’ for your impressive achievement.

  “I love you, Adam,” Kelley told her husband when she finally got the chance to wrap her arms around him. “I’m so proud of you.”

  Kelley and Adam, holding his diploma and Honor Recruit commendation letter at boot camp graduation

  When Adam carried Kelley over the threshold of the on-base apartment, secured for them by Captain Buschmann and their first home as newlyweds, she was twenty-two and he was twenty-four. A few days after graduation, as the couple settled into the military community of Naval Station Great Lakes, Adam made some phone calls. The first was to Captain Buschmann. “Thank you for believing in me, sir,” he said.

  “I had no doubts,” said Captain Buschmann. “None.”

  Adam called Kelley’s father, then Richard Williams and his father, Curtis Williams, as well as Ryan Whited, Grandma Brown, and of course Manda, whose tough-love approach had been the softest. She had rarely distanced herself from Adam, and now she congratulated her brother and thanked Kelley for the unconditional love she had shown him.

  But a call to Shawn, Adam’s original hero and moral mentor, meant the most. Even though they had put the past behind them, Shawn had remained understandably skeptical throughout Adam’s attempts at sobriety and had withheld any accolades—until now. “Mom and Dad are so proud of you,” he said. “And so am I.”

  The praise Adam received from his family was like rocket fuel as he headed into an intense blur of classes and fieldwork for the next six months. On the first day of A-School, the coffee maker began brewing a few minutes before Kelley and Adam’s alarm clock went off at 4:00 a.m. She made him breakfast, then hopped back into bed while he hurried off to SEAL PT—what would become their routine each weekday.

  At 5:00 a.m. every morning, some 150 prospective SEALs would queue up outside on a slab of concrete the size of a basketball court, or in the gym if there was a blizzard, or at the pool on swim days. Standing atop a small wooden block, the “motivator” was an active-duty SEAL whose goal was to physically prepare these boot camp graduates for the wet and sandy hell of BUD/S. “A couple of hours a day a few days a week is not enough time to prepare you for what I promise will be the longest twenty-seven weeks of your life,” yelled the motivator. “What we’ll be doing here is fun. If you’re not having fun, you’re in the wrong place—better go and pick out a ship, ’cause that’s where you’re heading.”

  The temperature, like the original number of 150 men, dropped significantly as fall merged into winter. Two-mile runs in the rain became five-mile runs in hail and then eight-mile runs in snow, as the Great Lakes region dished out storm after storm, rivaled in intensity by whatever the motivator could concoct for that day’s session—after the run. It might be an hourlong crab walk, five hundred push-ups, or a buddy-carry through knee-deep snow.

  On one particularly miserable morning, the motivator decided the students should do nothing but sit-ups for an entire hour, with a goal of a thousand. No one but the motivator could actually do that many, but they grunted and jerked their bodies through the motions till their backs were bleeding.

  Then there was swimming. Miles and miles of swimming, sometimes underwater, sometimes with fins, sometimes with clothes on, other times with rocks in their pockets. “Just a little taste of what you’ll face at BUD/S,” said the motivator.

  After the two-hour PT, Adam would rush home, his lips blue and his cheeks red and windburned, but with a smile on his face. “I can’t wait for San Diego,” he’d say to Kelley, not a doubt in his mind that was where they were heading.

  He would take a quick shower, change into the uniform of the day, and find a full breakfast waiting for him that he’d gobble down before running to his A-School classes at 8:00 a.m. Kelley would walk Sidney, then head off to her job at the base travel agency. Dinner was ready or in the oven when he got home by 6:00 that evening. Then he would study, Kelley quizzing him with flashcards.

  “I babied him,” says Kelley, who finished each night by drawing Adam a hot bath complete with mountains of bubbles, just the way he liked it. “I wanted to give him every advantage because I knew, with that drug calling his name, he was fighting something none of the other guys were. ‘Stay in bed; it’s cold and dark,’ he’d tell me when he got up. He never took it for granted. We were broke, but he treated me like a princess. Every day he’d tell me how pretty I was or how lucky he was. We saved our change in a bucket, and on weekends we went to the MWR [the base’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation center] and had Pac-Man wars for hours, till our quarters ran out. When he wasn’t at school and I wasn’t at work, we were attached at the hip. A-School was our honeymoon.”

  On April 6, 1999, Adam—one of only a few dozen students who had stuck it out through SEAL PT—was chosen as a Distinguished Military Graduate from the A-School course. His commanding officer praised him in his commendation letter:

  … exemplary performance in military decorum, appearance, respect for authority, and leadership in your peer group in addition to your outstanding academic record. These achievements are significant and have distinguished you as a “top performer” and “team player.”

  This superb performance demonstrates your self-motivation and sets an outstanding example for your peers. You are encouraged to sustain this level of performance … not only will you benefit from it, your example will encourage others to carry out their duties in the proud traditions of the Naval service.

  Kelley was ecstatic when she read the letter. “You’re on a roll, baby! Remember where you came from, and look where you are. You need to call your parents. Good job!”

  Kelley and Adam drove cross country in a big Ryder truck, her Pontiac Grand Am parked inside the back, surrounded by boxes, and Sidney in the cab with them. Each day brought them closer to the home they’d rented online in the town of El Cajon, twenty miles northeast of Coronado Island. Each state line they crossed brought Adam nearer to twenty-seven weeks of the most torturous military training ever devised.

  At the same time, former SEAL Dick Couch was gaining clearance from the Navy to observe and document what Adam was about to undergo, “a process,” he would write in The Warrior Elite, “that transforms young men into warriors … a distillation of the human spirit, a tradition-bound ordeal that seeks to find men with character, courage, and the burning desire to win at all costs, men who would rather die than quit.”

  Adam wore his dress whites when he checked in at the Naval Special Warfare Center on the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, California, at the beginning of May—one of 145 men in SEAL Class 226. The class proctor outlined the course and told them that only 20 percent of them would remain at graduation. He explained the DOR (drop on request) option that any of them could use at any time, a “get out of hell free” card where one need only ring a bell, a public announcement that said, “I’m not good enough to be a Navy SEAL.”

  “The reputation you forge here will follow you to the teams,” the proctor said. “Your reputation here will define you.”

  “Hooyah!” was the res
ponse.

  And so began the punishing rite of passage. Most candidates admit being a little awestruck and a tad intimidated when they first encounter the jaw-dropping male specimens who show up for BUD/S to strut their stuff. Then there was Adam. “He was nothing special,” says Christian Taylor, at twenty-nine one of the few guys older than Adam. Christian was not going to ring that bell, and he made it a game to predict who would. “I didn’t take him seriously,” Christian continues, “that southern accent and all. He seemed too friendly to be tough.”

  But boot camp and A-School had awakened in Adam the “psycho” who never quit. On top of that, as he told Kelley many times, his ace in the hole was his faith, which gave him a refuge to go to and a shield of strength. Quoting the verse Pastor Smith had shared with him in jail—“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13)—he said he had complete confidence. Not in himself, but in the One who lived within him.

  If innate mental and physical toughness was his armor and faith his ace in the hole, Kelley was Adam’s secret weapon. As he began the first phase of BUD/S, Kelley charged into her own grueling routine. Once again she’d found a job at a travel agency, and every day at 5:00 p.m., she’d get off work and hurry home to take Sidney for a quick walk before driving the half hour to the BUD/S compound. Arriving around 6:00, she’d park and read her Bible or another book until Adam showed up, anywhere from 6:00 to 10:00. Perhaps his boat team (or even the entire class) had been pegged by the instructors as requiring some extra “motivation” in the form of a four-mile run, some log PT, or an hour of push-ups and sit-ups. Occasionally, she’d pick him up as late as midnight if there had been a night-specific exercise.