by Eric Blehm
“Thank you,” Kelley told Christian that evening. “He’ll be home tomorrow. This is the last time this is going to happen.”
For Kelley it bordered on miraculous that Adam had lasted this long without a relapse, because “it was the devil to him. Toward the end of his dark time he’d come home and say, ‘I can’t believe I let him get me. He paints this pretty picture, but I know it’s wrong and I don’t want to lose y’all.’ ”
Kelley had spent that day and evening playing with the kids and praying, not overly concerned that something bad had happened to Adam. No doubt he was hiding somewhere, afraid to return home because he was ashamed and angry at himself for giving in to the voice he had overpowered for so long. She believed this was another test, another hurdle put before her, and while God had never told her to leave Adam before, this time she felt guided to do just that. “I wanted to shock him,” she says.
Kelley filled Janice and Larry in on what was going on, receiving their full support to go forward with her plan. When Adam finally walked in the door Sunday morning, his head was hung low. Quietly, so Nathan, who was playing in the living room, could not hear, she said with all the venom she could muster, “How dare you. You have a family. How dare you!”
He shook his head and appeared “beat down and ashamed,” says Kelley. He began to speak.
“No,” she said. “I’ve heard it all before.”
Studying his eyes, Kelley could tell that Adam was no longer under the influence of the drug, so she placed nine-month-old Savannah in his arms, picked up the suitcase she’d packed the night before, walked out the door, and drove away. While she completely trusted Adam with the children, it took all her willpower to leave her family and camp out for the next twenty-four hours in a room at the Navy Lodge at Little Creek. She read her Bible, watched television, and walked around the base for hours, listening to the ringing of her cell phone as its message box filled with Adam’s apologies and promises.
In addition to apologizing to Kelley, Adam was apologizing to God for being weak. And he prayed that Kelley would give him one more chance. He was also handling all the things Kelley usually did for their children—mixing formula for Savannah, changing diapers, preparing meals, bathing them. At bedtime, Adam held Savannah and sang to Nathan the happy song that he and Kelley had been lulling him to sleep with for almost a year. But tonight, for Adam, it was just plain sad:
I love you, you love me,
We’re a happy family …
Kelley returned home on Monday morning having not answered even one of Adam’s calls. She wanted him to understand what it felt like to have a spouse, the parent of your children, disappear.
“Please forgive me,” he said as she passed him by and went straight to Nathan and Savannah and hugged them. “I’m sorry.”
“Get to work,” Kelley replied. “We’ll talk about a few things when you get home.”
For the first time in his Navy career, Adam was late for his job that morning. In the afternoon, at Christian’s request, he headed to a Village Inn restaurant.
Christian was already seated when Adam showed up, looking “like a beat dog—you know, when a dog knows they did something wrong, just guilty. I take this job seriously, and I knew he did too. But we all have weaknesses and that makes people real, and controlling those weaknesses makes people strong.”
“I really messed up,” Adam said.
“I know,” said Christian, and then he let Adam have it. “I am beyond disappointed; I am pissed. There is no room for that in this job. No way. We train at high levels, shooting real bullets. There is no room for error. I mean, seriously? We are Navy SEALs! I have to be able to trust you, man. We’re going to war soon. You have to be the guy that’s got my back when we go in and we’re on target.”
“I know,” said Adam. “You’re right.”
“And you’re letting your family down,” Christian went on. “Kelley is an angel putting up with this. What the hell! I have to be able to trust that you’ve got my back, and if you’re thinking about doing something else, thinking about doing crack and not protecting me or anybody when we’re doing our job … I need to know where your mind is when we go into a room and we need to shoot and make decisions.”
“That’s it. I swear I’m never going to do it again.”
“All right then,” said Christian. “I trust you. We’re done here.”
That evening Kelley informed Adam that there would be no more chances; the next time it happened, she and the kids would be gone for good. “It was tough talk,” says Kelley. “He believed it, I said it so he’d believe it, but I can’t honestly say I really would have left him if he did it again. We prayed that night, we read the Bible, the verses on strength, and I told him he was letting God down too.”
A month and a half later, Team TWO was training in a MOUT (military operations on urban terrain) village on a base in Alabama. Defending the buildings within this setting were an opposing force of SEALs armed with M4 rifles and 9mm simulation rounds—actual bullets with liquid, paint-filled tips, advertised as nonlethal for training purposes. Often referred to as paintballs on steroids, they are painful and can penetrate the skin. Protective gear for the neck and eyes is mandatory.
Adam was moving up a stairway when he came under intense fire and was hit in the chest. He lifted his arms to signal that he was “dead” and began to walk down the steps to “reset” the assault by regrouping with his team to try again. At the instant he turned, a final round aimed at his head slipped past his wraparound sunglasses and hit him in the right eye. He trotted outside the building, where his team was waiting. “Man, I got dinged,” he said to Austin, then pulled off his glasses. “How does it look?”
The outer corner of his right eye to the center was covered with blue paint. Near the tear duct, it was blood red.
“Can you see out of it?” asked Austin.
“Naw, everything’s blurry,” Adam replied calmly.
After being treated at a local hospital’s emergency room, Adam called Kelley. “Baby, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “I’m okay, but I got shot in the eye with a sim round. Just grazed it, but I’m coming home. It’ll be late; I’ll get a ride.”
From the way Adam downplayed it, Kelley assumed that his injury was probably a black eye. But when he came home—the bandage off because of pain and his eye swollen to a squint—“my heart nearly fell out of my chest,” she says, remembering the bloody tears that streamed down his cheek. “It was mangled, just trashed.”
“Are you going to lose your eye?” she asked, hugging him tight.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m scheduled for surgery in the morning.”
At Portsmouth Naval Hospital, Adam and Kelley were told the bullet that had glanced off Adam’s eyeball had all but destroyed his cornea, as well as damaged the lens, surrounding nerves, and muscles. Adam was now eligible for a medical discharge as a disabled veteran, at a level of disability that would pay a significant sum each month for the rest of his life. He refused to even consider the option. “One, I’m not disabled, and two, I’m not a veteran,” he said. “I haven’t even fought for my country yet.” The doctors explained that he was still considered a veteran for having served in the military.
“That didn’t count, as far as Adam was concerned,” says Kelley. “End of discussion. There wasn’t an ounce of quit in him. What we did do was move out of our house into a smaller apartment, to save a little more money in case this was a career-ending injury.”
For the next few months, which Adam spent alternating between doctors’ appointments and his ongoing training cycles, the ophthalmology staff fought to restore the sight in his injured dominant eye. He could see shadows and detect movement peripherally, but beyond that the eye was essentially blind. In addition, there was severe swelling of the eyeball, which the doctors had a difficult time getting under control.
“The pressure was painful,” says Kelley, “but he wouldn’t let on. I’d see him grimace when he
didn’t know I was looking.” Furthermore, Adam had come to believe that what appeared to be a freak accident “was actually God tapping him on the shoulder, letting him know he wasn’t happy that Adam had succumbed to that voice,” says Kelley. “He was so depressed for a few weeks, and then he decided it was just another challenge, another lightning bolt God was throwing at him, to see if he’d get up or stay down.”
The ongoing prescription was for steroid drops and an eye patch that delighted three-year-old Nathan. “Arrrrgggh, matey,” Adam would say, donning a pirate hat. He’d sword fight with his son and draw maps that would lead them to treasure he buried in the sand at a nearby playground. “If he had to be home recovering after a procedure,” says Kelley, “he was going to play with the kids as much as he could.”
Adam’s task unit was scheduled to deploy to Iraq in April 2004. This gave him seven months to both heal his eye as much as possible and retrain himself to work around the injury. Even with limited vision he was able to excel in—and successfully complete—a highly competitive one-month Naval Special Warfare Assault Breacher Course. The “breacher” is the SEAL who gains access to a building or compound during a raid so the rest of the assault team can enter the target structure. He is the first to sneak up to an objective while the rest of the team holds security from a distance. As an explosives expert, the breacher can also safely implode whatever stands between the SEALs and the enemy: a door, a gate, or a wall.
For as long as Savannah could remember, Daddy wore an eye patch and gave her nose a pinch every chance he could sneak one in.
In addition, Adam taught himself to shoot using his nondominant left eye. This didn’t affect how he held a handgun, but aiming an M4 carbine required that he turn his head and lean out over the stock for accuracy.
Once the platoon workup was finished, Adam was cleared by Medical, having exhibited proficiency in SEAL tasks, but with the notation that he was doing so with limited vision in his dominant eye. He flew to Baghdad for a six-month deployment, and upon his arrival, Adam’s superiors decided that his limited vision was a liability. They would not allow Adam to participate with his platoon in direct-action combat missions on the ground.
This had been a possibility, he knew, but he’d thought it was a slim one, especially considering his most recent evaluation, based significantly on the training he’d taken part in after his eye injury. In the evaluation the master chief had stated that Adam was his “FIRST CHOICE for the toughest jobs.” He’d gone even further and recommended Adam for “NSW DEVGRU.”
Instead, Adam was given a job working with intelligence as part of a reconnaissance-focused task unit. As a team player, he dealt positively with his disappointment. “He thought he’d work hard and prove himself and then persuade leadership to clear him for direct action,” says one of his Team TWO teammates. “That was his plan.”
For the first few weeks in Iraq, while Adam’s teammates were conducting special reconnaissance, sniper missions, and raids—capturing or killing insurgents, clearing houses, and gathering intelligence—Adam tirelessly performed a myriad of support tasks while based in the northern city of Mosul. He constructed the C4 charges his team used for explosive entry; he took aerial photographs of target buildings and neighborhoods from airplanes and helicopters; he participated in the interrogation of captured insurgents; and most importantly, he pored over intelligence and played a lead role in planning missions.
Knowing how SEALs operate and with a keen sense for strategy, he “developed a systematic approach for intelligence and operations fusion,” wrote his commanding officer in evaluating Adam’s performance after the deployment. “His techniques were used to positively identify follow-on targets within 24–48 hours and facilitated an accelerated targeting cycle that resulted in the capture of 36 known anticoalition fighters in less than two months of combat operations.”
“He was making huge contributions, doing really important work,” says Austin. “They just would not let him do all of what we were doing because of his eye.” Adam continued to feel sidelined and “it drove him crazy. He didn’t realize he was probably working harder than anybody on the team.”
Back in Hot Springs, Kelley had no idea what Adam or any of the SEALs were contributing to the war effort, and to preserve operational security, Adam couldn’t tell her in his e-mails and phone calls. She could only trust in his training and pray for his—and the entire unit’s—safe return. Janice and Larry liked to keep abreast of what was going on in the war by watching the daily news, but Kelley would often walk away from the television. Not only did it escalate her worry, it also infuriated her whenever the U.S. military was portrayed in a negative light. She was livid at the soldiers who had taken part in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. “It reflected poorly on all the military,” says Kelley. “It reflected poorly on my Adam.”
It was so important to her that their children understand their father’s efforts in the war that Kelley had given Adam a journal before he deployed and made him promise to write about his experiences. “When Nathan and Savannah are older,” explains Kelley, “I want them to understand the war—not from the media or their school history books, but from the perspective of their daddy, who fought in it.”
After only six weeks in Iraq, in spite of the limitations placed on him by his superiors, Adam had a firm grasp on how this war was being fought, especially how intelligence was gathered and “extracted” from prisoners. On May 10, the same day the New Yorker magazine reported “numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’ ” in its cover story, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” Adam sat down on his bunk at the end of a fifteen-hour workday in Mosul. He picked up the stuffed toy duck Savannah had sent with him and wrote about how he could still smell his Little Baby on it; he pushed around the toy #24 race car from Nathan. Then he wrote them a letter:
Dear Nathan and Savannah,
Let it be known that if it weren’t for you kids, I’d be sleeping right now, but I promised your mom I’d write in this journal for you. I want you to know, as you read opinions and history in school about 2004, that going to this war was right. No matter what you hear 20 years from now by elite media and historians, things get distorted.… Just like Vietnam, I fear OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) will be abused in the same way. Just as you hear more about American soldiers in Vietnam raping women and children and shooting unarmed men, today the media is focused about this detainee debacle for two weeks solid, in contrast to American Soldiers being dragged in the streets and dismembered, which was covered for less than 72 hours.
I am part of the Special Operations Forces elite. Our detention center is for the sole purpose of obtaining evidence as quickly as possible for rounding up more terrorists. We are harder than anyone at these detention centers and let me tell you, we treat these guys with the utmost professionalism. We do not hit them, we don’t humiliate them or cause them any bodily harm for the purpose of entertainment. This is WAR and treated very seriously. People are being killed and it is our job to get information.
Honestly, it is the hardest thing I have ever done. I fight for people’s freedoms, not to take [them] away. The humanity in me wants to warm them, tell them their family is okay, feed them, and even embrace them in a loving way. As a Christian, one assumes great compassion. Most, even in my stature, feel the same way. This is the American Soldier.
As for the punks that have humiliated our country and our sovereignty, I show them no pity and insist they are in the deepest minority of American professionals. What they did was not to gain intel, only to elevate their weak and pathetic lives to a status for some reason they have only dreamed of.
My hand hurts and I can only imagine what my sleepiness has caused me to write on this paper. You kids, Nathan and Savannah, y’all are so precious to me. I get chills thinking about watching you grow. You are both already so big. If your mom and I ever teach you anything, I pray it is at least to show all people courtesy and respect. The truly courageous and power
ful never have to prove it. It is always shown in their actions.
I love you dearly,
Daddy
13
Something Important
LATE IN MAY 2004 ADAM WAS RECRUITED by the CIA—for a few hours, anyway—when a case officer learned he was good with electronics. A local resident’s vehicle, to be used for drive-by reconnaissance missions in Mosul, needed to have installed a discreet surveillance system with its own power source. The system also had to be remotely activated. “I used parts from a bomb maker’s house that we did a hit on earlier this week,” Adam wrote in his journal. “He’s giving back and doing his part to fight terrorism and doesn’t even know it.”
While lending a hand to the CIA, Adam met a seasoned DEVGRU operator named Dale who had worked with Chief Harley. They discussed Operation Red Dawn, which had led to the capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, near Tikrit, as well as Osama bin Laden and how Dale hoped to be the guy who took bin Laden out when the time came. That was, to Dale, the ultimate mission, the “Big Mish.”
The conversation segued to Adam’s recommendation for Green Team, the seven-month proving ground/selection course for those seeking to move up to DEVGRU. “He was really humble about it,” says Dale. “Adam was smart about how he got information. Some guys are annoying with their questions or come off as cocky, but Adam was so genuine, you wanted to give him all you could. And one question he asked me was why I chose to go to that next level.
“I explained it to Adam like this,” he continues. “Guys will say they’re going to get out and do something else, but honestly, the reason guys don’t go, the only reason a SEAL from the regular teams won’t go to Green Team, is because he’s afraid of failing. Because if you fail out of Green Team, then you’re automatically ranked in the SEAL teams as not good enough to be at DEVGRU—and, some of us might say, not good enough to be a SEAL. If you don’t go, then you’re never ranked. Oh, you can still think you’re a hotshot at the regular team level, but that’s only because you’ve never been tested at the next level.
