Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  “Man,” Dave said, “I don’t understand how you can do what we do and be religious.”

  “One, I’m spiritual, not religious,” Adam replied. “And two, I can’t believe you can do what we do and not be.”

  The actions of the DEVGRU squadrons, targeting the networks of suicide bombers and IEDs in late 2007 and early 2008, nullified the Hollywood perception that tier one teams are reserved for the occasional high-level mission, training for weeks at a site built to replicate their target before embarking upon that mission.

  “These guys are so good at what they do,” says an officer who oversaw Adam’s squadron, “because they have an op almost every night, sometimes more in a single night than guys did in their whole careers pre-9/11. They never stop training, sure, but nothing compares to on-the-job training.”

  Between February and April 2008, Adam and his squadron teammates killed 117 enemy combatants and captured 152. For his part Adam was awarded his first Bronze Star with combat valor. The citation reads,

  For heroic achievement … in combat operations against the enemy as an assault team member, [Adam Brown] displayed great battlefield courage while conducting multiple direct action missions against enemy leadership targets. On 22 February 2008, during clearance of a targeted location, the assault force came under heavy direct enemy small arms fire. An AC-130 gunship engaged the enemy position, but the fighters were well entrenched in the structure and close air support had little effect. Special Warfare Operator First Class (Sea, Air, and Land) Brown maneuvered under intense enemy fire with his assault team and engaged the insurgents at close range with accurate small arms fire and grenades. By his extraordinary guidance, zealous initiative, and total dedication to duty, Brown reflected great credit upon himself and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

  Later that year, U.S. Central Command declassified statistics regarding IED attacks in Iraq. According to an Army Times article by staff writer William H. McMichael, posted on September 28, 2008, “The number of roadside bombs in Iraq that exploded or were discovered and neutralized tumbled from a high of about 2,600 per month in March and June of 2007 to 555 in August 2008, a decrease of 79 percent. Coalition casualties fell at a similar rate from August 2006 to August 2008.… The command says 47 troops were killed by roadside bombs in August 2006, but only seven this past August—an 85 percent decline. And while 384 troops were wounded by roadside bombs two years ago, that figure fell to 52 in August—an 86 percent reduction.”

  This was one of the greatest victories in the war, but few in the government grasped—and the public did not even realize—that this offensive was executed almost entirely by two squadrons of DEVGRU SEALs. Fewer than one hundred men were responsible for destroying the network, killing in total more than two hundred enemy, and capturing upwards of three hundred. “It’s impossible to know how many lives were ultimately saved by eradicating those bombing cells,” says one intelligence officer who supported the mission. “But conservative estimates were in the thousands.”

  “It was a team effort,” says a SEAL about the raids. “We lost a few really good guys during the hunt, but we crushed those bastards. Payback was hell for them.”

  16

  Heart of a Warrior

  UPON ADAM’S RETURN FROM IRAQ, Kelley was overwhelmed with relief. “After losing Mike, Mark, Nate, Louis, and Tommy,” she shares, “seeing him walking toward us in the distance, that unmistakable saunter, I took a moment, thinking, Okay, we got through another one.”

  She squeezed in “I missed you” and a hug before Nathan and Savannah climbed all over Adam, enveloping him with hugs and kisses. “I sat back and just stared,” says Kelley. “My family was whole again.”

  Having been on a different sleep schedule, Adam was jet-lagged and exhausted, but he pushed through dinner and a game of Sorry! after the kids chanted, “Game night! Game night!” Finally Kelley told them, “Okay. Daddy needs some sleep.”

  At four in the morning, Adam slipped out of bed. Kelley stirred, then smiled as she heard him turn on the bath water; no doubt he was pouring in Mr. Bubble. Feeling content and safe, she alternated between dozing and listening to the water slosh in the tub.

  Click. Kelley jolted awake at the sound of the outside door, located just down the hall, being opened. “My heart nearly stopped,” she says. “There had been some home invasions in Virginia Beach, and burglaries; we were always vigilant.”

  She leapt from the bed and ran toward the bathroom as Adam “charged out, completely naked, bubbles flying everywhere,” she says. “He didn’t stop to get a gun; he didn’t stop to do anything.”

  “I’m going to kill you for coming into my house!” he shouted, barreling down the hallway.

  “He was scary,” says Kelley. “I seriously thought he had somebody in our living room and was killing him with his bare hands, because I’d never seen that, ever. Just protection mode, and it was crazy.”

  “You’d better keep running!” Adam yelled, standing at the partially open door. “If I find you, I’m going to rip your throat out!”

  Kelley was frozen, “scared to death,” she says. “But then I grabbed our gun real quick while Adam ran upstairs to make sure there was nobody in with the kids.” Nathan was sitting up in his bed, eyes wide. Savannah had slept through the whole thing.

  The intruder hadn’t even gotten a foot in the house before turning tail. Locking the door again, Adam wrapped a towel around himself and hugged Kelley, who was “shaking like a leaf.” He was completely calm.

  “It’s all right, baby,” he said. “It’s okay. I’m glad I was home.”

  “Like that,” Kelley says, snapping her fingers, “he went from this scary-sounding man back to my cuddly Adam. It gave me a glimpse—just a glimpse—of why he was so good at what he did. Why he was a SEAL.”

  A week after the intruder incident, the sound of a man shouting snapped Kelley out of sleep in the middle of the night. Kelley says, “It was Adam, beside me in bed cursing and yelling, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ in his sleep. He was sitting up in bed swinging his arms, his legs were going, he was moving his head around, he was living it.” For a minute or two she listened, “and he just kept going. I could tell he was on a mission. He was in Iraq.”

  Kelley put her hand on his shoulder, gently shaking him while saying, “Adam. Baby. Adam. Adam, are you okay? It’s me. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Adam finally responded. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s fine,” said Kelley. “Go back to sleep.” He slept soundly after that.

  The next morning over breakfast, Kelley asked him, “Do you remember last night?”

  “No, why?”

  “You don’t remember your dreams?”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “Look, I know you do some things that I’m sure are very hard to deal with,” Kelley replied, “and I know you’ll talk about what you can when you’re ready. If you never do, that’s fine, but I just want you to know that I know there are things going on in your head. I’m here for you.”

  “Thanks, baby,” Adam said without elaborating.

  The same thing happened the following night, and the night after, and then again—four nights in a row—and Kelley was beginning to worry. She was thinking of urging Adam to speak with a counselor at the command when, on the fifth night, after Nathan and Savannah were asleep, Adam said, “I sure would like to take a bath.”

  “Do you want me to run you a bath, sweetie?” she asked.

  “Well, you know, I feel bad asking, but …”

  “That was our routine,” says Kelley, “and I loved it. So I got the water just right, poured in the bubbles, lit a candle, and then I did my own thing while waiting for him to ask, real sweet, for a towel.”

  But Adam stayed in the bath for almost two hours, running the water every few minutes to keep it hot. When he finally called out, it wasn’t for a towel.

  “He wanted to talk,” says Kel
ley. “I can’t share the details—it was private for him—but he told me that he’d killed people and that was the first time he ever even acknowledged that part of his job. I think he felt like he had to tell me, to see if I was okay with it. And I was. What he did had to be done.

  “He told me that Easter had been very hard, that a lot of people were killed. Such an important holiday as a Christian—it’s about the Resurrection—and here he was taking lives. There wasn’t guilt; these people were making bombs that were killing hundreds of people every month. It was his job and he believed in it. However, on Easter? Really? Really, God? That got to him and had been haunting him, and I think he had to take the time to soak, to process the whole operation.

  “We prayed together, and that night he slept well. Whatever had been eating at him he worked out, and it was done. Never did that happen again.”

  Three months later, in July 2008, Adam stood beside his mother on the deck of the dream house she and Larry had built on Lake Hamilton, staring out at the amazing view, complete with the 70 West bridge a quarter mile down the shore.

  “You could tell his heart was still here,” says Janice. “He had been thinking about what he’d do after he got out of the Navy. They came out for a visit every summer, but this time he asked Larry and me to keep an eye out for houses and property for sale. He wanted to price things out, but it had to be in the Lake Hamilton School District; that’s where he wanted Nathan and Savannah to go to school one day.”

  In the two-week visit home, Adam spent a lot of time with his children, picking wildflowers with five-year-old Savannah and tossing a football with eight-year-old Nathan on the Wolf Stadium field, imparting fatherly wisdom in the process. Don’t pick too many flowers; you want to leave some for others to enjoy, he’d tell Savannah, while he taught Nathan the importance of being tough, not only on the football field but also in life. “When you fall down or get hit, you get up,” he would say. “You don’t think about it, you just do it.”

  Together, Adam and Kelley took their family on hikes in the mountains, went canoeing on the creeks, and swam for hours in the lake that was Janice and Larry’s backyard—fun-filled days of what Adam called “good, clean Arkansas living.” They also looked at lakefront homes they liked but couldn’t afford, and land that was more reasonably priced but still had to have a house built on it. One piece of property really called out to them: it was near a small lake, with views of the mountains and lots of open space.

  “Plenty of room for the kids to run,” Adam said as they stood in the tall grass and dreamed about their future home. “Someday,” he told Kelley. “We’ll make it happen.”

  One weekend, Adam and Kelley drove from Hot Springs to Bentonville so Adam could see Sam Walton’s original Five & Dime, which had evolved into Wal-Mart—another bit of his Arkansas trivia. As a souvenir Adam bought the “authentic badge holder” that Wal-Mart employees wear.

  “I’m going to use it for work,” he said to Kelley.

  Back in Virginia Beach the following Monday, Adam cleared security at DEVGRU with his ID displayed in his “Hi. My name is Adam” Wal-Mart badge holder hanging on a lanyard around his neck.

  “Adam was one of a kind,” says teammate Kevin Houston. “We had cover stories if people asked us what we did for a living. I always told people I stocked shelves at Target, and Adam was either a Wal-Mart greeter or a rodeo clown.”

  Adam and Kevin had been good friends ever since Kevin joined the squadron the year after Adam, and outside work this friendship centered around family: their wives were friends, their kids played together, and recently the Houstons had accepted Adam’s invitation to try out the Browns’ church. “Kevin was a little rough around the edges,” says Kelley with a fond smile. “Meiling [Kevin’s wife] and I would cringe when he dropped the F-bomb during service, but he was there, spitting chewing tobacco into a cup, listening in, ‘trying to figure this whole Christian thing out,’ he’d say.”

  In addition to being brothers in arms, Adam and Kevin were initially drawn to each other by their ability to talk smack about their athletic prowess in sports ranging from Ping-Pong and darts to football and basketball. In particular, their jockeying for alpha male dominance in basketball had led to the planning of a future one-on-one tournament to settle the score. Kevin knew he would win, and it drove him crazy that Adam wouldn’t admit it.

  “It didn’t matter if he knew I was a better player because I’d beaten everybody else in the squadron,” Kevin says, “Adam still thought he could take me. If Kobe Bryant was like, ‘Hey, let’s play one on one,’ Adam would seriously think he had a legitimate shot at winning.”

  While car-pooling to DEVGRU one morning, Kevin told Adam about a friend of his son’s who came from a broken home without much money, and how he and Meiling had bought the boy cleats and athletic glasses—setting him up with the proper equipment for the sports he loved and providing some self-esteem in the process.

  “Even at our level of military we were on a budget, Adam and I,” Kevin explains. “And the first thing he said after I told him about this kid was, ‘How can Kelley and I help? Let us buy his pads or help out with his next uniform.’ ”

  This discussion led to an idea: someday, Kevin and Adam decided, they would check out the local football practices and look for “the kid that has nothing,” says Kevin. “He’s got cleats, but most of them are broken off, his face mask is chipped, his pads are all duct-taped, he’s probably a minority, very poor, but he is a freakin’ beast on the field, and that is the kid Adam and I would recognize, because he’s putting out. He’s the kid we’re going to size up and buy a brand-new helmet, shoulder pads, cleats—hook him up big time and let him be a rock star. What I’m getting at is I have a soft spot for kids—and so did Adam.

  “Best example is 2008. The shoes.”

  On July 13, 2008, U.S. Army soldiers based at a remote command outpost near the village of Wanat in Nuristan Province, Afghanistan, were surrounded and attacked by an estimated two hundred Taliban insurgents. Nine Americans were killed and twenty-seven wounded in what became known as the Battle of Wanat.

  Days later Navy admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to the media, saying that “all involved with operations on the [Pakistan-Afghanistan] border must do a better job of policing the region and eliminating the extremists’ safe havens … that are launching pads for attacks on coalition forces.”

  Three months after the Battle of Wanat, Adam headed to that very same border region, returning to the northern Kunar District where he had targeted extremists on his initial DEVGRU tour in Afghanistan. On Adam’s first run up “PT hill,” the workout he’d done dozens of times on his previous deployment, a light rain turned to hail near the summit, painting the trail white. A few weeks later, snow flurries announced that winter was coming.

  In Virginia Beach the weather was pleasant. Nathan and Savannah were at school, and Kelley was about to head out on a shopping excursion to put together a Thanksgiving care package for Adam when he called, a rarity—generally they e-mailed every few days. She asked Adam what he’d like in the package, but he replied that he needed nothing for himself. “Could you just grab some shoes for the kids here?” he asked. “Smaller sizes, they’re little kids. Some shoes and some socks. Instead of anything for me, just mail those.”

  Adam called Janice and Larry and told them the same thing. Says Kelley, “He’d see the Afghan children walking around barefoot or in flip-flops, and it was starting to snow. He’d say, ‘I can’t stand it. It makes me think of our kids. It’s almost winter, and I haven’t seen them wearing anything but sandals. They have got to be freezing.’ ”

  Kelley purchased twenty pairs of shoes from Target; Janice bought another twenty. Both women shared the request with their respective church congregations, who promised more donations.

  In the Kunar, the early winter months were accompanied by rocket and mortar attacks that pounded the outstations. This unusually heavy enemy activity�
��generally reserved for the insurgents’ spring offensive—punctuated the ever-present danger of an ambush or an attack.

  Says a Green Beret who worked with Adam during the deployment, “Here we are, packing extra ammo and grenades when we went outside the wire, and Adam was stuffing his ruck with shoes, knocking on doors in the villages, keeping track of their sizes on a notepad and telling them all that more were on the way. He’s got his weapon slung and he’s on his knees in the dirt, helping kids who have never tied a shoe in their life. This is a war zone, and he’s passing out shoes.”

  Ultimately, Adam would distribute over five hundred pairs of shoes (and socks) to the children of Kunar Province.

  A decade before, when Adam had shown up at Jeff Buschmann’s apartment in Corpus Christi, Jeff would not have believed that his drug-addicted best friend could ever rise to the top of what he considered the most elite fighting force in the world. He also wouldn’t have believed that two kids from Hot Springs, Arkansas, would randomly end up at the same remote outpost in the Hindu Kush mountains at Christmastime.

  Adam provided the children of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, with warm socks and winter-worthy shoes during this deployment.

  Although Adam had stayed in touch with his friends from Hot Springs by e-mail and phone, he’d missed the Lake Hamilton High School ten-year reunion and it had been years since he and Jeff had seen each other face to face. In early December 2008, Jeff received an assignment to conduct classified intelligence work at an outstation in Kunar Province. He looked at the name of his point of contact and was amazed to see that it was Adam Brown.

  Jeff, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, had graduated from flight school near the top of his class, but decided—in part because of Adam’s involvement—to also go the Naval Special Warfare route. He did his stint in the fleet as a surface warfare officer, then transferred to Special Boat Team TWENTY-TWO as a Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (SWCC) before attending Naval Special Warfare postgraduate school and Naval Intelligence School.