Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  In his role as intelligence officer, Jeff arrived in Kunar and spent the week before Christmas tracking a senior al Qaeda agent who had recently popped up on the local radar. His old buddy Adam accompanied him outside the wire, the two riding their ATVs to outlying villages, meeting with locals, verifying reports, and conducting other classified intelligence activities. “When I was with Adam, no matter what we were doing, I always felt completely safe,” says Jeff. “He never told me he was worried about me, but I knew he was. He would always double-check my gear, and he would go over anything he thought was important to my safety, so thoroughly you would have thought he was kidding.”

  On Christmas Eve Jeff pulled out a DVD of the Arkansas High School State Championship—won three weeks earlier by the Lake Hamilton Wolves—that he’d received from a coach. He and Adam had a beer, watched the game, and talked about old times.

  “Remember when Richard’s dad paddled our rears in front of the cops?” Adam said.

  “I’d forgotten that!” Jeff replied with a chuckle. “That wasn’t too bright, was it?”

  On the drive to school that day in 1990, the boys had pointed wooden rifles, props for a school play, out their windows at pedestrians, drivers, essentially anything that moved. As soon as Jeff and Adam entered the school, Principal Williams called them to his office, where two sheriff’s deputies, who had responded to numerous complaints about the two punks pointing guns at people, waited.

  “I know both their fathers,” Principal Williams told the deputies, doing his best to keep the boys out of big trouble. “How about you watch me beat their asses? Will that suffice as punishment?”

  Both Jeff and Adam remembered the look on one of the deputy’s faces when he grinned and said, “Yeah, let’s do that.” And they could still feel the sting on their rears as they endured Principal Williams’s wooden paddle.

  While both men laughed at the memory, Jeff reflected on how, for Adam, this had been only a temporary reprieve from the Garland County jail. He felt fortunate to have witnessed his friend’s rise from darkness to the top tier of the American military, where he performed a crucial job. Jeff was proud of Adam, thought he was an inspiration, and loved him like a brother, but he didn’t have to say any of that. “Adam always knew what I was thinking,” says Jeff. “We didn’t need words.”

  Christmas morning was celebrated with a run to the top of PT hill, where Adam and Jeff posed for photos while holding American and Arkansas flags. “It was cold, but dry—no snow. We did some target practice and worked out with weights later in the day,” remembers Jeff. “Adam talked about how much he loved the seasons back home, how pleasant the woods are in the fall and how he’d rather just go for a run on an old logging road or trail than be cooped up in a gym.”

  Jeff Buschmann and Adam flying their state colors at an observation post a stone’s throw from the Pakistan border.

  Christmas morning in Hot Springs “just wasn’t the same without Adam,” says Janice, “even though we felt blessed that Kelley and the kids and Shawn and Manda’s families were all here. We knew we’d been lucky all these years Adam had been home for Christmas; guess we got spoiled. Plus I was always worried when he deployed. He’d tell me, ‘Mom, we are so well trained.’ But I knew he was at some remote location just like the one we’d heard about on the news that had gotten overrun. So yeah, I was worried. And a little sad.”

  Once all the grandchildren had opened their stockings, Larry read aloud the e-mail he’d received from Adam that morning. The subject was “Family.”

  I just wanted to say Merry Christmas!

  The week we come home to Arkansas in December is the week I live for every year. It is my favorite time of the year and my favorite thing to do. I love getting to hang out with all of you and I never take a day of it for granted. I can feel how cold it is there right now and I can picture the view [of] the lake and the 70 West bridge and the hills behind it. I can picture Shawn looking miserable, wondering when will it ever end, Dad reading something real boring, and my ears hurt from how loud the TV is right now. I am sure Reese and Luke are both plotting something against the other, and Josie and Maddy have something ridiculously cute on right now. I love that my kids are there getting to see what the America that I believe in is all about, it’s YOU.

  How blessed we are to have what we have. I hope everyone realizes how fortunate our large united family is. Meeting the hundreds of people I meet reminds me of it all the time. Don’t be sad for me this time of the year because you are all right here with me, you are the people I believe in, the ones I look up to, and you guys are never far away.

  I love you all,

  Adam

  When Adam returned home in February 2009, he was in excruciating pain. “He had been getting these little blisters on his eye for about a year,” says Kelley. “It was like it was boiling from the pressure. They’d pop up and then rupture, and it hurt so bad it would knock him down for a couple of days.”

  The condition was bullous keratopathy, a swelling and blistering of the cornea, and the dry air of the Afghan mountains had compounded what had already been diagnosed as a “severe case.” The cells of Adam’s cornea could not maintain the fluid balance, causing the cornea to retain water and bulge, pushing against the eyelid. Blinking and movement created blisters that burst.

  Adam could have returned from his deployment at any time, says Kelley, “but the man would just not quit. When his leg was broken and his eye would blister up, he’d limp around, and I’d ask, ‘How’s your eye?’ and he’d say, ‘It’s keeping my mind off my leg.’ ”

  Because of the severe trauma from the paint bullet five and a half years earlier, the doctor told Adam he wasn’t a candidate for a corneal transplant. The only option was lubricating the eye and controlling the swelling with drops. “Or,” said the doctor, “we can remove your eye.”

  With less than two years remaining in his contract, Adam was thinking seriously about leaving the Navy but kept it under wraps to everyone except his closest friends and Kelley. “Talking about retiring and actually retiring are two totally different things,” says Christian, who advised Adam to really consider the decision. “You don’t want to hang up your guns too early,” he told him.

  Given Adam’s service-related injuries and nearly eleven years of service, a medical retirement with disability benefits would have provided him with a nice package at any time; he didn’t even have to wait for his contract to be up. “Adam would still not consider it,” says Kelley. “He was going to push through his commitment, through 2010. He said they had trained him to do a job and he wasn’t going to do it halfway. He was going to finish and retire with an honorable discharge.”

  Between his last deployment and the next one scheduled for the beginning of 2010, Adam added another commitment to his already full plate: college. Determined to earn his bachelor’s degree, he began taking one course a month in an online university program, with the long-term goal of attending business school. He would not let this new commitment interfere with family or work. “He barely slept,” says Kelley. “I’d wake up and he’d have snuck out of bed after I fell asleep and be at our desk in the bedroom, working on a paper or studying for a test, a crumpled-up Kleenex where he was dabbing his eye because it never stopped watering.

  “He wanted to get an MBA,” she says. “And I didn’t doubt it. He had conquered his drug addiction—my Adam did not fail. You know where he was going to go? He didn’t say he was going to apply; he said he was going to go to Harvard. Case closed.”

  Adam’s eye was surgically removed on July 27, 2009. In simplified terms, it was scooped out and the muscles were left intact for use with a prosthetic eye. As with his hand, the two-plus-month healing process was slow, painful, and “disgusting,” says Kelley, who had a difficult time placing the prescribed drops into his empty eye socket.

  Though he suffered a life-threatening post-op complication—a medication-induced drop in blood pressure that landed him in the hospital—a
week following the surgery, Adam was back to studying for his college courses. Now, however, instead of tears he had to dab at the bloody fluid draining from the socket.

  After two months he was fitted with a prosthetic eye. Outwardly, Adam made light of it, joking with Nathan and Savannah by holding it in his hand and “peeking” in their rooms, saying, “You’d better be good—I’ve got my eye on you.” But “quietly, he was insecure,” says Kelley. “He’d look in the mirror a lot and always asked me if it looked okay. If it was daytime, he wore sunglasses and not always for the sun.”

  Indeed, the first eye Adam was fitted with “looked like they’d colored it with crayon,” she says. “I went down there and had them make him another one we were both happy with.”

  Shortly after Adam had gotten his new eye, he and Kelley were teaching the second-grade Sunday school class when a boy said, “Mr. Adam, are you looking at me? Because your eye is not.”

  “He can take it out,” seven-year-old Savannah piped up proudly.

  “Really?” another boy asked. “You can take that thing out?”

  “Sure,” Savannah answered. “It’s so cool. He can take it out and he can spin it all around.”

  “You want me to do it?” asked Adam.

  “No!” Kelley jumped in. She walked Adam away from the children and “straightened” his eye with her finger so that it was tracking properly. Then she firmly whispered, “Do not take your eye out—you’ll traumatize these kids.”

  The chanting began: “Take it out! Take it out! Take it out!”

  “It was hilarious,” says Kelley. “One of Adam’s biggest concerns about getting the eye removed was that it might freak the kids out, and here it was, a novelty. But I didn’t let him take it out, not without their parents’ permission.”

  As 2009 played out, Adam knocked off college course after college course, racing against the clock before his next—what he planned to be his final—deployment in February 2010. Yet he still managed to volunteer as a coach for ten-year-old Nathan’s football season. “I loved it,” says Nathan. “Best coach ever. He taught us to do things we didn’t think we could. I like that. And if we complained because we had to run around the goalpost, he’d run with us, and when he got there he jumped up and did pull-ups. My other coaches would watch us run; my daddy ran with us.”

  History repeated itself that fall when Jeff transferred to a local Naval base in Virginia, and Adam, in addition to insisting that Jeff stay at his home, proceeded to introduce “Busch” to his SEAL buddies. Adam made it a point to brag about Jeff as he recounted stories from their youth. “Making me feel good about myself,” says Jeff, “which showed me Adam had not changed in all those years. He was still the same humble kid who knew it was important to be nice to people.”

  One afternoon Adam received special clearance to bring Jeff along when he went to DEVGRU’s shooting range to test out some experimental weapons. After shooting a box of ammo, Adam turned to the attendant and said, “Hey, you want to try this gun?” The attendant was taken aback by the unusual request. “Most of these guys work hard and it goes unnoticed,” says Jeff, “but Adam, being who he was, insisted the attendant shoot an entire box of ammo, and we all had a blast.”

  Respect for others—no matter their rank or social standing—was a theme throughout Adam’s life. When fellow SEAL Brian Bill first joined DEVGRU, he was tasked with a new-guy job of emptying the trash cans around the squadron’s team room. “Let me get that,” Adam told him at one point, taking the can from Brian.

  “At first I thought, okay, this guy is messing with me,” says Brian. “He’s gonna take the trash can and turn it upside down and ask me why I dumped all the trash on the floor. It was that weird to have a senior guy like Adam helping a new guy with the trash. But Adam never degraded the new guys—he mentored them. He mentored me.”

  Two days before Christmas 2009, the Browns hit the road for Hot Springs, driving through a massive snowstorm on the way. They stopped off at a restaurant with Internet service long enough for Adam to fire off a final college paper that Kelley had proofread in the car. Adam was only two classes away from his bachelor’s degree, and with two months left before his deployment, it looked as if he would reach his goal.

  The family of four arrived at Janice and Larry’s home on Christmas Eve, Adam decked out in his finest attire: tight black pants and an even tighter white V-neck polyester sweater covering a black dickey. Complete with hair slicked back and holding a glass shaped like a moose head, he had become Cousin Eddie from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

  He rapped loudly on the door before heading inside to the living room, where he announced to Janice, Larry, Shawn, and Manda, “You surprised to see us, Clark?”

  “Oh, Eddie,” Manda and Shawn recited in unison the next line from the movie they’d all watched together every Christmas for over a decade, “if I woke up tomorrow with my head sewn to the carpet, I wouldn’t be more surprised than I am now!”

  “The house was full of laughter,” says Janice. “Everything was perfect, with our kids, and their kids, and the laughter, and the stories. I remember thinking how blessed we were as a family. Adam was heading to Afghanistan soon, and he’d told me, as he’d told me before, ‘Momma, don’t worry. We are so well trained, we just go in and do our job, and come out …’

  “I don’t like to think about that, though. I’d rather just think of that Christmas.”

  17

  Objective Lake James

  IT WAS FEBRUARY 5, 2010, and Nathan and Savannah were giggling as Adam blew out all thirty-six candles on his favorite cake, cookies and cream. “What are y’all laughing at?” he asked, grinning, and they pushed a present in front of him.

  Soon Adam was laughing too at the adult-size black-and-yellow Batman briefs he’d unwrapped. Pulling them on over his pants, he paraded around the kitchen, striking superhero poses. “I love them,” he said, which made Kelley and the kids laugh even harder.

  “I’m serious.” He got down face to face with Nathan and Savannah. “I’m going to make y’all a promise: I promise these are going to be my undercover underwear. I’m going to wear them on every op I go out on, and”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“nobody will ever know my superhero capabilities. The bad guys will never know it’s really Batman showing up.”

  “You dork,” said Kelley, and the kids cracked up again.

  “They were just eating it up,” she says. “Daddy’s job wasn’t real back then. They knew Navy SEALs killed pirates because it had been on the news, and they knew they hunted bad guys—but it was like make-believe.”

  “Really, Daddy?” Savannah said. “You’ll wear them?”

  “I will,” said Adam. “I promise.”

  On February 26, Kelley and Adam dropped Nathan and Savannah at school, then drove around town picking up last-minute odds and ends for his deployment—which included an encyclopedia-size study guide for the GMAT exam, the initial step toward gaining acceptance into Harvard’s MBA program. In spite of a hectic training and pre-deployment schedule, Adam had earned his bachelor’s degree.

  Adam promised Nathan and Savannah he would wear this superhero underwear they gave him on every mission.

  At noon they lunched with the kids in the school cafeteria and Adam shot hoops with them on the playground. After school let out, the family headed to Adam’s choice of Chili’s and his favorite queso dip appetizer.

  Kelley watched Nathan’s and Savannah’s little hands digging into the chips alongside their daddy’s, all three laughing as they jockeyed for the biggest chips. If Adam landed on one, he would immediately turn it over to Savannah. Though savoring this sweet moment of family life, Kelley picked at her own food. She had no appetite.

  From dinner they went straight to the base, where Adam flashed his ID, still in the Wal-Mart badge holder. They drove through the main gate, then along the familiar tree-lined stretch of woods. They skirted the chain-link fences, the manicured lawns, and a system of interior
gates and finally stopped alongside a curb where a few other families were saying their good-byes, respectfully distanced from each other. While Adam piled his gear on the sidewalk, Nathan and Savannah—even as they tried mightily to be strong—began to cry.

  Adam picked Nathan up first, and Kelley remembered vividly those first deployments when Nathan was so small; now his legs were long and lanky. He sobbed on his daddy’s shoulder, and Adam closed his eyes and squeezed him tight. Then he pulled back and looked Nathan in the eye. “This is the last time, buddy,” he said, a tear trickling down his cheek. “Last time.”

  When Adam turned to Savannah and lifted her into a hug, he knew she could see his tears. “Bye, Little Baby, it’s all fine,” he said to reassure her. He held her for a long time, gave her a big daddy squeeze, and pushed her nose as he set her down.

  “Beeeep,” she responded instantly.

  “I love you, Little Baby,” he said and walked over to Kelley, who held his face in her hands.

  “You come home,” she said.

  “I promise,” Adam replied, and they kissed—long and sweet and perfect. “But different,” says Kelley. “I can’t explain; it was just different than the other times.” The second they pulled apart, Kelley touched her lips, as if pressing on them would keep Adam’s kiss there longer.

  “Let’s get this done,” she said to Adam, attempting to sound strong. “Get home.”

  Right before Adam carried his gear through the gate into DEVGRU, Kelley felt compelled to ask the guard to snap a photo of the family together, there in the twilight—something they’d never done before. A final wave from Adam and he was gone.