Fearless Page 11

  While Kelley drove, Adam would strip off his wet, sandy cammies and T-shirt. At home he’d hose off outside, then jump in the shower while she shook the sand out of his clothes and tossed them in the washer. She’d make dinner, and he’d practically fall asleep in his food before flopping into bed, already snoring when she put his clothes in the dryer, then “boxed his cover” (shaped and creased his hat), and, if it was a scheduled inspection day, shined his boots, touched up the paint on his helmet and polished it, and starched and ironed his camouflage uniform. Only after laying out his boots and still-warm-from-the-dryer PT clothes—long pants, T-shirt, and socks—would she crawl into bed next to him.

  At 3:30 a.m. Kelley would rise and make a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon or ham and wake Adam up at 3:45 with a cup of coffee. He’d wolf down the food, pull his clothes on, and they’d be on the road by 4:00, Adam snoozing with his head on Kelley’s shoulder. She’d wake him up when they arrived at the gate between 4:30 and 4:45, and he’d push her nose like a button, kiss her on the lips and forehead, and say, “Bye, Itty Bitty.” He’d drop off his duffel of sparkling clean clothes in his room (everybody was assigned a room, even those who lived off base) and line up on the concrete meeting area called the grinder, ready for PT at 5:00 a.m.

  By the time Kelley was back on the freeway heading east, Adam was already either sweating from a combination of push-ups, sit-ups, dips, and pull-ups; wet and cold from a trip into the Pacific; or enduring being a “sugar cookie”—jumping into the ocean and then rolling around in the sand. After running anywhere from two to six miles, he’d eat a second breakfast with the single guys, who stayed on base. “You cannot eat enough” is a BUD/S instructor’s mantra; it’s impossible to replace the calories burned on a daily basis.

  Unable to go back to sleep, Kelley would spend the hours before going to work prepping for dinner, cleaning the house, and taking Sidney for a longer walk. Weekends were for recovery for both Adam and Kelley. On Saturdays they’d sleep in late and watch movies, and on Sundays they’d regain their spiritual strength for the upcoming week by attending church.

  Kelley came home for lunch one day, after three weeks of this schedule, feeling unusually exhausted. She sat on the couch, closed her eyes, and woke up after an hour. In the past, she couldn’t nap if she tried, but the following day the same thing happened. “Maybe you’re pregnant,” a coworker suggested.

  “No,” said Kelley. “Of course not.”

  But after dropping Adam off the next morning, she bought a pregnancy test at a pharmacy and rushed home to take it. Positive. “Oh, Lord,” she said aloud. “Really?”

  Returning to the pharmacy, she bought two more tests; both were positive. Right now? Right at the start of BUD/S? she thought. Beyond the shocking reality of impending parenthood, she was worried about putting Adam into a tailspin. Okay, how am I going to tell him? she asked herself.

  That evening she didn’t say a word about the pregnancy during the drive, just got Adam home and put him in a bubble bath. Then she sent Sidney into the bathroom, her collar hooked up to a balloon that read, in big letters, “Congratulations! You’re having a baby! ”

  Standing outside the door, Kelley waited for a reaction but none came. Finally she walked in, saw that Adam hadn’t noticed the dog or the balloon, and handed him a small plastic stick.

  “Honey,” he said, “I’m fine. I feel fine.”

  “No, no, no,” said Kelley. “It’s not a thermometer. See this?” She pointed to the pink line and then the balloon and said, “It’s a pregnancy test, baby. I’m pregnant.”

  They stared at each other, for a minute or more.

  “Okay, this just makes it even more important,” said Adam. “I have to get through BUD/S.”

  9

  Pays to Be a Winner

  AS A NEW FATHER-TO-BE, ADAM TACKLED the gauntlet headfirst. On his boat team he chose the front-left paddling position, next to Christian on front-right—arguably the two toughest positions. Together they dug deep with their oars, first to crash through the cresting waves that broke over them as they paddled out through the surf, racing the other boat teams and battling painful “ice cream” headaches brought on by water temperatures in the high fifties.

  During the long, rigorous paddle, his boat crew would try to rotate out with him but Adam routinely refused. “ ‘Ah got it,’ he’d say in that deep Arkansas twang,” says Christian. “I would get so mad, because if he wasn’t going to switch, I wasn’t going to switch. And I was getting smoked—he could suck it up more than anybody.

  “Competitively, Adam was my nemesis. I’d push it as hard as I could, and we were neck and neck running, neck and neck on the obstacle course, same with swimming, and it just annoyed me. In surf-torture they’d make us lie down and link arms in the sand, freezing cold waves splashing over us, our teeth chattering like we’re running a jackhammer, and I’d look over at Adam next to me, and he was blue from the cold and grinning, like he was loving it. I remember thinking, What is driving this guy?”

  With Hell Week about to begin, Adam stood before the performance review board. He had passed the fifty-meter underwater swim, underwater knot-tying test, and drown-proofing test. He had finished the twelve-hundred-meter pool swim with fins in under forty-five minutes; one-mile bay swim with fins in under fifty minutes; one-mile ocean swim with fins in under fifty minutes; one-and-a-half-mile ocean swim with fins in less than seventy minutes; two-mile ocean swim with fins in under ninety-five minutes; obstacle course in less than fifteen minutes; and four-mile run in boots and pants in less than thirty-two minutes.

  But he needed to work on his swimming times, the review board told him. He’d barely made the two-mile ocean swim within the ninety-five-minute time constraint, and the next two-mile swim had to be finished within eighty-five minutes, with the final two-mile swim in phase three in under seventy-five minutes. The fact that the board was coaching Adam, not reprimanding him, meant the instructors liked him. He had continually exhibited the teamwork and can-do attitude they were looking for.

  Ninety-eight students entered Hell Week: five days of relentless, round-the-clock physical and mental hazing with only four to five hours of sleep the entire time. At its end, Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura made a guest appearance, calling out the ceremonial “Hell Week is secured!” to Adam, Christian, and the sixty-three other students who remained. Ventura, whose real name is James Janos, had graduated from BUD/S Class 58 in 1970 and served during the Vietnam era on Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) TWELVE. He shook hands with the men and told them they were one step closer to being part of the greatest fraternity in the world. “Don’t give up,” he said.

  Later, the soft-spoken base chaplain Bob Freiberg gave a personalized Bible to each of the sixty-five, letting them know that they didn’t have to read it “or even keep it.”

  After thanking the chaplain, Adam opened the book and read the inscription:

  ICFN Brown,

  Congrats on completing Hell Week 25–30 July 1999. Class 226—God Bless!

  Chaplain Freiberg

  Adam knew exactly what he was going to do with his camouflage-covered Bible—but first he had to make it through the rest of BUD/S.

  “You’re beautiful!” was the first thing Adam said to Kelley as he stumbled to the car—the first time he’d seen her since the start of Hell Week.

  “You’re delirious,” she said with a laugh. “How you feeling?”

  “I’m just fine. How are you feeling? Everything okay? How’s our little baby?” He rubbed Kelley’s belly, which didn’t yet show any sign of being pregnant, and she said, “Hungry.”

  “Me too,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  Adam was asleep before they reached the freeway, and at home Kelley got him bathed, fed, and into bed, where he slept for another fifteen hours. “I have to cut ten minutes off my time or it’s done,” he said to her as soon as he awoke, referring to the two-mile ocean swim. “I’ll get rolled or they’ll drop me.”


  A student who couldn’t pass all the requirements could be dropped completely from the course or, if instructors saw potential, rolled into the following course during any of the three phases of BUD/S. This meant that if Adam couldn’t pass the two-mile ocean swim, the instructors could roll him into Class 227 at phase two. While waiting for his new class to get to the second phase—which would take about two months—he would have to maintain his fitness level and assist the instructors.

  He had three weeks to improve his time, and he knew he’d already given his all just to make the ninety-five-minute cutoff. With rigorous training he had improved his strokes and bettered his time by the final week of phase one, but not by enough.

  “I got a call from Adam before this big open-ocean swim, and he asked us to pray for him,” remembers Larry. “We had the whole church praying for him on that day. I was at a men’s prayer breakfast when a friend, Ted Smethers, prayed aloud that Adam would not only qualify, he would beat his best time by so much that it would be evident to everyone that God did it, not Adam.”

  On the crucial day, Adam came in at under seventy-five minutes. He not only cut twenty minutes off his prior best time, he also beat the required time by a full ten minutes.

  The second phase of BUD/S, dive phase, is considered by many to be as difficult as Hell Week. In pool competency, students must perform specific tasks underwater—sometimes with mask, fins, and dive gear; sometimes without—displaying perfect technical procedures without panic while being harassed, to the point of near drowning, by the instructors. It’s not uncommon for an unconscious student to be hauled out of the pool, vomiting water. This was most often the case with mentally tough students like Adam who wouldn’t give up—students who would rather die than quit.

  But no matter how much he tried, Adam could not pass pool comp, and when the review board informed him that he would be rolled to the dive phase of the next class rather than dropped, he was both angry with himself and relieved. He also added up the months in his head: Class 227 would finish very near Kelley’s due date.

  Twelve students were rolled during pool comp, including Christian, medically rolled for stress fractures in one of his legs. Also rolled was a fellow student five years younger than Adam named Austin Michaels, one of the single guys whom Adam and Kelley invited over for home-cooked meals on weekends.

  When Adam said grace before dinner one night, Austin realized that they shared the same religious beliefs, and he was stunned when Adam confided in him about the dark times he and Kelley had gone through. From that point forward the Browns and Austin were family.

  Adam and Austin began the second phase of BUD/S for a second time with SEAL Class 227. Christian Taylor was also on the roster and ready to go, his fractures now healed.

  “You again,” said Christian when he saw Adam, only half joking.

  A couple of weeks later Christian and Adam were facing each other in the ice bath, teeth chattering and lips turning blue, after getting in trouble for putting away their dive gear before the instructor told them to.

  The ice bath was a trough of freezing cold water, affectionately referred to as a slushy by instructors who used it as a motivational tool. After adding a pitcher of ice cubes to the water Adam and Christian were sitting in, their steel-faced instructor said, “The only way you’re getting out of this slushy is to make me laugh. One of you better have a joke or something that is going to make me laugh.”

  He dumped another pitcher of ice into the trough, crossed his arms, and stood over them like an emotionless robot.

  Shivering violently, Adam said, “Hooyah, instructor, I have one for y’all.” Class 227 gathered around while Adam relayed a story that had been infamous at Lake Hamilton High, an embarrassing incident at a party that happened to a buddy and the buddy’s girlfriend, both of whom drank too much and suffered food poisoning. For full effect Adam told the self-deprecating story, detail by detail, as though it had happened to him.

  The account included meticulous descriptions of bodily functions occurring simultaneously—to the horror of the poor fellow’s girlfriend, who had a front-row seat to it all. By the end, the instructor was laughing so hard that Adam and Christian could barely make out his words: “Pays to be a winner, Brown.”

  Which meant they could get out of the ice bath.

  While “cold, wet, sandy” is the theme for BUD/S, “Pays to be a winner” is the mantra of instructors who demand teamwork—anybody who hasn’t pulled his weight is long gone by phase two—yet also create competition by offering rewards, usually rest, to those who finish first. The winning boat team on a course out through the surf, around a buoy, and back to the beach gets to lounge in the sand while the other boat teams do it again. A poor result on the obstacle course might find an individual running it again that night while the rest of the class eats dinner. Instructors know that every student is exhausted, but “winners” prove they can dig deep when they’re at their breaking point, finding that something extra when their bodies tell them nothing is left.

  Adam overcame a cold, wet, sandy hell—plus his own gnawing demons—to get through BUD/S Hell Week.

  Adam was known among the instructors for two reasons: his wife was expecting a baby, and he was one of only a few throughout the course who never once failed to give his all—and then some. His scores were not the highest, but his determination was unmatched, and that carried him into the third phase of BUD/S.

  By the time Adam and the thirty remaining students of Class 227 headed to San Clemente Island—seventy-five miles off the coast of San Diego—for some of the last weeks of their training, he had learned the rudimentary skills of a combat diver. Now the focus was land warfare. Physically, Adam was in the best shape of his life, having completed the obstacle course in ten minutes, the four-mile run in boots in less than thirty minutes, and the two-mile ocean swim with fins in less than seventy-five minutes. He had also finished a grueling fourteen-mile run without stopping and a five-and-a-half-mile ocean swim.

  Even though instructors never allowed students to slack off, during third phase they were particularly vigilant because of the use of explosives and live ammunition. Students also learned more advanced patrolling tactics and how to plan and execute realistic missions—firing upon target buildings, calling in close air support, and clearing buildings of the enemy. The men remaining had proven they weren’t going to quit; now they had to remain focused and uninjured for one last phase.

  One of 227’s first training days on the island took the class on a conditioning jog up a steep, rocky rise. At the top the instructor allowed the men to catch their breath before leading them to a small, nearly vertical cliff that dropped down onto another steep, rocky slope. He pointed out a landmark at the bottom of this ankle-twisting obstacle course. Get down to that as fast as you can, he told them, then run back up. “Pays to be a winner,” he added.

  Immediately, the men began to carefully sideslip and shuffle down the slope, which was “about forty-five degrees, a big giant rock face,” says Austin, who was just a few steps into his descent when Adam passed him. “Adam was sprinting a hundred miles an hour. He made it about halfway, his gangly legs and arms just flying, till he lost control and started somersaulting—three or four big flips—crushing him each time on the rocks. Somehow he ended up on his feet, ran to the end, and then sprinted back up. He was back on top before most of us were at the bottom.

  “Everything Adam did was a sprint; he didn’t know how to hold back. He cared more about his performance and his reputation than his physical body.”

  The baby was due February 18, 2000. Scheduled to return home from the island on January 31, Adam received permission to check in with Kelley the week before. “Everything’s fine, it’s all good,” Kelley told him. “What’s going on with you?” Good, Adam said, but there was a huge weapons practical test that coming Wednesday that had him stressed.

  Kelley never let on to Adam that she had been on mandatory bed rest for the past few da
ys due to complications with the pregnancy: preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction, both of which are potentially dangerous—and even fatal—for mother and baby. The morning after she talked with Adam, she headed to a doctor’s appointment for her weekly checkup. “We need to deliver this baby today,” the doctor said upon examining her.

  When Kelley gave Adam’s parents the news, Janice took the next flight to San Diego, arriving at midnight. By then Kelley was already in induced labor and suffering from a literally blinding headache from the magnesium sulfate she’d received to lower her blood pressure. After eighteen hours of painful labor, through which Kelley couldn’t see much more than shapes and blurs, Nathan Cole Brown was born on Wednesday, January 26—all four pounds eight ounces of him.

  While in recovery Kelley called the BUD/S compound to let them know that Adam Brown was the father of a healthy baby boy. “But do not tell him until after he completes the weapons practical this afternoon!” she told the instructor who answered the phone.

  “Yes ma’am,” he replied. “Understood.”

  On San Clemente Island, Adam waited nervously for the weapons practical to begin, hoping he wouldn’t get called on first.

  “Brown!” The instructor broke the silence. “You’re up!”

  Adam stepped up to the carbine and handgun laid out on a table. When the timer began, he first cleared a jam in each weapon, then began disassembling and reassembling each weapon while the instructors peppered him with questions. “What is the effective firing range of this weapon, Brown?” “What is the purpose of that mechanism, Brown?” “What caliber is the ammunition used in that gun, Brown?” Answering in stride, Adam reassembled both weapons. “Done,” he said, clicking the final part into place and raising his hands off the table.