Fearless Page 15

  As usual, Shawn and Adam ended up outside tossing a football back and forth, their breath hanging in the cold like smoke, chatting about the world, the Razorbacks, and fatherhood. “I’d like to coach Nathan when he gets older,” said Adam. “If it works out, God willing, we’ll be back here in time for him to play ball for the Wolves.”

  Says Shawn, “Adam started talking about moving back to Hot Springs early on as a SEAL. After 9/11 it was a blur, but I remember Adam saying that he was going to be fighting for us, for our way of life. Not ‘us’ as in our family, but ‘us’ as in America.”

  Since October, Green Berets had been on the ground in Afghanistan, as well as some SEAL teams conducting reconnaissance missions in advance of two raids by Special Operations Forces: an airfield seizure in southern Afghanistan and a raid on one of Mullah Omar’s compounds. The hunt for Osama bin Laden had begun, and while Adam assured his family that his first deployment would be to South America, he didn’t hide his enthusiasm for getting into the fight in Afghanistan as soon as possible.

  “I was in awe,” says Manda, “because Adam was just Adam all over again—but in a different uniform. He was my hero as this crazy football player who loved Lake Hamilton High; now he was a SEAL, and his team was our entire country. But he wasn’t loud about it, like he’d been before. He’d matured and was more quiet and humble, and that to me made him more powerful.”

  “I was so proud,” Janice says. “Think of those months after September 11 and all the American flags that were going up everywhere. We put one up, a big one. And when I saw a flag, I think, like any military mother, there was a little something extra. In fact, I was getting used to being proud of Adam instead of worrying about him, but 9/11 changed all that, and there I was worrying about him again, worried that he was going to war.”

  Larry felt the same conflicting emotions, but trusted that God had a plan and that Adam’s part in it would be revealed. “He told me it was his calling,” says Larry, who remembers that particular Christmas as the first time he’d discussed politics with his son. There was no need for debate; they were both on the same page. “People were arguing back and forth about whether or not this was a holy war, and Adam and I couldn’t figure out why,” says Larry. “For the terrorists, it wasn’t anything but a holy war, stated clearly by them. There was no doubt in our minds that they were waging a holy war, and Adam—as an American, as a warrior, and as a Christian—was not going to stand for it.”

  12

  War

  ON APRIL 3, 2002, KELLEY DROVE ADAM, now Petty Officer Second Class Brown, to the SEAL Team TWO compound at Little Creek to see him off on his first deployment. She watched as Adam held Nathan, now two years old, tightly against his chest, then tossed him in the air until the toddler was laughing.

  “More, Daddy!” Nathan shouted.

  “That’s it, little buddy,” Adam said, holding him in one arm while he wrapped his other around Kelley and kissed her nose and Nathan’s, back and forth a few times. “Don’t y’all grow too much while I’m away,” he told Nathan.

  He stooped to put his son in the car, then stepped back and threw him in the air one last time before strapping him into the seat. Adam gave Kelley a long hug and kiss and rubbed her stomach, which was barely showing a bump; the baby was due at the end of Adam’s deployment. “You drive safely,” he said to her, “and take care of our babies.”

  While Adam flew south with his task unit toward Puerto Rico, Kelley and Nathan drove west to Arkansas where, in order to save money, they would split their time between her dad’s house in Little Rock and the Browns’ place in Hot Springs. “Once the water warms up,” Adam had said to Kelley, “be sure you take Nathan swimming in Lake Hamilton.”

  Nearly six months later Adam flew into Hot Springs in time to witness his daughter, Savannah Nicole Brown, enter the world on September 24, 2002.

  Tough in every other aspect of his life, Adam was overprotective of Kelley and downright squeamish when it came to childbirth. “He attended to me,” says Kelley. “Wouldn’t let me lift things, like a box of detergent or whatever, and I’d say, ‘How do you think I’ve survived all these months you’re away?’ But I loved it, and how he’d get real quiet if I started talking about an ultrasound or something going on down there after I saw the gynecologist. He’d get this glazed look, like he did not want to be hearing this. There were times he thanked God that he was a male. When Savannah was born he was there, and his eyes got a little teary and he called her ‘My Little Baby’ right off the bat—and that stuck. She had his heart.”

  Adam brought Nathan into the hospital room to meet his baby sister later that day, and “Nathan’s little outfit did not match,” says Kelley. “I bit my tongue, but inside I laughed because when it came to stuff like that, Adam was a fish out of water. Put him in the jungle, the desert, mountains, ocean, whatever, and he’d maneuver his way to wherever he needed to be, but he’d get lost in the kids’ sock drawer.”

  Everyone who came by Janice and Larry’s to congratulate the family of four also wanted to hear about what Adam had done while deployed. He remained the consummate, quiet professional. “We just kind of did our thing,” he said to Manda’s husband, Jeremy. One of the more exciting tasks he’d been assigned was assisting a sailor who had been injured in the jungle, Adam said, but he wouldn’t elaborate on the story, simply saying that he “helped with the medevac.”

  Even Kelley had a hard time getting the full story from her husband because “he underplayed everything,” she explains. Months later she learned that Adam had been awarded his third Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for his actions. When she asked what the other two medals were for, he replied, “It was no big deal; just doing my job.”

  The commendation certificate, stuffed by Adam into a file in a desk drawer, read,

  For professional achievement in the superior performance of his duties while serving as a member of a volunteer rescue team that provided medical assistance and comfort to an injured service member in the El Yunque Rainforest from 5–6 May 2002. Petty Officer Brown demonstrated great foresight by gathering needed medical supplies for the injured man. Displaying impressive courage and skill, he fought through five hours of treacherous river currents and vertical ascents. Once on scene, he expertly assessed the situation and stabilized the patient. He continued to provide vigilant care throughout the night until evacuation was accomplished. Petty Officer Brown’s professionalism and devotion to duty reflected great credit upon himself and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.

  More official praise thickened the U.S. Navy’s file that archived Adam’s Enlisted Service Record—evaluations that Adam had signed and Kelley never saw. These records documented Chief Harley’s assessment that Adam’s goofy, sometimes clumsy, laid-back demeanor belied his outstanding professional performance as a SEAL.

  In one of Adam’s earliest performance evaluations while in Golf Platoon, Harley wrote:

  Despite his limited experience, Petty Officer Brown’s initiative and determination ensured 100 percent success in his [platoon’s] department. A team player who is always willing to lend a hand where needed. Even with an extensive workload, Brown dedicated numerous late night, weekend, and off duty hours to assist his teammates in their departments. His exemplary performance has been a great influence on the junior members of the platoon. He scored OUTSTANDING on the most recent command inspection and SEAL PRT. Brown is on track to become a stand out performer. [He has] unlimited potential and is dedicated to excellence. He is among the top of the Second Class Petty Officers.

  A lieutenant who was the officer in charge during Adam’s first deployment—which included joint training missions with host-nation military in Puerto Rico, Suriname, and St. Croix, and counterdrug missions in Ecuador—described Adam in his next evaluation as “a hard-charging SEAL operator. This warrior gives 100 percent the first time, every time!”

  Providing a glimpse into what Adam’s job en
tailed, that same lieutenant wrote,

  His absolute dedication ensured 100 percent accountability and maintenance of over 300K of parachutes and associated mission essential equipment [while he] served as lead instructor and established standard operating procedures for a vital week of interoperability training with the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment. Professionally instructed his sixteen-man platoon in every facet of helicopter insertion and extraction techniques with HH-60 and MH-47 helicopters. Served as the jump master during 40 high-risk air insertions and extractions, ensuring the safe control of over 75 SEALs in jump, rappel, fast rope, and helicopter cast operations, and 150 hours of live-fire demolition and field craft exercises. Brown implemented an innovative re-directing braking system that improved safety of rappel operations. This dedication to his teammates is his trademark.

  Two weeks after Savannah was born, the Brown family returned to Virginia Beach, renting a house with a yard in a suburban neighborhood. While Adam began the twelve- to eighteen-month workup for his second platoon, Kelley figured out the logistics of raising two children.

  In Afghanistan, the oppressive Taliban government that provided a safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his fellow al Qaeda terrorists had surrendered ten months earlier, on December 5, 2001, after just two months of war. While SEALs, Marines, and Army Rangers played a role in the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, it was fought predominantly by fewer than a hundred Special Forces Green Berets, working with the CIA and a handful of Air Force combat air controllers. They joined forces with the Northern Alliance in the north of Afghanistan and a ragtag militia in the south led by a Pashtun tribal leader named Hamid Karzai, who would become the first president of Afghanistan.

  The swift victory against the Taliban regime then shifted to a counterinsurgency mission of fighting hard-line Taliban insurgents and their allies—foreign jihadists pouring in from Pakistan and Iran. They sought to overthrow the fledgling Afghan government and oust the American-led coalition forces, whom they considered invaders and infidels.

  In addition to fighting these insurgents and jihadists and providing security for the newly formed Afghan government, the U.S. military’s priority mission remained the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11 attacks on American soil. He was at the top of the list, followed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founding father, and a laundry list of Taliban and terrorist leaders on the run in Afghanistan and around the globe.

  War planners realized almost immediately after the surrender of the Taliban that this was merely the beginning of combat operations in Afghanistan. Then, while Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government and national police and army were still under construction, another war was being planned in the Middle East. U.S. intelligence, military leadership, and ultimately Commander in Chief and President George W. Bush deemed Iraq—more specifically, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein—the gravest threat to national security.

  On March 17, 2003, President Bush demanded that Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay, surrender and leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. When that time line was not met, the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq began. Two days later, about forty-five minutes after the first bombs struck military targets outside Baghdad, President Bush addressed the nation and outlined the objectives of what would be a military invasion of Iraq:

  … to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.… The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

  That week, as the bombing campaign continued in Iraq, the master chiefs of SEAL Team TWO conducted an annual closed-door meeting in which they discussed, evaluated, and graded all the enlisted SEALs under their command. They ranked Adam Brown five out of thirty-two second class petty officers.

  Adam’s superior, another lieutenant, noted in his March 25 evaluation that Adam was a “proven, tactically proficient operator” and that he had been selected as “operator of the quarter” due to his performance while deployed. Again, Adam was recognized as “always the first to volunteer for the hard jobs and the last to leave. Leads, mentors, and sets the example—The Definition of a Team Player: Advance to First Class.”

  Now six months into his second platoon’s workup, with war being waged on two fronts, Adam was virtually guaranteed deployment to a combat zone of a war he fervently believed in.

  “Adam trusted our leadership, the checks and balances of our Constitution, and felt it was his duty to go where he was ordered to go,” says Larry. “Beyond that, he believed in his heart that what we were doing was the right thing. He educated himself so he’d have an informed opinion. Going after bin Laden was a no-brainer; the Taliban, the atrocities they committed, they needed to be removed. Their treatment of women and children was always a big deal for Adam; that got to him. And in Iraq Adam remembered this photo of a Kurdish girl lying dead on the street, eyes open, after Saddam Hussein had gassed her whole town. All this argument about whether or not they had weapons of mass destruction—that was proof enough for Adam that they not only had them but that Saddam Hussein had used them against his own people. He was evil, he was a bully, and to stand by and watch that and not do something about it was unacceptable to Adam.”

  Says Kelley, “Adam believed in a spiritual battle between good and evil. Reading the Bible was part of his training, really. Just like what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, with good people versus bad people, there was good and bad in a spiritual sense, and he wanted to be educated. So he read and read and read—books, the classified reports he could get his hands on—and he watched the news. But more than anything, he couldn’t wait to get over there and see for himself, try and do some good wherever he was.”

  One morning Adam donned a fireman’s hat and proceeded to exhibit what Chief Harley says was his “ability to flip a switch and adapt to any situation.”

  Wearing the bright red hat, he got down on his hands and knees and went to work. He slinked like a leopard, hopped like a rabbit, climbed onto a desk like a monkey, and with accompanying growls, clicks, and howls, he kept a dozen two- and three-year-olds riveted for the entire hour of Kelley and Michelle’s Sunday school class.

  “He was a great big kid himself,” says Kelley. “I had a rule: no climbing on the desks. But I step out for a minute and who’s on the desk when I get back to the room? My twenty-nine-year-old husband.”

  Says Austin, “The fact that Adam taught Sunday school really defines who he was. He’d play and act out the animals on Noah’s ark, and he’d tell me that was just the best way he felt he could praise the Lord. He was a human puppet for the kids. They loved Adam.”

  Since Virginia Beach is a military town, each Sunday the congregation at Atlantic Shores Baptist Church prayed to God to watch over all who were serving, and almost every Sunday they also prayed for the families and souls of those killed the previous week. Michelle and Kelley never verbalized their own fears, but as each month of training brought their husbands closer to war, all it took was a glance during these all-too-frequent prayers for fallen warriors. If the wives’ eyes met, they knew they were both experiencing the same sense of dread that only a military spouse can feel when a loved one is bound for war.

  While the wars waged on, Adam quietly continued to fight the personal battle that had begun the first time he’d smoked crack some eight years earlier. His faith, family, and determination had kept him drug free for almost five years, but his body and brain had been altered by the drug and they would seek that pleasure forever. He had a one-beer limit, a tough maximum to adhere to in a community where “if you don’t go out drinking with the boys,” says one SEAL, “you’re not really one of the boys; it’s the reality of the job. But there are exceptions, and Adam w
as one of them. Austin was another. Both solid operators who didn’t get obliterated. They’d either limit themselves or sometimes I’d look over and realize Austin was drinking water. They were a good influence, and most of the guys respected them for it.”

  But Adam was human and would push his own self-imposed limits. On a Friday in late June, Adam and Kelley went out for a night of pizza and bowling with Christian, Paul, Austin, their wives—all of whom had been pregnant during the South American deployment—and children ranging in age from a few months to Nathan, the oldest at three. The Browns returned home to a neighborhood get-together that Kelley encouraged Adam to attend while she put the kids to bed.

  After two hours Kelley glanced out the window and saw that the lights were off at the neighbor’s house. Then she realized that their car was gone. She called Adam’s cell phone throughout the night, but he wouldn’t pick up, and by the next morning Kelley knew without a doubt what had happened. She was both crushed and furious.

  According to the neighbor, Adam had left with another neighbor to have a beer at a bar, and Kelley surmised that one beer led to another and another. Somewhere in there, with his willpower weakened by the alcohol, Adam had searched out the drug or maybe somebody had offered it. Either way, he’d done it.

  Kelley asked Christian if he would go out and search for Adam, and together with Paul, the two SEALs spent all of Saturday driving around the worst neighborhoods of Norfolk and Portsmouth. “When we couldn’t find him, I was devastated,” says Christian. “Kelley was really troubled, and I felt like I was letting them both down. They were family.”