Fearless Page 18

  Adam continued the journal entry to his children:

  From everything I’ve read, seeing these kids, including girls, playing, tells me we are doing right here. I have not gotten a single sour face from any of the locals, and I don’t see fear in their eyes. I’m sure I will learn more over time. They are poor; y’all cannot believe what little they have, Nathan and Savannah, but we have restored their dignity, and their lives … the Taliban had taken that away. (Read Marri’s letter in book Sewing Circles of Herat.) Kids, I am proud to be here doing what we are doing.

  During his personal quest to learn about Afghanistan, Adam had read a book titled The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan by Christina Lamb. The letter he referred to was sent to Lamb by a secretly educated young Afghan woman named Marri.

  Dear Christina,

  … I hope this will help you outside understand the feelings of an educated Afghan female who must now live under a burqa.…

  For two pages the letter described Marri’s background and various anecdotes of life before and after the Taliban, ending with,

  Life here is very miserable. We have no rights at all and we have asked many times other countries of the world for help but they have been silent. Now we heard about this attack on the towers in America with many people dead and my father says the Americans will come and remove the Taliban but we do not dare hope.…

  I do not know what you want me to write to you. If I start writing I will fill all the paper and my eyes will fill with tears because in these seven years of Taliban no one has asked us to write about our lives. In my mind I make a picture of you and your family. I wonder if you drive a car, if you go out with friends to the cinema and restaurants and dance at parties. Do you play loud music and swim in lakes? One day I would like to see and I would also like to show you a beautiful place in my country with mountains and streams but not now while we must be hidden. Maybe our worlds will always be too far apart.

  Marri

  For the first few weeks in-country, Adam and his task unit flew from Bagram to outlying villages. Their living quarters were eight-foot-by-eight-foot plywood rooms with a blanket for a door, a bunk, and some shelves in a building built by Army engineers when the Taliban had surrendered four years before. Adam’s missions were with a team of doctors who provided care to the locals, and in many cases their animals, while the SEALs provided security.

  After a month of supporting this MEDCAP/VETCAP (Medical Civic Action Program/Veterinarian Civic Action Program) mission, winning the hearts and minds of the indigenous population, the task unit was ordered to relocate. Adam was preparing his gear for the move when his buddy, FBI agent Billy White, who had been accompanying the SEALs on the mission, stopped by his room, the walls of which were covered in graffiti from its many different residents. One message was, “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow … what a ride.’ ”

  Billy liked it so much he jotted it down in his journal. Then he noticed Adam’s Bible, the cover bent, pages marked, and it sparked a conversation about their shared Christian faith—and how they both believed God had led them to fight in this war.

  “Neither of us had seen actual combat at that point,” says Billy, “and we talked of being warriors and Christians, and mentally dealing with killing. Specifically, we talked about how the Bible says thou shalt not murder; it does not say thou shalt not kill. There is a time to kill, to protect your home, your family, your freedom. And when I said that to Adam he replied, ‘Amen, brother.’ ”

  The following morning Adam and Billy were in a vehicle heading south from Bagram, part of the relocation convoy of five Humvees. They rounded a corner and saw an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy coming from the opposite direction, barreling down the middle of the narrow two-lane blacktop at sixty to seventy miles an hour, roughly the same speed as Adam’s convoy. The lead vehicles in both convoys edged over into their own lanes, but in doing so dropped their outer tires into the powdery dirt, instantly creating a large dust cloud.

  Adam was riding in the front passenger seat of the second Humvee, his right hand holding on to the upper frame of the open window, when the wall of dust appeared. Their driver barely had time to tap the vehicle’s brakes before it was swallowed by the blinding cloud, and an instant later the left front bumper impacted with the second vehicle in the ISAF convoy, causing a glancing head-on collision. Adam’s Humvee flipped three times while cartwheeling down the blacktop.

  The dust cleared and Dave Cain—a SEAL in the undamaged lead vehicle—saw Adam leaning into the backseat of the smashed Humvee, administering aid to somebody who was “howling like a dog that got run over by a car,” says Dave.

  Billy was pinned between the caved-in roof, a piece of which had speared through his left quadriceps muscle, and the seat and floorboard. His lower left leg was crushed, and a bone protruded through his calf muscle from a compound fracture. The left side of Billy’s head and his ear were torn open, his left wrist was disfigured and broken, and his M4 carbine, which he’d been holding muzzle up between his legs, had been driven through his left armpit into his back so that it could be seen bulging against the skin there. These were only the visible injuries.

  Adam was seated in the front right seat of this Humvee when it was involved in an accident on the road to Kandahar.

  “Adam was applying pressure, trying to stop the bleeding on Billy’s leg,” says Dave. “Billy was screaming. Another guy had gotten thrown out and was in shock, sort of stumbling around. The guy next to Billy thought his back was broken but was still trying to help Adam with Billy. Then a corpsman from the rear of our convoy ran up and Adam yelled at him, ‘Give Billy his morphine! Give him his morphine!’ ”

  As Adam helped extract Billy and the other injured men from the mangled vehicle, Dave noticed Adam’s right hand: its fingers were dangling by skin and tendons, every digit but the thumb severed. When the Humvee began to flip, the hand that had been gripping the window frame was crushed between it and the road.

  “Adam, your hand is messed up,” Dave said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Adam. “I’m all right. Focus on these guys.”

  A corpsman overheard. “Hey, I need to take a look,” he told Adam. After examining the injury, the corpsman carefully laid Adam’s fingers back into place and bandaged his hand.

  Local men, women, and children had begun to gather, watching the scene. A stopped convoy dealing with a medical trauma was a target of opportunity, and the enemy could easily be hidden within the crowd.

  “Let’s keep these people back!” yelled Adam, standing up and grabbing his M4 with his uninjured hand. Says Dave, “He balanced the stock on the forearm above his bandages and started holding security. I told him, ‘Adam! Sit down, man. We got it. Relax.’ But Adam shook his head and kept pushing people away from the wreckage.

  “When the helicopter landed, there was Adam, still holding security for his own medevac, refusing to get loaded until all the others were tended to and on board. Only then did he lower his weapon and join them.”

  14

  Green Team

  KELLEY WAS DRIVING NORTH, APPROACHING the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, when her cell phone rang. From the forlorn tone of Adam’s voice, she knew instantly something was wrong.

  “I’m coming home, baby,” he said.

  “Oh, Adam. What happened? Are you okay? Talk fast, I’m coming up on the tunnel.”

  “Well,” he said, “I got in an accident.”

  Unable to pull over, Kelley entered the tunnel and lost the call. Once she was on the other side, Adam called back and filled her in—somewhat. “He was so casual about these horrible injuries,” Kelley says. “He was in the hospital and was like, ‘I hurt my hand pretty bad, my fingers got cut off, but I got ’em sewn back on.’ He was most worried about his friend who was in
surgery and in critical condition, lucky to be alive.”

  Adam asked her to call his parents. “And Itty Bitty,” he said, “have everybody we know pray for a guy named Billy White.”

  Initial surgeries for both Adam and Billy were performed the day of the accident in the Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield. The following morning they flew together to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where Billy was operated on more extensively. Adam remained with Billy so he could accompany him home three days later. When they returned to the States, Billy went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, and Adam was driven home for reconstructive hand surgery at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia Beach.

  “It wasn’t until he got home that night,” says Kelley, “that I saw his fingers hadn’t just been cut off; they’d been crushed off between the Humvee and the road. It looked so painful.”

  The next day Adam checked in at the hospital and insisted on a local anesthetic so he could watch the procedure. “He chatted with the surgeons with his hand laid open on the table,” says Kelley. “He watched them work on his nerves, muscles, tendons. Every cut, stitch, screw, and pin, he saw it all.”

  Janice and Larry had monitored Adam’s situation from Hot Springs since the accident. “Kelley always kept us informed,” says Larry, who would then pass the information on to Shawn and Manda. “We’d known he was going to Green Team after this deployment. And with his eye, he’d already dealt with so much. I was scared to ask what this injury meant; we just prayed. God knew Adam real well by then. I turned to Romans 8:28: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.’ That became a theme when Adam got hurt. I’d ask ‘Why?’ and that was my answer.”

  Over the next four weeks Kelley cleaned and debrided Adam’s hand. Twice a day she would unwrap the ointment-saturated surgical gauze from around each finger, pulling away the dead flesh. “There was pus and blood and goo,” she says. “I was lightheaded the first few times, but I got used to it. His index finger had an exposed nerve, and we’d save that one for last because when I unwrapped and rewrapped it, it shot a jolt, like an electrical shock, through him that nearly knocked him down.”

  The pins and screws were surgically removed the second week in December. Green Team was scheduled to begin in June 2006—less than six months away—and “Adam’s biggest concern wasn’t if he’d ever be able to use his hand for normal things, like holding a fork or writing with a pencil,” says Kelley. “He was thinking pull-ups.” Would he be able to hold on to the bar and do fifteen, the minimum requirement? Would he be able to draw his pistol, pull with his trigger finger, assemble his weapons? “He went down the list, everything he knew he’d have to do to qualify and what he’d have to work on. Because now both his dominant eye and his dominant hand were a mess.”

  While Adam’s grip gained strength in rehabilitation, his overall dexterity and fine motor skills weren’t the same. A month after the surgery, he began to retrain himself to shoot—both pistol and carbine—with his left hand. This was far more difficult than what he’d done in Sniper School, where single shots were patiently set up, the rifle steadied, if not by its own tripod, then atop a tree stump, log, or whatever was available. And even though he had used both his nondominant eye and his left hand, pulling the trigger as a sniper was a slow, deliberate move, unlike what he would need to do when faced with split-second decisions in the realistic combat testing of Green Team.

  Adam’s hand looking remarkably good with his fingers reattached.

  Adam’s biggest concern was the Close Quarters Battle (CQB) portion of the course, in which he would have to clear rooms, search houses, react to bad guys: tough shooting exercises that require both lightning-fast reactions and pinpoint accuracy. “This doesn’t even compare to what Adam was up against,” says one Green Team cadre instructor, “but let’s say you’re right-handed and somebody tells you to start writing left-handed. You have to retrain yourself to write fast, you can’t drop below the line with your letters, the letters have to be perfect, and you’ve got to know and write down the answers to do-or-die questions almost simultaneously. And do all this with bad guys shooting at you. Adam had to rewire his brain to react ‘left’ when his whole life he’d reacted ‘right,’ in a course where half of the very best guys who have two good eyes and two good hands still fail.”

  By January Adam was drawing his pistol and making consistently accurate shots. “Almost like he had been ambidextrous and didn’t know it,” says Jack Elliot, an armorer who helped maintain weapons for the SEALs. “We teach our guys to shoot with their off hand in case their good one is injured in battle, so I’ve seen a lot of guys try and shoot nondominant hand. Adam was smooth. I’d joke with him: ‘C’mon, come clean, you’re a Jedi, right?’ And he’d say, ‘Naw, I just pray a lot.’ ”

  With only a couple of weeks of shooting left-handed under his belt and his fingers barely healed, Adam volunteered for what was presented as “an extremely challenging counternarcotics mission” in South America. As the leading petty officer, he headed a twelve-man SEAL unit tasked with creating a premier maritime fighting force from the ranks of Colombia’s marines.

  When he arrived in Colombia and met the forty marines who had been chosen for training in a variety of ocean-borne tactics and procedures, Adam found one overwhelming problem: only about ten knew how to swim. So, for the first three weeks of the tight two-month schedule, some of the most elite warriors in the world got into a murky swimming pool and, according to one of the SEALs present, coaxed the anxious Colombian marines into the water. Once they mastered dog-paddling, they eventually achieved success at what another SEAL had first considered a “hopeless task.” Adam’s evaluation read,

  Selected to head a highly successful Counter Narcotics Training mission in Colombia. Created and implemented an aggressive training schedule in which 40 Marines and twenty Colombian helicopter pilots were trained in high-risk helicopter boat and fast-rope insertion methods. He successfully conducted the first ever helicopter “K-duck” boat insertions in Colombian special forces history.

  Back home in April, Adam was awarded a gold star, representing his fourth Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for his accomplishments in Colombia. The following month, as he prepared for his transfer to Green Team, the SEALs from Team TWO presented him with a wooden paddle that had a brass plaque on the blade engraved with “The Ballad of Adam Brown.”

  SEAL Team FOUR was where you made your debut,

  Stabbing your face on a dive would be nothing new.

  At Stennis you proved insects were a menace,

  First bees and then ants breached your defenses.

  Arkansas’s finest, PTs never wearied,

  But who would believe your crazy bubble theory?

  Stanardsville taught you Escape and Evasion,

  Save your burning gloves, it was a vacation.

  A Sim fight in Alabama proved you had no fear,

  But a stray round caused more than a tear.

  It kept you from combat, this cruel fate,

  But showed your true character, your lack of hate.

  Afghanistan should have been your time to shine,

  I think God was saving you from a land mine.

  He took a few fingers, but then gave them back,

  You shrugged it off, it didn’t mean jack.

  So it’s off to Green Team, a fate long deserved,

  A place at the table for you is reserved.

  Any SEAL will agree when they get in the mix,

  All would be honored to have you watching their six.

  Fair Winds and Following Seas

  From the Warriors of SEAL Team TWO.

  Two weeks before his move to Green Team, Adam was clearing out his locker at Team TWO when his chief stopped by to deliver the bad news: Adam had been medically disqualified from the course. “His file was reviewed,” says another instructor. “And even thou
gh he’d been cleared and was on the roster, somebody went back in and reconsidered, figured there is no way he will pass without perfect vision, and because it’s a dangerous course—lots of live ammunition, explosives—they did not want that liability.”

  Adam got in his car and drove home. “He was furious and in disbelief,” says Kelley. “Adam was a man of his word, and he couldn’t stand that they were going back and forth. He knew he could do the job and was determined to make it happen.”

  They explored every angle to appeal the decision, and they prayed. “He said he would leave the Navy and return to school if that was his path,” Kelley says. “He said he would even shoulder the humility of not succeeding at DEVGRU, but still be the best SEAL he could be. He’d go to bed disappointed, but he’d wake up fired up, saying, ‘I’m not done.’ ”

  After a week of hitting brick walls with every appeal, Adam seemed out of options. Then one day, as he drove to work on the base at Little Creek, he noticed the familiar gait of a runner on a trail next to the road. Pulling alongside Captain Van Hooser, his former commander, Adam called out through the window, “Good morning, sir! Can I interrupt your run for a minute?”

  Despite having commanded thousands of SEALs over the years, Van Hooser knew exactly who Adam was. He remembered the blade incident, and how Adam had not interrupted the training dive in spite of his wound. He was impressed by the way Adam had described being shot in the eye as merely a “ding” and was aware that he had passed Sniper School—just missing being the honor graduate—while shooting left-handed with his nondominant eye.