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  The other shooter in the residence started up again, turning the courtyard into a deadly crossfire of bullets.

  The SEALs were trained for the worst-case scenario, and it didn’t get much worse than this. They were deep within the hornet’s nest, facing at least two barricaded fighters shooting from opposite ends of a compound, with a severely wounded teammate fully exposed between them.

  “Let’s go get him! We gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go!” Brian said urgently, peering around the open gate. As Rick formulated a split-second plan, Heath stood atop the southern wall and poured cover fire over Adam and into the barn’s door and windows. Kraig ran across the barn’s flat roof and leaned over the edge, first firing his weapon down at the well-barricaded shooter, then taking out a grenade.

  Both of his hands were on the grenade ready to pull out its pin when there was another burst of AK-47 gunfire, this time directed not at Adam but through the roof at Kraig. A bullet struck Kraig’s wrist, forcing him to his knees and knocking the grenade out of his hands—just as five of Adam’s teammates stormed through the compound gate.

  Seeing Kraig go down, Kevin jumped up on the roof and helped him into the alley north of the compound, then squeezed his wrist to stop the bleeding. “Just give me my aid kit and go!” Kraig said, and Kevin tore around the corner toward the main gate. Immediately, Kraig slapped a pressure bandage on his wrist, bound it tight, climbed back on the barn roof, and pulled out another grenade.

  In the courtyard John Faas and Matt Mason went right and Rick went left, all three laying down cover fire into the residence and the barn. Brian Bill and Nick Null ran straight to Adam, who was motionless when they reached under his shoulders and pulled him through the branches and off the wall. They repositioned their grip on his belt and the shoulder straps of his chest rack, lifted some 250 pounds—Adam’s weight with the equipment and weapons still slung across his chest—and in a crouch half shuffled, half ran for the gate, Adam’s feet dragging on the ground behind.

  Kraig moved forward and threw the second grenade through a window of the barn. He waited for the explosion, then swung his weapon over the edge and started shooting downward into the building. In the courtyard Matt gripped Adam’s collar while shuffling backward, helping to pull Adam toward the gate as he continued to fire between Nick and Brian at the barn. John, Heath, and Rick pounded both the residence and the barn with gunfire before throwing numerous fragmentation and thermobaric grenades into every window.

  At last the enemy gunfire ceased, but searching the buildings and identifying the dead was no longer the priority. Adam was.

  Less than one minute after Adam was shot, Brian, Nick, and Matt set him down outside the wall, and Zeke, one of the assault force’s medics, frantically went to work pulling off Adam’s armor and cutting away his cammies to assess his wounds. Matt unrolled a casualty litter, while Kevin moved the women and children being guarded by the Afghan soldiers farther away from the compound. Nick helped Zeke pack the wounds, and Brian held Adam’s hand. “Talk to him,” Zeke said to the two SEALs. He slapped Adam’s cheek. “Stay with me, Adam!”

  There were bullet holes through Adam’s legs, along his left side, under his left arm, and in his abdomen. The side angle from which the fighter had shot the AK-47 could not have been more deadly.

  The bleeding was severe.

  Zeke rolled Adam onto his side, found an exit wound, patched it with a dressing, then felt along every inch he couldn’t see to be sure he wasn’t missing a bullet hole. Through it all Adam remained conscious but groggy, looking up with tired eyes but never saying a word. As Zeke cut through the rest of Adam’s pants, he paused for a moment, as did Nick, Matt, and Brian.

  “The world stopped for a few seconds,” says Brian, “and we just stared. He was wearing the Batman underwear his kids gave him.”

  At the Brown residence in Virginia Beach, it was eight in the evening and Kelley was cleaning up the kitchen, Nathan was reading, and Savannah was playing with her stuffed animals when the doorbell rang. “It was dark out,” says Kelley, “and my heart kind of stopped. Nobody rings the doorbell at night, and with Adam deployed … So I peeked out and it was my neighbor, bringing over something I’d bought from their kids’ fund-raiser.”

  As Kelley closed the door, the smile of greeting dropped from her face and she put her hand to her chest, thinking, That hurt. That was scary.

  A half hour later, the kids were in bed and Kelley checked to see if Adam had replied to the e-mail she’d sent earlier that day. He had not. That’s when “I got this sick feeling,” she says. “Out of the blue I pictured having a funeral for Adam, and I’d never had that happen before. I’d have worries, but never, ever a funeral. It was so sad, and horrible, and I literally shook my head trying to get the thought out of there.”

  She took a hot shower and cried, then put on one of Adam’s T-shirts, checked e-mail again, and got into bed, thinking that maybe her feeling of dread was because “he was unhappy and missing us. That was always the hardest thing for him. I prayed for him right then. I prayed that he was safe and that he wasn’t sad—that he would have peace being away from us.”

  Hurrying out the compound gate, Heath dropped to his knees beside Adam and asked Zeke what he could do to help. Grenades continued to explode in the background as Zeke placed Heath’s hand atop a bandage on Adam’s side and instructed him, “Push! Hard!”

  “I was putting pressure,” says Heath, “and looking at Adam, talking to him. I’ve seen it enough; you can see when somebody’s not all there, like it’s bad. I saw Brian was holding his hand, and I yelled, ‘Adam! Hang in there, buddy!’ That’s when he looked right at me. He looked at all of us who were there. We’ve got this red light on so he can see our faces a little, and he says, ‘I’m okay. I’m okay.’ That’s standard Adam—he’s good, he’s good with it.”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  Adam closed his eyes after those words, but no doubt in his heart remained the essence of the letter he’d written to Nathan and Savannah years earlier during his initial combat deployment in Iraq, the first time he’d seen death on the battlefield: “I’m not afraid of anything that might happen to me on this Earth because I know no matter what, nothing can take my spirit from me.… No matter what, my spirit is given to the Lord and I will finally be victorious.”

  Zeke finished strapping Adam onto the litter and told Matt, who was relaying status on the radio, “Get that 47 spun up! We need to get Adam on a helicopter now!”

  The original plan had been to push through the compound and village to the helicopter landing zone farther down the road and just outside the hamlet. But the steadily increasing gunfire meant that reaching the first HLZ was no longer an option, and neither was an immediate onsite pickup; the helicopter was at too great a risk of being shot down.

  Instead, the assault force began to follow Tom and his sniper team’s directives, away from the compound down to an emergency HLZ below the terraces and almost at the base of the valley. Adam’s litter was carried at first by four men, one each at his head, feet, and sides, with Zeke and another medic alternating between helping carry and monitoring Adam. Soon that number increased to eight, four on each side, their body armor a shield surrounding Adam and the extra hands mandatory as muscles began to burn and shake. An AC-130 gunship thousands of feet overhead engaged the enemy that could be positively identified by their weapon fire.

  The men moved as quickly as they could down the steep, muddy terraces, shuffling forward maybe twenty yards before setting Adam down so that Zeke could do chest compressions. Then they would pick him up and repeat the process, “a nightmare,” according to every man there.

  Halfway down the terraces, a light infantryman was shot through the bicep, which led the assault force to believe that the enemy had night-vision capabilities. Those who carried Adam traversed the slope, attempting to distance themselves from the line of fire, only to enter a different line of fire.

  At one point during
a set of chest compressions, Zeke switched on his red-lens penlight, which was barely discernible to the naked eye but lit up like a circus tent to someone wearing night-vision goggles. Instantly, bullets started whizzing by and sparking off the rocks along the terrace walls a few feet away. “I know you’re doing what you need to do,” Matt said to Zeke, “but is there any way you can do it without that light on?”

  “There were a few times where it was sheer madness,” says Brian. “We were getting shot at from so many different directions, you couldn’t even tell where it was coming from. And we were smoked.”

  Every man was on the brink of exhaustion following the six-and-a-half-hour foot patrol and the ongoing battle, but the terraces went on and on, some of them so narrow there was barely room for the men bearing Adam’s litter. Kevin found his heels hanging over the edge as they sidestepped, then lost his foothold and released his grip on the litter, falling fifteen feet into an irrigation ditch filled with water. His rifle dug into his thigh, which he had to punch repeatedly to relieve a paralyzing muscle spasm before he could climb back up and limp onward.

  Each terrace was a riddle, requiring a new technique to move Adam to the next level. Sometimes that was sliding the litter down an opportune slope adjacent to the terrace; sometimes that was lying prone, then lowering Adam horizontally or vertically to the waiting hands reaching up from ten feet below. The medics performed CPR every minute of the maddening descent.

  Only a few hundred yards below, the sniper team had marked the new HLZ, but it took over an hour to carry Adam there. Nearly every SEAL had done his part to carry, talk to, breathe for, or encourage Adam to hold on, that they were “almost there,” that he’d “be home very soon.”

  “I don’t think anybody gave up hope,” says Matt. “He’d been through so many injuries. If anybody could pull through, it was Adam.”

  At the HLZ, a helicopter came out of nowhere, hovering only long enough for the medics and immediate litter team to scramble on board with Adam. They screamed down the valley and over a mountain pass. In less than ten minutes they were at a forward operating base, off-loading Adam into the waiting hands of a surgical team.

  The remainder of the assault force crowded into a second MH-47 and landed at the FOB soon after the first. Both helicopters’ rotors remained spinning at low power while every man on board waited for news. On their helicopter, Heath and John moved away from the others, down to the end of the open ramp, and stood looking out at the light blue hues of morning spanning the eastern horizon.

  “We need to be prepared,” Heath said quietly. “We need to keep it together and be prepared for what’s going to come out of this.”

  “What do you mean?” John asked.

  “Adam’s gone, man.”

  “What? No. I’m not ready for that … You sure?”

  “I’m not positive, but it didn’t look good to me. I don’t see him making it.”

  Silently, the two SEALs continued to stare at the brightening sky until the grave voice of their master chief came over their radios a few minutes later.

  “Adam didn’t make it.”

  A handful of SEALs—some of Adam’s closest friends—filed slowly off the helicopter, across the tarmac, and into the trauma center for a private moment with Adam. Afterward, they gathered outside and one by one thanked Zeke, who was sitting on the ground, head in hands. “He was a hero,” says Tom. “He fought so hard to keep Adam alive and pretty much collapsed once he got him into surgery. The doc told him, ‘If he’d been shot up like this and landed right here on this operating table, we could not have saved him.’ ”

  “So, what happens now?” Rick asked the surgeon, who stood solemnly nearby.

  “We’ll get him prepared to move, then someone will fly in and take him down to Bagram, where they’ll fly him to Germany and then to the States … usually one of the rotation flights that we get in here.”

  “Well, screw that,” said Brian. “Can we just take him right now?”

  “That’s not protocol,” said the surgeon, “but I’m not going to stop you.”

  “We’ll take him,” said Rick. “We’ll bring him home.”

  Two hours later Adam was back on the MH-47, flying to the DEVGRU home base, surrounded by his brothers in arms, who planned to give him a proper warrior’s send-off.

  Staring at the body bag on the floor of the helicopter, Kevin thought only of Kelley, Nathan, and Savannah. God, he prayed, if you’re up there, I’m not too happy with you right now, but we’ll work that out later. If you’re listening, be with Kelley and the kids. They’re going to need you.

  19

  Unconquerable Soul

  KELLEY HAD BEEN BOTH PRAYING and crying at ten thirty (seven the next morning in Afghanistan), the last time she’d looked at the clock before falling asleep.

  An hour and a half later, two black Suburbans entered the quiet cul-de-sac, their lights dimming as they pulled to a stop. In the backseat of the vehicle in front, Christian Taylor stared blankly out the window, remembering all the times Adam had invited him over to visit; yet he’d been busy, he’d kept putting it off, and this was the first time he would see their new house. At midnight, Christian, Dave Cain, and a SEAL in dress blues exited the vehicles, and Dave knocked on the front door.

  Kelley heard the knocking as if in a dream, but when the doorbell rang she knew. It hit her like a shot of adrenaline. “The sad thoughts, the crying, the vision of a funeral. Adam had been telling me good-bye.”

  How much it pains me to think about never kissing Kelley’s lips, Adam had written in that letter years before, and not watching my boy excel in life, or giving my little baby girl away in marriage. But don’t worry, Kelley, I’ll kiss you again someday.

  “He was dying,” she says, “and he was telling me, ‘I’m leaving, and I’m sad.’ ”

  Outside the door waited a SEAL in uniform, standing between Christian and Dave, both of whom Kelley knew were on Adam’s casualty assistance calls officer (CACO) form. The uniformed SEAL began, “Mrs. Brown, I’m sorry to inform you …” Kelley didn’t need to hear any more; the words drove her straight to the floor.

  Gently, Christian and Dave helped her up.

  “Are you sure?” Kelley sobbed. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Dave said. “We’re sure. I’m very sorry.”

  When the SEAL finished his mandatory words, Michelle Michaels, who had been called by the notification team and was waiting down the street, ran to Kelley and held her as she cried. “What happened?” Kelley managed to ask through her tears.

  “We don’t know yet,” Dave said.

  “But you’re sure?” Kelley asked him again.

  “I’m so sorry, but yes. We’re sure.”

  “You’re sure?” she said again and looked to Christian, who nodded. “I’m so sorry, Kelley,” he said.

  “Why Adam? Why my Adam?” she asked him.

  Says Christian, “My own guilt translated ‘Why Adam?’ into ‘Why not you?’ Kelley would never say or imply that, but I was mad it wasn’t me. It should have been me. I messed up my family, was unfaithful to my wife, and Adam didn’t and never would. He would have kept being the great father and husband that he was, not like me. I asked myself why would God take somebody like Adam, who is an example—a moral compass for so many of us—instead of me?”

  “I just don’t know,” he replied.

  In an instant of composure, Kelley said, “There’s got to be a reason.” Then she began to sob again.

  “Mama?” Nathan said from the top of the stairs. “Are you okay?”

  “Hey, buddy, we’re just talking with your mom,” said Dave. “Why don’t you crawl back in bed?”

  Quickly Michelle climbed the steps, led Nathan to his room, and sat on the side of the bed as the ten-year-old closed his eyes. But he didn’t sleep.

  “The minute I saw Daddy’s friends there,” he says, “they didn’t have to tell me what happened. I think God had been telling me all day. I already knew
.”

  On the living room couch, Kelley sobbed for a while longer before asking Dave to bring the children down. Barely awake in Michelle’s arms, Savannah started crying as soon as she saw her mother’s face, while Nathan walked stoically beside Dave, tears running down his cheeks.

  Putting her arms tightly around Nathan and Savannah, Kelley told them softly, “Daddy’s not coming home. Daddy’s gone to be with Jesus. He’s in heaven.”

  While a small jet carried another notification team from Virginia to Hot Springs to inform Janice and Larry that their son had been killed in action, the MH-47 helicopter with Adam and his teammates on board landed at 9:00 a.m. at the airfield servicing DEVGRU’s compound in eastern Afghanistan.

  The squadron’s entire air and ground support staff were on the tarmac, dozens of uniformed men and women standing at attention and forming an aisle between the ramp of the helicopter and a pickup truck. Members of Adam’s assault team, including Rick, Brian, John, and Heath, carried his body to the vehicle and then crowded in around him for the drive to their compound.

  Bringing a body bag through the thick layers of security surrounding their base in Afghanistan was uncharted territory. “We basically commandeered Adam’s body,” says Tom. “It couldn’t have been legal—we never checked. We were going to bring Adam in so we could say good-bye.”

  But there were no questions, only salutes for Adam as the group passed through multiple security checks. Inside the squadron’s compound, Adam’s teammates laid his body on one of the benches that encircled their fire pit, near an American flag lowered to half-mast. They sat with Adam and passed around bottles of whiskey, and every once in a while one would kneel beside his body for a moment alone, saying a good-bye, saying a prayer. “We know that you are still with us,” said Adam’s teammate Rob Reeves. “You will be with us on our next op, and on our next deployment, and forever.”