Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  “Good job, Brown. Good job. Now go over to the office and call your wife at this number.” The instructor handed him a piece of paper. “She just had a baby. You’re a dad. Congratulations.”

  At the news Adam sprinted to the phone. “Are you okay?!” he asked Kelley. “Nathan is all right?”

  “Yes,” Kelley said, sounding tired but happy. “He’s healthy. He’s little, but your mama is here and she said you were little too and that never slowed you down.”

  “My mom’s there?”

  “She’s staying for graduation, so you get done. Finish up and come meet your baby boy.”

  The ocean swell picked up and waves started pounding the island, making the conclusion of phase three particularly brutal for Class 227. In one exercise, as students swam through the surf zone with their rucksacks, a wave hammered Christian when he attempted to pull on a fin and he ended up with a broken ankle. He struck a deal that he could graduate from BUD/S if he pushed through the final exercises on crutches.

  Before the other students headed back to Coronado and Christian headed into surgery, they celebrated their last day on the island with a barbecue, during which the commanding officer followed tradition by telling them that this was only the beginning of their training. “You’ll train for the rest of your careers,” he said. “And if you’re lucky, you’ll get a chance to serve your country and do the real thing.”

  Kelley and Nathan were released from the hospital and able to drive to the BUD/S compound with Janice when Adam returned from San Clemente Island. The family’s reunion was shared by a throng of Adam’s classmates, who slapped the new father on the back when Kelley presented him with his swaddled baby boy. “He’s so little,” said Adam, holding the newborn awkwardly. The baby’s head flopped to one side, and Janice jumped forward. “Don’t drop him,” she said, guiding Adam’s hand up to support his son’s neck.

  That evening Nathan fell asleep cradled in Adam’s arms as he sat on the couch of the Browns’ El Cajon home. “It’s a miracle,” he kept saying. “I can’t believe it.”

  Kelley cuddled up beside Adam and together they stared at Nathan as he slept, mesmerized.

  At BUD/S graduation a week later, Adam was one of only twenty-six men left, including Austin and Christian, fresh out of surgery. It was an especially moving occasion for the Brown family—including Shawn and his wife, Tina, and Manda and her husband, Jeremy—as they watched proudly. “We knew something extra about Adam,” says Shawn. “Nobody there realized what else Adam had been through just to get in the Navy.”

  During training an instructor had told the men that they would become like brothers, closer than any friends in high school or college. He had encouraged them to embrace that brotherhood and find strength in it, but to never, ever forsake the importance of family. Now, after hugging and thanking every member of his family for having faith in him, Adam presented to his father the Bible that Chaplain Freiberg had given him after Hell Week. Inside the cover, on the page opposite the chaplain’s note, Adam had written,

  Dad: Thanks for instilling in me all that I have. Thanks for believing in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. God couldn’t of given me a better example of who I want to be in life. If I become half of the man you are, I’ll be happy of who I am. I wish I could express in words the respect I have for you. I think you’re the greatest dad ever. Thanks for being so positive in my life.

  10

  A SEAL Is Born

  THE DOCTOR WHO RECONSTRUCTED Christian Taylor’s ankle told him the injury was a game changer. “He told me I’d never be able to do the job,” says Christian. “Never be able to jump out of planes or handle the pounding I’d take as a SEAL. But I knew I could. I just had to get some rehab and suck it up.

  “When they told us what SEAL teams we were going to go to, there were two things I wanted,” he continues. “One was to go to the East Coast, and the other was to not be on the same team as Adam. I heard my name and ‘Team FOUR,’ which was perfect—East Coast team. Then they said, ‘Adam Brown, Team FOUR,’ and I just shook my head.”

  Still annoyed that he’d been medically rolled from Class 226 into 227, Christian put the blame for his stress fractures not on the instructors or the curriculum of BUD/S, but on Adam. Adam was the only person to ever push him so hard his body had failed. If they were on the same team, that rivalry was sure to continue, and frankly, he didn’t know if he could maintain the pace.

  These were some of the thoughts Christian mulled over as he convalesced in Coronado while Adam, Austin (who was also assigned to SEAL Team FOUR), and most of the other graduates headed to Fort Benning, Georgia, for three weeks of airborne training before checking in at their respective teams. Kelley returned to Arkansas with Nathan, planning to bounce back and forth between the Browns’ home in Hot Springs and her father’s home in Little Rock. One week into airborne training, however, Adam called.

  “Itty Bitty,” he said, “everything is okay, but … it’s calling my name.”

  “My heart sank when he said that,” says Kelley.

  Adam had been drug free for a year and seven months, but she’d done her research and learned that relapse was still extremely likely. For Adam the trigger was a glance at a gas station from a man he instantly knew was a dealer—a suggestive look that said, “You need something?”

  “You have come too far,” Kelley told him. “You are not going to throw all this away. You need to be strong; we’ve got a family now.”

  “I know,” said Adam.

  “We’re coming out,” she said. “Think about where we can stay, and I need to talk to Austin. Is he there?”

  When Adam had filled Austin in on his past, Kelley wasn’t so sure it was a good idea, thinking word would get around that Adam was a recovering addict and had been in jail, which couldn’t help his reputation in a community where reputation was everything. But now Austin reassured her that he was keeping an eye on Adam and urging him to be careful about whom he shared his story with. Kelley was thankful and relieved that Adam had someone close by watching out for him. “You’re a good friend,” she said to Austin before hanging up.

  Next Kelley informed her father, who had planned to drive with her to Fort Benning in a couple of weeks, that there’d been a change of plans. “Something came up with Adam’s training,” she said. “We need to leave sooner.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll get packing now. Can we leave tomorrow?”

  Two days later Kelley’s father helped her and Nathan move into a one-room vacation cabin that Adam had found on the base. Now, when Adam wasn’t in class, in an airplane, or jumping out of one, he was with his family. “I put Nathan in his arms every chance I got,” says Kelley. “While he was studying, when we ate dinner. I knew holding Nathan made him strong, reminded him he was a father and why he couldn’t give in.”

  After Adam earned his parachute jump wings, the three drove east to Virginia Beach, where they rented an apartment not far from the Naval Amphibious Base at Little Creek, the East Coast home of Naval Special Warfare Group TWO. On the morning of March 27, 2000, just after Nathan turned two months old, Adam checked in at the SEAL Team FOUR headquarters, a single-story building within a fenced compound at the water’s edge of the base. Wearing the required dress whites, Adam approached the main reception area, or “quarterdeck” of the “ship”—what all buildings in the Navy are considered—sticking out like a sore thumb and eliciting scornful comments from the team guys dressed in cammies or PT shorts and T-shirts. “Get your sunglasses, boys,” announced one SEAL, shielding his eyes. “There’s something bright white and stupid coming on board.”

  The ridicule began another rite of passage for the new guys, one in which their SEAL Trident pins were prominently displayed in a glass case inside the entrance to the quarterdeck, a continual reminder that they were not yet official U.S. Navy SEALs.

  Established in late 1970, the Naval Special Warfare Trident signifies a SEAL’s official membership in this exclus
ive fraternity. The coveted insignia recognizes those who have completed BUD/S training, made it through a six- to nine-month probationary period, and passed advanced SEAL Tactical Training. Only then are SEALs authorized to wear the Trident, as a gold pin on dress uniforms and an embroidered patch on cammies.

  There are four components to the Trident: the anchor, symbolizing the Navy; the trident, which represents the SEALs’ historical ties to the sea; the cocked pistol, a reminder of SEALs’ capabilities on land and their constant state of readiness; and the eagle, which—in addition to being the national emblem of freedom—symbolizes the SEALs’ ability to insert from the air. The eagle’s head is traditionally held high, but on the Trident, its head is lowered, signifying that a true warrior’s strength comes from humility.

  The day after Adam checked in, Austin joined Team FOUR and was permitted to wear his Trident—briefly. A master chief pulled it out of the case and pinned it to the wrong side of a black wool vest that the chief made Austin pull on over his dress whites. Looking ridiculous, Austin then had to walk the halls of the building, receiving jeers from the established members of SEAL Team FOUR. Every new guy was at the mercy of whoever happened to be around when he checked in, and endured anything from catcalls about his dress whites to getting his Trident painted blue, the same color as an inert training munition—the derision being that until he was fully trained, that’s exactly how he would be regarded: inert, harmless, useless.

  So began the probation period for Adam and his classmates from Class 227. They would go through SEAL Tactical Training (STT), the apprentice-to-journeyman stage in learning and absorbing the tactical aspects of the SEAL trade and honing basic war-fighting skills: land warfare, combat swimming, land navigation, weapons skills, and patrolling. At the end of STT they would have to take a three-day final exam, with both written and oral aspects. Those who passed would be “platooned up”—assigned to one of twelve platoons on Team FOUR, each comprising sixteen men: two officers, a chief petty officer, and thirteen enlisted. Then, after a punishing ocean swim, they would be presented with their Trident and deemed SEALs by their brethren.

  The next East Coast STT course wasn’t set to begin until June, so in the meantime the “mission” of the new guys was to support the Team FOUR platoons. Their ships needed upkeep: floors mopped, walls painted, windows washed, trash taken out. In his first week at Team FOUR, Adam scrubbed garbage cans, unclogged the toilet a few times, and reorganized a storage closet. But he also sat in on a planning meeting for a training exercise, joined a platoon at the firing range, and absorbed the peripheral chatter that gave shape and purpose to the job.

  “He attacked whatever task he was given,” says a Team FOUR master chief. “Sometimes we’d give the new guys BS tasks, like ‘Go do a backflip off the dock.’ Some guys rolled their eyes, said okay, and then did whatever it was at half speed, knowing they were getting messed with. But Adam ran down to that dock like he was on an op—no questions, no hesitation—like, ‘There must be a higher purpose that I’m doing this backflip with all my clothes on into the ocean.’ He was can-do from day one.”

  During his second week Adam was chosen to support a platoon’s training dive. In the dark of night, Adam and five SEALs, all in full dive gear, boarded an inflatable boat and paddled across the Little Creek inlet on the southern shore of Chesapeake Bay to a training area. There they would place limpet mines, magnetic Naval explosives named for their superficial similarity to the limpet mollusk and used since the early 1900s to destroy enemy ships, piers, and bridges.

  While the SEALs readied for the dive, Adam slid his brand-new SEAL “pup” knife out of its sheath and attempted to cut through the heavy-duty plastic zip tie holding a dive buoy against the boat. The tie held fast, so with the blade facing him, he used his full might to pull up. The blade cut through the tie, then continued up to Adam’s face, jabbing him above his nose, right between his eyes.

  “Ah, man,” Adam said, pinching the deep gouge to stop the blood pouring from the wound. When he looked up, the SEALs were shocked to see blood dripping off the end of his nose and streaming down his cheeks.

  “What the hell happened?” one said. With his free arm Adam waved off their attempts to get a closer look. They were only a half hour into a four-hour training operation that he didn’t want aborted, especially because of him. “Hey, I’m good. I’m okay,” he said, squeezing the wound while blood trickled out.

  The SEALs gaped at him.

  “Carry on!” he said. “Let’s do this.”

  Adam remained in the boat the two hours it took to place the mines. Then the team leader, who because of Adam’s injury had no intention of forcing Adam to retrieve them, jokingly said, “Okay, Brown, go get the mines.” He gestured with a thumb at the cold, black water.

  Without hesitation, Adam flipped backward overboard, the knife wound pouring blood again as he donned his mask and submerged. When he resurfaced, lugging a mine that he tossed into the boat, his mask was a quarter full of blood. He emptied the blood and dived again.

  A SEAL started humming the theme from the movie Jaws while the team tracked Adam’s underwater movement by watching his marker buoy travel from the boat to the bridge pylons and back. On his final trip, the buoy started heading out to sea—the opposite direction from the remaining mine. Assuming that Adam was either visually disoriented from blood in his mask or mentally disoriented from loss of blood, they yanked on the line and tried to redirect him to the boat. But determined to get the job done, Adam refused, instead redirecting himself to the mine, retrieving it, and only then returning to the boat. When he reached for an oar to help paddle back to shore, a SEAL told him to stand down.

  “We’ll make it to shore, Brown,” he said. “You just keep pressure on that wound and try not to bleed to death.”

  The following morning, more than a hundred SEALs from Team FOUR stood at quarters: the once-a-week gathering where all platoons not deployed or training elsewhere stand in formation and receive official information from the master chiefs. It’s also a time for the skipper, at the time Captain Pete Van Hooser, to address the entire team, sometimes giving out awards or highlighting “a dumb new-guy mistake,” says Austin, who stood beside Adam that day.

  The master chief from the platoon Adam had supported the night before took this opportunity to address some “very serious concerns.” He proceeded to give a Cub Scout–level “refresher” on knife safety: never pull the business end of a knife toward your body, especially not toward your face. The men laughed as Adam, stitched up and bandaged, was presented with a rubber knife and a nickname: Blade.

  Although Adam had been embarrassed and berated himself the night before, he laughed at the nickname. In spite of the rookie blunder, “he left a solid impression,” says Austin. “Everybody knew Adam Brown was not going to let anybody take up his slack, even if he was bleeding.”

  For long days and longer nights, the SEALs on Team FOUR worked the new guys, integrating them, as Adam had been on the diving exercise, and hammering them with information they must remember. “I hope you’re taking notes” was a common admonishment as they jumped from task to task. “It was like drinking water through a fire hose,” explains Christian, who had cut short his rehabilitation and joined the team in late April, pins still in his ankle.

  At the beginning of May, Christian and Adam were tasked with supporting an Operational Readiness Exercise (ORE), the “final exam” for a SEAL platoon after its twelve-month workup—intense cumulative training exercises that prepare them for deployment into the real world. The ORE consists of a series of war games in which the platoon is pitted against an opposing force of “enemy” soldiers attempting to thwart its mission.

  The cadre of instructors orchestrating this particular ORE employed Adam and Christian to role-play as enemy patrolling the area where an American pilot had gone down. Their job was to spot members of the platoon being tested, whose mission was to locate and rescue the pilot undetected.

 
“I’ll drive,” Adam said to Christian as soon as they were handed the keys to a pickup truck and told where to go.

  “He peeled out, literally burned rubber,” says Christian, “then drove like a maniac—drifting around corners, hitting potholes. I thought he was being an ass, trying to scare me, see if I’d tell him to slow down. I just tightened my seat belt and held on. I was not going to give in.”

  On the third day of the ORE, Adam and Christian had the afternoon off. In their nine months of BUD/S together, they had done little more than compete, never once sitting down to have a conversation.

  “We were sitting on a pier watching this guy fishing,” says Christian. “No rivalry, nobody yelling at us. For the first time we were relaxed. So we talked. Adam opened up and showed me all the demons from his past—how messed up he’d been on drugs, gone to jail, how his wife would go looking for him in crackhouses, and how becoming a SEAL wasn’t a dream for him; it had been his last hope.

  “I was awestruck, but I was glad to know he had demons too, because I sure as hell did. Weaknesses make people real, and he let me know his, and that took serious trust. If the wrong people got wind of his past, that could have been bad for him. Something in him trusted me, and so I shared my demons with him, the bad things I’d done in my life. We talked until the sun went down, and when we walked away from that pier, I thought, This guy is good to go. I could trust him completely.”

  Late that night they were awakened by the master chief running the ORE. A large rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB) being used in the exercise had run aground on a sandbar during a beach landing. It was now Adam and Christian’s job to rescue it—an important task for a SEAL and unheard of for new guys.