Fearless

by Eric Blehm

  “It was our first mission ever,” says Christian, “and the last thing the master chief told us was, ‘You’d better not f—ing fail!’ ”

  They sped an hour north to a Coast Guard base, where they jumped aboard a waiting towboat for the two-hour ride to the marooned boat. As they approached the stranded vessel, Adam readied the tow rope; before the anchor dropped he was in the water with the rope, swimming toward the inflatable.

  That’s when Christian realized that Adam’s crazy driving wasn’t a personal affront. “It was just Adam’s speed,” he says. “Everything he did was fast and furious.”

  Christian joined Adam in the water while a couple of SEALs who had been left on board the marooned boat monitored their progress, offering little more help than “Get it done.”

  “We free-dove—masks only—and were danger-close to the intakes of revved-up jet engines,” says Christian, describing conditions around the RHIB. “There were currents, and we had to fix and refix lines while the towboat pulled. We had to look out for each other, especially when we were clearing the intakes—massive suction going on, the water all churned up—but we got the engines running and got it off that sandbar. For the first time we weren’t competing with each other. We were working together as a team.”

  When Adam began SEAL Tactical Training in June, Nathan was a little over four months old, and his parents had weathered the basic training of their new careers and were now honing their skills as warrior and mother. While Adam mastered land navigation through the woods, Kelley memorized grocery store aisles for quick in-and-out missions; as he skillfully blew up an enemy bunker, she deftly changed a “blown-out” diaper; he evaded a mock enemy, while she dodged projectile vomit.

  As STT progressed, the training and subsequent real-world scenarios became more complicated—for both of the Browns.

  In the STT field classroom: “You’ve patrolled for five hours through enemy-held terrain, and your platoon has remained undetected.” The instructor describes a scenario to Adam and his teammates during the patrolling phase of advanced land warfare training. “Boom! The guy in front of you hits a booby trap, his lower leg is blown off, he’s screaming, hemorrhaging blood, and guess what? There’s an enemy observation post right there, and they open up with heavy machine-gun fire. What’s your first priority? What are you gonna do? C’mon, your buddy is dying, you’re under attack, there are enemy reinforcements heading your way—what’s the call?”

  In the Browns’ small apartment on base: Nathan has his first cold and is awake most of the night. Kelley needs to go shopping because there is no food in the house and only four diapers. On the drive to the store, Nathan finally falls asleep and snoozes in his car seat. With Nathan still sleeping, Kelley maneuvers the shopping cart through crowds, rushing from aisle to aisle. Throwing in milk and frozen foods at the very end, she rushes to the front of the store only to find long lines at the two open registers. Boom! A little old lady bumps her cart into Kelley and apologizes, but Kelley’s focus is on Nathan’s eyelids. They open and the hungry baby starts to cry, then scream. Everybody around watches, obviously annoyed, as she picks him up. And here comes the snot. Quick rummage through the purse—no tissues. The frozen stuff in the cart is melting. There is no way she’s going to breast-feed Nathan standing in a line that she estimates will take fifteen minutes to get through.

  In the field: “C’mon, guys!” the instructor yells. “Your buddy is bleeding out and you’ve got another casualty. What’s. The. Order?”

  In the grocery store: Kelley starts to cry. She surrenders, lifts the car seat from the shopping cart, and runs to her car.

  By the end of STT three months later, Kelley had learned a lot about what it meant to be a Navy SEAL’s wife. In the first seven months of Nathan’s life, Adam had been with his son only a handful of days. His social life outside the Navy was an extension of the friendships he’d forged within, so it worked out well that Kelley clicked with Christian’s wife, Becky—soon to be a new mom herself—and Heidi Ames, the girlfriend of an officer on Team FOUR named Paul Jacobs. As is standard in the military community, the women spent time together and became each other’s support group while “the boys” trained.

  Paul, a buddy of Adam’s from Class 226 who had sailed through BUD/S training without getting rolled, attributed much of his physical endurance and mental focus to being a high school and college wrestler, the same thing Adam said about football. And of course, Adam would not be outdone when the two waxed poetic about their backgrounds. He claimed that his two-a-day summer football conditioning practices in the sweltering humidity of the South rivaled Paul’s “steam room” wrestling practices.

  This segued into how much better a state Arkansas was than California, where Paul was from. “You got beaches, we got lakes,” Adam would say. “California has to import its drinking water, but Arkansas doesn’t have to import anything. We could put a bubble over the entire state and we’d be just fine. We have every natural resource. You name it, we have it. Or grow it. Fruits, vegetables, we’ve even got catfish farms. The soil in Arkansas, the dirt, is richer in minerals—you scoop up a handful, it looks like coffee grounds …”

  His Arkansas Bubble Theory, its roots in an eighth-grade history class, would lead back to football and the best high school team in Arkansas, the Lake Hamilton Wolves, then to the best college football team in the country, the University of Arkansas Razorbacks—which always included a rousing rendition of the university’s hog call: “Woooo, pig! Sooey!”

  “You didn’t want to get him started about Arkansas,” says Paul. “Everybody knew where Adam Brown was from. He had more pride in his home state than anybody.”

  While all of Adam’s teammates knew he was from Arkansas, they also knew Paul was a wrestler—due to his standing bet during STT that he could pin anybody in thirty seconds or less.

  Says Christian, “I thought Adam was going soft when he wasn’t the first to take the challenge.” But Adam wasn’t “going soft”; he was analyzing the problem—and Paul was a big problem. In college he’d wrestled in the 184-pound weight class, and now, after BUD/S, he was in the best shape of his life. Officers, enlisted men, even some of the cadre instructors gave it a go, every one of them ending up flat on their backs and pinned in under thirty seconds.

  After a few weeks of this, a crowd gathered on a grassy field to watch Adam finally face off against Paul. At the count of three, a designated timekeeper hit his stopwatch and Adam turned and sprinted, much to the surprise of Paul and the spectators, who started cracking up as they cheered him on. He made it about thirty yards before Paul tackled him, flipped him over, and pinned him—in thirty-five seconds.

  “He was the only guy who ever made it past thirty,” says Paul. “And I respected him for it. He beat me, and I learned something about Adam that day: he wasn’t only tough; he was smart.”

  On September 5 Adam, along with Austin, Paul, and an expanding list of fellow SEALs who had become brothers in arms, went through a timed series of pass-or-fail tests based on what they’d learned in advanced SEAL Tactical Training. Stations were set up for map reading, weapons handling and maintenance, communications/radio drills, medical procedures, and other skills.

  Then each man except Christian—Becky was in the hospital having a baby—stood before the Trident Board for the final oral exam. When Adam’s turn came, his superiors presented him with the same earlier scenario of a patrol hitting a booby trap and coming under heavy machine-gun fire. He was ready.

  “First thing to do, sir, is win the fight.” Adam proceeded to give a rundown on procedure. Returning fire is the first priority, then maneuvering against the enemy while the team leader calls for close air support and casualty evacuation. If the down man is conscious, he is doing self-aid and putting a tourniquet on his leg, but most likely he is unconscious. The fight must be won before helping the down man: “self-aid, buddy aid, and then corpsman aid.” As soon as a SEAL can be spared from the fight, he will treat the down
man.

  The chiefs of SEAL Team FOUR passed Adam, evaluating him as “one of the hardest workers, a role model, and top performer.”

  “I love what I do,” Adam told Kelley once STT was completed. “I love the guys, the brotherhood, and I just love being a SEAL. Thank the Lord for putting me on this path.”

  Kelley, too, had grown in her role as mother. What had once sent her running out of a store in tears was no longer a big deal after nine months of on-the-job training. Instead of abandoning her cart of groceries, she had learned a trick of the motherhood trade: request an employee to park the cart in the walk-in refrigerator behind the milk and dairy department while she went to the car and fed Nathan.

  Representatives from all of Team FOUR’s platoons assembled on the sand at Virginia Beach one week later to watch the remaining twenty graduates of STT pair up and make their way out through the rough seas for the Trident swim. “I’ll never forget that day because the surf was horrible,” says Christian. “Big waves and swell lines out to the horizon. We had to swim a half mile out to get beyond the breakers before we began the three-and-a-half-mile swim up the coast.”

  A couple dozen SEALs swam with them, but they wore shorts and T-shirts, maybe a wet-suit vest, while the new guys wore cammies and dragged along a sledgehammer and a rucksack stuffed with clothes. Says Christian, “Our strongest swimmer carried the hammer the whole way. The rest of us switched off dragging the rucksack in groups of two—and that thing, when it was wet, was like a lead weight.”

  They were also accompanied by the commander of Naval Special Warfare Group TWO, as well as the commanding officer of Team FOUR, Captain Pete Van Hooser. Both men were widely respected. Van Hooser had served multiple tours as a Marine in Vietnam, then laterally transferred into the Navy and went through the SEAL program. In a parachuting accident he suffered a compound fracture, shattering his leg so badly that he was told he’d never walk normally, much less run again, if he kept it. Van Hooser chose to have the leg amputated so he might function at the level he wanted and continue his career.

  Wearing a prosthetic, he joined his men for their hardest workouts, the Monster Mashes: grueling combinations of back-to-back runs, swims, and paddles. On the Trident swim with Adam and his teammates, his prosthetic was fitted with a fin, so he could swim alongside.

  Janice and Larry had flown out from Hot Springs and stood with Kelley and Nathan and dozens of other supporters on the beach near the finish line. All smiles, the men exited the water and gathered in the shallows until everyone had finished. It had been a two-year journey from the day Adam checked in at boot camp until he stood at attention in the surf on the Virginia Beach shore facing Captain Van Hooser as he took the backing off the pushpin of the gold Trident.

  He pushed the Trident through the fabric above the upper left pocket of Adam’s soaking wet cammie top, and a U.S. Navy SEAL was born—on paper anyway.

  The rite of passage for a new SEAL involved one more initiation ceremony for full induction into this fraternity of warriors—an unofficial one. The night after the Trident swim, the newly pinned SEALs were invited to an off-the-record party—attendance not optional—at a Team FOUR member’s house. The new guys were called in pairs to the garage and directed to stand with their backs against the wall.

  “This was the real pinning,” says the SEAL who stood next to Adam as they handed over their Tridents to a senior enlisted SEAL and removed their shirts. “He pulled off the frogs [the pin backing], pushed the pins into our chests so they stuck, then punched them in with his fist.”

  A line of at least a dozen Team FOUR SEALs followed suit. “One by one they punched the Tridents into our chests. It was hard-core; we were yelling and screaming—not screams of pain, screams of pride. All of our chests were bloody, and when we left that party, the ceremony was complete. We finally had credibility.

  “We’d bled together, now we could fight together. We were brothers.”

  Captain Van Hooser pinning Adam with his Trident minutes after the three-and-a-half-mile swim.

  11

  The Calling

  PICTURE A ONE-YEAR-OLD FLYING through the air, arms and legs flailing like an airborne cat. That was Nathan reentering Earth’s atmosphere after Adam had tossed him into orbit.

  “Don’t throw him so high!” Kelley said.

  “Ah, he loves it,” said Adam. “Look at him, he’s laughing.”

  “He’s laughing because he’s petrified. It’s a nervous laugh.”

  “It is not. Kids don’t know nervous.”

  “Well, I’m petrified,” pleaded Kelley. “Please, just—”

  Adam sent Nathan sailing again, caught him, then walked over to Kelley and gave her a hug and squeezed her nose. “Have I ever dropped him?” he said. “No. I have not. I will not drop our baby.”

  It was January 26, 2001, and Adam and Kelley’s closest friends in Virginia Beach were at their apartment to celebrate Nathan’s first birthday. Says Austin, “I was more comfortable handling explosives. No kidding. Nothing made me more nervous than watching Adam throw Nathan in the air.”

  Paul was also there with Heidi, now his wife, and Christian and Becky had brought along their baby boy.

  It was fortunate that their training cycle allowed them to be in Virginia Beach on Nathan’s birthday. For the nearly five months since the men had earned their Tridents, they’d been training with their newly assigned platoons: Golf Platoon for Adam and Paul, and Hotel Platoon for Christian and Austin. These sister platoons trained and deployed together as a single “task unit”—one of six such units on SEAL Team FOUR.

  As Golf Platoon’s 60-gunner, Adam single-handedly carried the Vietnam-era M60 machine gun, the heaviest weapon on a patrol. In every other unit in the military, the M60 is crew serviced: one man shoulders the twenty-three-pound gun and one hundred rounds of ammo, weighing about seven pounds, and a second man takes four hundred rounds of ammo, about twenty-eight pounds. On SEAL teams one man—in this case, Adam—handles it all solo, almost sixty pounds of weapon and ammo in addition to the rest of his equipment, altogether a total of eighty and often ninety pounds. The only other man in a SEAL platoon whose load rivals the 60-gunner’s is the radioman, Christian’s job on Hotel Platoon. Though these backbreaking jobs aren’t desirable and are routinely assigned to the new guys, Adam and Christian took pride in them, arguing over whose load was heaviest.

  Adam’s daily workout included throwing Nathan into orbit.

  “They would go on and on with their man talk,” says Kelley. “And they spoke a different language now. It took a while for us girls to catch on—the acronyms and calibers and klicks. We’d just laugh at them, these big tough Navy SEALs talking the talk while drinking fruit punch in tiny paper cups, holding their babies, and wearing Blue’s Clues party hats.

  “We were all pretty naive and innocent back then. We were young military couples, just starting to have kids. We knew what our husbands did, what they were trained for, but it was peacetime. In my mind it was like what they did was in a movie. What they were training for would never really happen.”

  Thirty-six-year-old Shane Harley, Golf Platoon’s chief, had served ten years at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—DEVGRU—before taking over a platoon at Team FOUR. Even the new guys knew what this meant: he’d been a tier one operator with SEAL Team SIX. On paper, the men who serve at DEVGRU test weapons and equipment being considered for Navy-wide implementation. Indeed, they are the Navy’s weapons experts—but that is only the cover story.

  DEVGRU SEALs are also one of the United States’ premier Special Missions Units, capable of executing top-secret missions anywhere in the world. This was the rapidly deployable, highly elite counterterrorism unit the Navy had created as a result of the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran in 1980, when Adam was six years old. DEVGRU operators take orders from the highest levels within the Pentagon or directly from the Oval Office.

  Chief Harley was the only member of Golf Platoon who had seen act
ion, and even though the details of that action were classified, he was revered by the men because only a tiny percentage of SEALs are chosen for DEVGRU. First, a SEAL has to be recommended by his commanding officer. Then his mental health and past are meticulously scrutinized for top-secret clearance. Finally, he is given a chance to qualify through a process that—according to those who have passed it—“makes BUD/S look like a cakewalk.”

  As Team FOUR SEALs, the guys on Golf and Hotel Platoons already represented the alpha males of the U.S. Navy; but compared to the tier one SEALs, “they were playing college ball,” says Harley. “DEVGRU is the NFL.” His DEVGRU experience was the major reason Harley continually reminded the men in his platoon during their twelve-month workup that they were training for the real deal, despite the fact that it was peacetime. Having lost friends both in training and on missions, Harley knew the stakes were high.

  “At the end of the day, this job has huge rewards,” he told the platoon as they rested in the dirt after a particularly brutal patrol exercise, “but you also pay a huge price for failure. Pro football players like to compare what they do to the warrior mentality, being at war, going to battle. Well, if you lose the Super Bowl, yeah, you’re going to be pissed, you may shed a tear, you may go home and kick the dog, but the next morning you’re going to wake up, eat breakfast with your wife and kids, and life goes on.

  “The difference between Joe Quarterback and you is if you make a mistake and lose, you may be coming home in a body bag. You’re not waking up the next morning, your wife’s not going to have a husband, your kids aren’t going to have a father. So when we’re out here shooting blanks, you work hard and pray that if you make a mistake it only costs you something and you don’t have to have another teammate pay that price for you.”

  Early on in the workup it became clear who had their sights set on DEVGRU. Adam was one of the first to take Harley aside, asking, “Chief, how do I get over there? What’s my best route?”