by Eric Blehm
“Keep doing what you’re doing,” Harley said. “If you continue to be a top performer, the top one percent, you will get the opportunity to go over there. Be a sponge, keep soaking up that knowledge like you’re doing right now. I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe in opportunity, preparedness, and hard work. You prepare yourself with hard work, and when that opportunity comes, take advantage of it.”
When training took place locally, Adam was home with Kelley and Nathan in Virginia Beach—about a third of the yearlong workup. The other eight months were spent at military bases across the United States and in the jungles of South America and the Caribbean.
“He’d come home after being away for a couple of weeks,” says Kelley, “and he’d be bruised up from some fall, his hands callused and cut up, his feet a mess, and within a few hours, a day tops, of being home, he would tell me, ‘Itty Bitty, your job is so much harder than mine.’ ”
Although Adam avoided dirty diapers at all costs, Kelley knew he didn’t take what she did for granted. Every minute he was home he devoted to his family, making up for lost time and taking care of things around the house. “He’d turn that ‘work switch’ off,” shares Kelley, “and turn that ‘daddy and husband switch’ on.”
At the end of the week they would go to Atlantic Shores Baptist Church with Austin and his wife, Michelle, who had become Kelley’s good friend. Kelley and Michelle volunteered their time in the church’s nursery, a program that allowed parents to attend services and Bible study classes while their children were looked after. When Austin and Adam were home they also helped in the nursery, playing with the babies.
“Austin and I were the newlyweds,” says Michelle, “but Adam and Kelley were still on their honeymoon. In church I’d look over and they’d be holding hands. He’d have the Bible with one hand and she’d turn the pages. We’d go over to watch a movie and they’d be on the couch planted side by side, cuddling.”
And at the end of each day they spent together, Kelley and Adam would read aloud from the Bible, a ritual they wanted to be a part of Nathan’s life. They prayed for their families back in Arkansas and thanked God for the “simple little life” they were living together, one they hoped would someday return them to Arkansas. No matter how dark Adam’s experiences in his hometown had been, they never blotted out the good memories he cherished.
While taking long strolls with Nathan, he and Kelley talked about the home they’d have in Hot Springs, one with wood floors, a nice big kitchen, and a yard where Nathan and a sibling or three could “grow up right,” running and playing outside. If it was God’s plan for them to return, that’s where they would go after Adam served at least ten years in the Navy. In the meantime, they would keep saving what they could from his paychecks and buy a house in Virginia Beach.
Regardless of what they were doing separately or together, “Adam still wrote me love notes and bought me flowers,” says Kelley. “He never once missed my birthday or an anniversary. Even if he was gone, roses would show up, or a card, or something.”
After Nathan’s birthday, the boys geared up for winter warfare training, and the Browns were able to go out on a date, splurging with a restaurant dinner. It had been more than three years since they’d met, and “I still felt that deep, almost nervous love I felt in the beginning,” says Kelley. “The military life pulls a lot of couples apart, but for me, it kept it new. Every time he’d leave, I couldn’t get enough of him—I could never get enough of my Adam.”
Adam Brown, a.k.a. Blade, was a funny guy. That’s what Chief Harley kept hearing from his platoon—not only the stories Adam told and what he said, but the funny things that happened to him. “When you’re out in a crummy situation,” says Harley, “and in our line of work that’s most of the time—it’s freezing cold or hot as sin, you’re working your butt off rucking all over the mountains, whatever—the guy you’re with can either bring you down or boost you up. However he accomplishes it, if he can make you laugh in those dismal situations and still get the job done, he’ll go far.”
Harley experienced Blade’s celebrity firsthand when he paired up with Adam for winter warfare training in Virginia as well as some one-on-one mentoring. They were dropped off in a field in the middle of nowhere one early February morning with loads approaching ninety pounds, a map, a compass, and a directive: reach a specified location the following evening without discovery by the enemy force on patrol. Their route might include old logging roads, thickly vegetated wilderness, or steep, wooded mountains. Structures along the way—barns, sheds, hunters’ cabins—were considered risky but usable shelter.
Austin Michaels and Adam living the dream as fully armed and dangerous U.S. Navy SEALs.
Harley and Adam chose a route that took them over nearly fifteen miles of brutal wilderness, during which rain turned to freezing rain and then, as night approached, to snow. A summer cabin that was as cold inside as out acted as a “layup” point where they could find shelter and sleep for a few hours.
“Chief,” said Adam, his teeth chattering, “would it be tactically okay, since it’s after dark, to build a small fire in here?”
“Hell, yeah,” Harley said. “We’ve got wood, we’ve got a fireplace, we’re hypothermic. Definitely light a fire.”
Bringing in a pile of wet wood, Adam built a small teepee in the fireplace, then asked what they should light it with.
“I didn’t know Adam could be, well, a little clumsy,” says Harley. “And with frozen fingers and hands that weren’t working so well from the cold, maybe I should have thought it through more, but I didn’t. I told him, ‘Just take some of that white gas we have for our stoves and throw it on there and then throw a match. It should light right up.’ ”
Wearing his glove liners, Adam followed Harley’s instructions, and “Whooof!” says Harley. “It flamed right up, and Adam stepped back and was looking at the fire, his hands at his sides … burning.”
“Brown!” yelled Harley. “Your gloves are on fire!”
“Aw, damn,” said Adam and clapped his hands together, but the gloves kept burning. He pulled them off and stomped the flames out.
“Adam!” said Harley. “Your hands are still on fire!”
Eventually, Adam was able to smother the flames under his jacket. “Chief, I’m good,” he said.
“Let me see your hands,” Harley said, expecting to see second- or third-degree burns.
“Naw, naw, Chief, I’m good.”
“No, Adam, let me see your hands.”
Adam relented, holding out his hands, which Harley was amazed to find were only slightly red. The flames had been residual gas burning off and never reached Adam’s skin.
During the weeklong exercise, Harley accumulated story after story. Says Harley, “Adam kept me entertained till the end of that miserable training,” including the final night, when they had to follow a road in order to make their linkup point on time.
“So here’s the deal,” Harley told Adam. “We’ll walk down this road. If you see headlights coming, just step off the side about ten or fifteen feet, lie down, and they’ll never see you.”
Fifteen minutes later, a car approached and they shuffled off the road. As Harley flattened out on his stomach, he heard Thud! Thud! Bang! Crunch! coming from Adam’s direction. The car passed by, and Harley hurried over to where Adam had been, finding a drop-off into a massive drainage ditch lined with big, jagged rocks.
“He was lying on top of these rocks in a slump at the bottom,” describes Harley, who for a second thought he was looking at a dead body. “I called down, ‘Brown, you okay?’ ”
The body stirred and peered up at Harley. “Chief,” Adam said, “I fall a lot, but I don’t get hurt.”
Adam’s task unit—Golf and Hotel Platoons—headed to Mississippi at the beginning of September for their ORE. The thickly vegetated, hot, humid, jungle-like environment of Stennis was the setting for react-to-contact drills performed in a realistic exercise, complete with explosions going
off, blanks being fired, and a motivated opposing force attempting to “kill” them.
Between drills, the men of Golf Platoon were resting in some shade when Adam and teammate Mark Kramer noticed nine or ten guys from Hotel Platoon gathered in a circle.
“What’s going on?” Mark yelled over.
“We got a pool going,” one of the SEALs shouted back. “Twenty bucks a man for whoever is crazy enough to set their balls on this fire ant nest for thirty seconds.”
“A second later Adam had his pants down to his ankles,” says Austin. “ ‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’ ”
“Whoa, wait, hold on a second,” said another SEAL from Hotel. “There’re some rules. Your balls have to be on the anthill for thirty seconds; they cannot lift up for one second, they have to be on it the entire time. Otherwise you don’t get the money.”
By now both platoons had formed a large circle around the anthill, then “all the head shed, all the leaders, came over,” says Mark. “You’d think they’d say, ‘This is stupid, don’t do it.’ Nope. They were all over it. ‘Okay, we’ll put in twenty bucks too,’ they said. Same with the corpsmen, the medics—no concerns about anaphylactic shock or anything. In Naval Special Warfare, I’ve found the corpsmen are the most sadistic of our bunch.”
With six hundred dollars in the pot from some thirty takers, Adam shuffled over and got into position, his bare behind hovering above the anthill while a stopwatch was set and Christian stirred up the nest with a stick. As Adam squatted down slowly, the angry, swarming ants rose up to meet his anatomy, climbing on top of each other into a pyramid of defense. The second Adam touched the nest, three SEALs, including Mark, jumped on him and held him down.
“Adam screamed like a little girl,” recalls Christian.
“I will never forget his expression,” says Mark. “His face conveyed such acute agony, while everyone else was cheering.”
“Time!” shouted the SEAL holding the stopwatch, and Adam exploded off the nest, swatting himself furiously. “Get them off!” he shrieked. “Get them all off!”
Looking Adam over, the medics counted almost four hundred bites around his groin, “but it was hard to tell, because there were bites on top of bites,” explains Mark. “Over the course of the day, there was massive swelling. In terms of fruit, think cantaloupes. Small watermelons.”
“All those stories—the burning gloves, the blade incident, the anthill—are all funny, and they all help us understand the man Adam was,” says Chief Harley, who contributed his own twenty dollars to the pot, “but without a doubt, they should never, ever diminish his abilities, his personality as a warrior, as a SEAL. He could flip that switch from having this stuff happen, these funny moments, and the next minute we could be downrange and be in harm’s way and he would be the ultimate professional, operator, warrior that you’d want. Adam had that rare ability to go from looking in the mirror and laughing at himself to being the cool-headed professional, the one person I’d choose to have beside me if I was surrounded by enemy and running out of ammunition.”
Adam was granted the rest of the day in the aid station by the corpsmen, who propped his amply spread legs with pillows, iced his groin, put him on an IV, and shot him up with an antihistamine to counteract the venom from the fire ants. The cash poured in. A couple of men who hadn’t even been present gave Adam a twenty just because they’d heard the story.
By September 9 Adam felt good enough to waddle his way through the next evolution of training. On the night of September 10, Golf Platoon was tasked with a combat search-and-rescue operation that took them into the morning hours of September 11. The SEALs returned to their camp around four in the morning and were snoring within moments of hitting their bunks.
“A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!” shouted the officer in charge as he ran into their tent a few hours later. In a flurry Golf Platoon pulled on pants and boots and ran to the communications tent, where men were stacked like human bleachers—seated, kneeling, and standing around a small television set, watching in solemn disbelief.
As horror upon horror was broadcast, there was “shock, worry, tears, and anger in that tent,” says Harley, “but mainly, there was resolve. There wasn’t a guy in there—Adam included—who didn’t want a pound-of-flesh vengeance for what they were witnessing. They knew we were going to war, and more than anything, these guys wanted to be a part of it.”
“During peacetime, pre-9/11, it wasn’t a popular decision to join the military to protect your country,” says Mark Kramer, “so my decision was sort of validated that day. Adam and I were going around trying to find coverage to call home, and he was right with me, saying, ‘Get us out there—let’s get some payback.’ Adam had this intense love for his hometown and state, which is really what patriotism is. We had both been competitive in sports, talked about the frustration of watching a game from the sideline, so we were hoping and praying that the powers that be would let us go out and do what we were trained to do.”
Kelley, just back from an early morning trip to Wal-Mart for diapers, was holding Nathan tight and watching the news when Adam finally got through.
“It’s horrible,” she said.
“I know,” said Adam. “Pray for all these poor people who are suffering and scared, and you and Nathan stay home. Stay away from the base. Don’t do anything, and I’ll call you when I can.”
“What does this mean for you?” Kelley asked.
“I’m not certain,” said Adam, “but I know now why God led me to do what I’m doing.”
He called her again that evening, and then once a day while he completed the final week of the ORE. During these talks Kelley sensed a shift in Adam’s being, “like, clunk, he found the right gear,” she says. “He had always been a proud American, but his patriotism definitely started defining him and who he was going to be. Those attacks really brought out the old Adam, before all the junk. He started to emerge again.”
On the day Golf and Hotel Platoons passed their final ORE drills and were officially ready to deploy, Chief Harley stood before his men. “They all wanted to go join the fight that they knew was being planned for Afghanistan,” says Harley, “but their stated area of focus was South and Central America. That was where they were going for a six-month deployment.
“So I told them, ‘We don’t know where the front lines are going to be in this war against terrorism, and as part of the big-picture military, it’s our job to cover our zone. Before last week nobody was thinking about Afghanistan, and you know what? That’s too bad. We aren’t going to make that mistake and abandon the rest of the field; we’re going to do our job, and it’s an important job, and I know you will do your country and your families proud. Don’t spend your time home bitching and moaning. Enjoy them and this life and the freedoms we have. That’s what you’ll be fighting to protect soon enough. Mark my words, gentlemen.’ ”
One of the first things Adam did when he returned to Virginia Beach was go to a jewelry store he and Kelley had walked by months before. She had stopped to admire a platinum-and-diamond necklace, completely outside their budget, which Adam now paid for with a stack of twenties.
“I love it, Adam,” Kelley said when he presented it to her as an early twenty-sixth-birthday gift. “I absolutely love it, but we can’t afford this. We need to return it.”
Chief Harley congratulating Adam for his advancement to an E5-ranked SEAL.
Adam then revealed the ant bites, starting at his torso and on down to the heart of the matter. “There’s a little money left over,” he said. “We can put it in savings. I just want you to have the very best.” Adam’s words and what came to be known as the Ant Necklace brought Kelley to tears.
“You are crazy,” she told him as she hugged him. “I love you.”
Not one to boast or brag, Kelley made an exception with the Ant Necklace and wore it proudly to dinner with their friends later that week. While Michelle, Heidi, and Becky admired it, their husbands recounted th
e event, starting with the dare, continuing with Christian stirring up the nest, and ending with Adam “screaming like a little girl.”
Laughter soon turned to soft talking among the women, who shot glances at Christian, Paul, and Austin.
“What’s wrong?” Austin finally asked.
“I was just wondering why it was Adam and not you that took the dare,” said Michelle, gesturing toward Kelley’s necklace.
“You would have wanted me to?” said Austin.
“Oh yeah,” she said, Heidi and Becky nodding their agreement. “Definitely.”
Adam had expected to be somewhere in South or Central America for Christmas 2001, but an initiative known as Force XXI—a massive reorganization of the United States military—had prompted the Navy’s top brass to rethink the SEAL teams’ areas of focus, organizational structure, and deployment schedules. Currently, an entire team consisting of six task units each focused on a geographic region. With the new plan, only one task unit on Team FOUR would focus on South and Central America. Another task unit would cover Eastern Europe, another the Middle East and Central Asia, another Africa, and around the globe. In other words, each SEAL team could now cover the entire world.
Adam’s task unit was transferred to SEAL Team TWO, also based at Little Creek—a highly unusual move since a SEAL would generally remain on the same numbered team for the duration of his career. Led by Chief Harley, Golf and Hotel Platoons became Team TWO’s South and Central American task unit, a reorganization that postponed their deployment and added six more months of training.
This meant that Janice and Larry Brown would have all their children and grandchildren (Nathan; Josie, Shawn and Tina’s little girl, nine months younger than Nathan; and Maddy, Manda and Jeremy’s four-month-old baby girl) home for Christmas. Following family tradition, they went to church on Christmas Eve and, between visiting and eating, watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and The Outlaw Josey Wales.