by Eric Blehm
“The big thing for a SEAL is how many platoons you’ve done. Like this guy did seven platoons; he’s a badass. I told Adam, ‘I don’t care if you did a hundred platoons’—I’m kind of a snob that way, and a lot of guys are—‘if you don’t at least try for DEVGRU, then I really don’t want to talk to you. Not to be a dick, but I’m just saying, why wouldn’t you? Who they gonna call first when the Big Mish goes down?’ ”
After two months in northern Iraq, Adam’s unit was assigned the mission of protecting top Iraqi government leaders, including the Iraqi president and prime minister. His platoon would relocate to Baghdad immediately.
As a member of the support team for Team TWO in Mosul, Adam had planned nearly a dozen successful direct-action raids and missions that resulted in the capture or killing of numerous insurgents. But not once had he been allowed to participate himself. Now he was informed that he also would not be allowed to take part in the security detail protecting the Iraqi leaders, and was given the option of going home.
“We all talked about it,” says Austin. “He didn’t want to leave us, but we agreed: go home, try to get your vision back with surgery, and gear up for the next deployment. He had to take a step back to take a step forward, and that wasn’t easy for Adam, who was always in fifth gear. But he did it.”
Kelley was still in Hot Springs with Nathan and Savannah the first week in June when Adam called her from Virginia Beach. “They benched me,” he said, explaining how he’d been held back because of his eye. Then he told her he wanted to screen for Green Team, the selection course for DEVGRU.
According to documentation, fewer than 15 percent of more than two thousand SEALs on active duty at the time had successfully “screened” for the course—that is, been approved to participate in it. Those who actually pass are considered the top 1 percent of the SEAL community—the absolute best of the best. “He was fired up,” says Kelley, “and I was thinking, Wait a minute, you just told me in that last sentence that you got benched.”
“Baby,” she interjected, “you have only one good eye, and the doctor says that’s probably not going to change.”
“That’s why I want to screen for Green Team,” Adam said. “If I don’t pass the screening, then I’ll know. Then we’ll have to think about what’s next. If I’m not going to get to do my job, I don’t want to be strung along.”
While Adam had accepted that the bad choices he’d made—quitting football in college, the drugs, the crimes—had led him to where he was now, he still regretted them. That regret strengthened his resolve this time to push through until he could push no further.
“Itty Bitty, remember when you prayed about us back when I seemed hopeless, and God never once told you to leave? Well, I’ve been praying too, and all I’m getting, all I’m feeling in my heart, is that I’m not done. I’ve still got a lot of fight in me. I want to do something I can be proud of. I want to do something that’s going to make a difference, and I have not had the chance to do it yet.”
“All right then,” Kelley said. “Let’s keep praying about it. If you get in, it’s God. If not, we’ll figure it out.”
With Adam back in the United States, Kelley wanted to return to Virginia Beach as soon as possible, but it was summer and rentals were hard to come by—at least in their price range. Even with a recent promotion to the E6 pay grade, Adam’s net income as a SEAL (including some extra cash he made cutting down trees in residential neighborhoods) was about three thousand dollars a month. Still, with two kids, three maxed-out credit cards, a car payment, and life and auto insurance, they had managed to save twenty-five hundred dollars for a down payment on a house of their own.
After a couple of weeks in Virginia Beach, during which Adam stayed in the bachelor barracks for free, Kelley said to him, “I’ll do anything to be there with you. We’ll camp if we have to until we can find a place.”
That’s exactly what they ended up doing: buying the cheapest tent and air mattresses on the shelf at Wal-Mart and camping in the midsummer heat as a family at the Little Creek base campground.
“It was insane,” says Kelley. “I do not know what I was thinking. We were slipping and sliding in our own sweat, the sheets were soaking wet, and that was at night, when it was only in the nineties, with 90 percent humidity. During the day it topped a hundred. Both of the kids had heat rash, and little Savannah was getting potty trained, so you can imagine changing diapers with a flashlight in what felt like a steam bath inside that tent.”
When Adam went to work each morning, Kelley piled the kids in the car and drove, blasting the AC and searching for a place to live as well as spending hours in stores, malls, the library, anywhere there was air conditioning. They were all trying to sleep one night when Nathan spoke up. “Daddy,” he said, “are we in hell? ’Cause I think hell’s hot like this.”
“I was at my rope’s end by the end of our first week of camping,” says Kelley. “Then one of the guys on Team TWO who was about to deploy offered to let us stay in his condo, his air-conditioned condo, and we jumped on it.”
They moved into the SEAL’s place the following day, and it was “truly a bachelor pad,” says Kelley. “Nathan went exploring and showed me a poster on the wall and asked, ‘Mommy, why are those two girls naked and hugging?’ And I told him, ‘Well, they must be sisters and they love each other. They’re cuddling.’ ”
She sat him down in the living room, then walked through the condo removing X-rated posters and magazines and toning it down to a family-friendly G. Then she tackled the bathroom, which she suspected had not been cleaned that century. “Don’t get me wrong,” notes Kelley. “I was so grateful to be staying there; it just shows how the SEALs take care of each other. But for that bathroom I wore gloves—there were things growing in there science couldn’t identify. I needed a chisel for the bathtub.”
Two weeks later the Browns were able to rent a little house, complete with picket fence, in the Virginia Beach suburbs, and Adam began the screening process for Green Team, along with Austin and Christian. On the questionnaire Adam stated his reasons for entering BUD/S and the SEAL community: “To serve this country in the highest possible manner. To do things that others cannot.” To the question “Do you have any past or present injuries or physical condition which detracts from your physical capabilities?” he answered, “I was shot in the eye with a sim round. Temporary. I expect a full recovery.”
This was followed by an oral board review and written and oral psychological testing, a phase that approximately half the applicants fail. Adam, Austin, and Christian passed, with Austin and Christian placed on the roster for the next Green Team selection course, scheduled to begin in mid-2005. On his doctor’s advice, Adam chose to postpone Green Team for another year: once he was screened, his slot was reserved for a future class of his choosing.
In the entire history of Naval Special Warfare Development Group, nobody had ever attempted, much less passed, the stringent Green Team qualifications with good vision in only one eye—especially Close Quarters Battle (CQB), where peripheral vision and split-second reaction times are critical. The deferral meant further experience as a SEAL, another platoon, another deployment, and more time for Adam to either regain his sight fully or adapt to living and working with near blindness in his right eye. In the interim he planned at least one more surgery to improve his vision.
The surgery was not a success. “In fact,” says Kelley, “the eye seemed to get worse.”
What movement Adam could make out with his right eye became even blurrier. Kelley tested him by waving her hand around. “He’d say, ‘I can see what you’re doing there,’ ” explains Kelley, “but he couldn’t see how many fingers I would hold up or anything like that. He caught flashes of light and movement, but that was about it. He couldn’t read a stop sign out of that eye if he was three feet away.”
Realizing that his vision was not going to improve, Adam decided the best training for the DEVGRU selection process would be qualifying for and
attending the Naval Special Warfare Sniper School, arguably the most difficult advanced combat course in the Navy—outside of Green Team. “By far the hardest school I ever went through,” says Christian. “I was more relieved to finish that than BUD/S. Tons of pressure every day, and I had both of my eyes to rely on.”
Adam had attempted Sniper School once before, in 2002 when both eyes were functioning, but had failed the attritional “stalking” portion of the course (as did nearly half his class), which drove him even harder to complete the three-month course now. To do that he needed to master stealth, patience, and camouflage. He had to judge distances with absolute accuracy, anticipate the wind’s effect on a bullet’s trajectory, and learn a new language universal to Navy snipers. “But really,” says Christian, “the root of the course is teaching us to be silent hunters who can stalk our prey.
“Imagine a field full of sniper students,” he continues, “who have been given four hours to move over a thousand yards, set up a ‘hide site’ within a hundred fifty to two hundred fifty meters of the target without being detected—and there’s at least five guys with spotting scopes sitting on a truck trying to bust you. All they have to do is see you, identify you in the landscape. They did not cut us any breaks at all; it was a huge deal to be an NSW sniper, and they weren’t gonna hand it out to just anybody.”
Between January and April 2005, Adam not only completed the three segments of the course—Photo Image Capture, Scout, and Sniper—he also excelled in them. It was a punishing pace: thirteen- to fifteen-hour days six days a week, divided between Little Creek, Virginia, and Camp Atterbury, Indiana. Students endured daily physical training and weekly Monster Mash workouts that rivaled professional triathlons. They had to master one-thousand-meter stalks with a two-hour time limit; photographing or “killing” moving, stationary, and pop-up targets ranging from one hundred to twelve hundred yards out; and building ghillie suits that matched the environment. Since snipers work in teams of two, students must learn both shooter and spotter skills and know their weapons inside and out.
“You learn how to be invisible with your partner in any terrain,” says Brad Westin, a fellow SEAL who became friends with Adam during the course. “And then you must either take a clear photograph or put a bullet through the head of a target.”
The final exam is built into a brutal “ruck march,” where each student, shouldering a weapon plus a sixty-pound rucksack, is tested at intervals along a fourteen-mile course through urban areas, mountainous terrain, and seemingly flat-as-a-pancake fields on which he must find minuscule rises to hide behind. All the skills learned during the previous months, including steady, accurate shots, must be performed while students are exhausted.
To master this demanding curriculum, Adam completely changed his shooting stance, learning to shoot left-handed so as to best accommodate his nondominant eye. He passed Sniper School on April 8, a feat that Brad, a lifelong hunter, considers “next to godly.”
“There was Someone out there,” says Brad, “who was just like, ‘Adam, you will make it,’ and Adam was like, ‘Okay, got it.’ I can’t explain it any other way. To lose vision in your good eye within a year prior to that class and say ‘Screw it, I’m going to Sniper School—oh, and by the way, I’ll do it all left-handed,’ that’s hard-core. I don’t think it’s ever been done in the history of sniper schools in the world.”
Graduating from Sniper School was a huge confidence boost for Adam, and with Nathan starting kindergarten in the fall, he and Kelley decided to invest their small savings in a first home. Navy financing helped keep the mortgage about par with their current rent payment, and in April they purchased a three-bedroom house in the Virginia Beach suburbs.
Shawn and Larry with Adam just before Sniper School graduation.
As Adam dived into the workup for his next deployment with Team TWO, Christian and Austin sweated out the Green Team selection process. One weekend in early June, the three SEALs and their families went swimming at Becky and Christian’s condo. Staying cool by wading around the shallow end of the pool, Christian and Austin swapped stories about some of the mind-boggling scenarios they’d faced in the three months they’d been powering through the course. When they moved inside, Kelley noticed that Adam was subdued. “This is so hard for Adam,” she quietly told Christian. “He just wants to be there with you guys so bad.”
Christian and Austin dropped the subject, but it became the elephant in the room. Finally, Christian threw his arm around Adam and said, “You will crush it next year, buddy.”
At the end of the month, Adam was in the Team TWO building when he heard the terrible news: nineteen Americans—eleven SEALs and eight pilots and crewmen from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—had been killed in Afghanistan. Eight of the SEALs, from Team TEN, had been based at Little Creek.
The Team TEN SEALs had been sent out on June 28 as part of a Quick Reaction Force to aid a four-man SEAL reconnaissance team that was outnumbered, out-positioned, and pinned down by anticoalition insurgents in a fierce firefight in the mountainous Kunar Province. An enemy rocket-propelled grenade had struck their helicopter, and the resulting explosion and impact killed everyone on board.
At Little Creek ten days later, Adam stood at attention during a memorial service for the fallen SEALs; it had been the worst single-day loss of life in the history of Naval Special Warfare.
Captain Pete Van Hooser, who had pinned Adam with his Trident and was now the commander of Naval Special Warfare Group TWO, nodded toward Adam and the other uniformed SEALs in the crowd, but his focus in his moving remarks was on the photos of those who had given their lives, as well as on their family members—in particular, the wives and children of the fallen.
“I am always humbled in the presence of warriors,” Van Hooser said to the hushed crowd of thousands. “We have been in sustained combat for over three years—things have changed.
“I find myself speaking in public a lot more than I would like, but I always start by thanking four groups of people. The first are our warriors who have fallen; the second, those who have guaranteed that those who have fallen will not be left behind. Some with their bravery, others with their lives. I thank those who have selflessly pulled themselves off the line to train the next warriors to go forward—so that they may surpass the prowess of those currently engaged. And I am thankful for the families that nurture such men.”
“Take carry of Sissy and Mommy,” Adam said to Nathan on October 5, giving a discreet wink to Kelley. “You’re the man of the house while I’m away.”
“I will, Daddy,” said the five-year-old. “Don’t you worry.”
Kelley put her hand on her heart, watching as Adam picked up three-year-old Savannah and hugged her tightly. It was both sweet and terrifying to think of the burden her little boy had taken on so bravely and naively. For this deployment, Adam’s third and his second to a combat zone, he had been cleared for direct action, having proven that his virtually blind eye was not a liability.
“Six months,” Adam told Kelley when they finally hugged.
“Christmas will be the hardest,” she replied, feeling a lump in her throat.
She and Michelle had talked about and prayed for the widows of the men killed in June, and though she didn’t know any of them personally, the SEAL community was an extended family, so she felt a bond with and a deep sadness for the families. Beyond the sadness, they also represented her greatest fear.
Kelley swallowed the lump and slammed the door shut on her emotions. She’d vowed to be strong for Nathan and Savannah, who had grown accustomed to Adam’s trips. That was all this was to the children—a longer one than usual, but still just a trip.
Adam knew exactly what Kelley was feeling. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “You’ve got the toughest job. Mine’s easy.”
A kiss and he was off.
The minute the family returned home from saying good-bye to Daddy, Nathan went upstairs to his bathroom and moved his toothbrush in
to his parents’ master bathroom.
“Mommy,” he said, “y’all let me know if you need me to do anything.” Then he went about his business, which at the moment was building Legos.
The following morning Kelley opened the sugar bowl to make sweet tea and found a little scrap of paper within. It read,
You are so special.
Love, Adam
Every day she’d find another note. In the cookie jar: I miss you today. Love, Adam. In a dresser drawer: I wish for a kiss. Love, Adam. Inside the egg carton: Give yourself a hug & pretend it’s me. Love, Adam.
Cherishing each discovery, Kelley refrained from searching for all the notes at once. She kept them in her wallet and reread them whenever she needed a lift—and by the end of Adam’s first month of deployment, the once crisp papers were like those in their family Bible, worn and soft. They sustained her.
At the memorial service for the fallen SEALs, Captain Van Hooser had defined what coalition forces were up against in the landlocked country where Adam was deployed:
The enemy we face in Afghanistan is as hard and tough as the land they inhabit. They come from a long line of warriors who have prevailed in the face of many armies for centuries. It is their intimate knowledge of every inch of the most rugged terrain on earth that is matched against our skill, cunning, and technology. They are worthy adversaries and our intelligence confirms that they fear and respect us. They have learned to carefully choose their fights because SEALs will answer the bell every time.
Indeed, Adam respected the land he surveyed from Bagram Airfield, where he and his task unit were initially based. As a SEAL, he knew to “never underestimate the enemy” but he also “rejoiced,” according to his journal, when he saw children playing in a field with a soccer ball as he patrolled in and around the ancient city of Bagram.