by Eric Blehm
Saying good-bye was hard on all the SEALs and their loved ones, but even more poignant for the family men on the team, the ones with children. Inside DEVGRU’s restricted zone, Adam and his teammate Heath Robinson, also a father, met up with each other, the sadness apparent on both their faces. Side by side they walked.
“Well, that sucked,” said Adam.
“Always does,” replied Heath, who slapped Adam’s shoulder, then gave it a squeeze—meant to convey both strength and compassion. It was time to put their game faces on.
Recently Heath had shared with Adam a conversation he’d had with a longtime civilian buddy. “How do you do it?” the friend had asked him. “How do you shoot people, kill people, and then come back home, sometimes just hours later, and hang out with your family?”
“There’re a couple of books that discuss this,” Heath said to his friend. “On Killing [by Dave Grossman] is a good one. He writes about cops, and he discusses troops from the Civil War all the way up to now. He talks about mentally, how different people are able to do their jobs and how some people can’t. Why PTSD is so prominent in some people and why it’s not in others.
Before Adam deployed for his final rotation in Afghanistan, Kelley asked a gate guard at the base to snap this family photo.
“And he talks about the 5 percent, which is Special Operations guys, and how, clinically, we’re all borderline sociopaths. But in my mind we’re not the ones that are messed up; it’s the other 95 percent of the population. We run toward the sound of gunfire. Like the fireman who, when everybody else is running this way, is running into the flames. A cop, anyone who does that sort of work, is in that 5 percent, that personality that we need to get that job done. And be able to do that job and rationalize it, religiously or country or however you deal with it, say, ‘Okay, that was my job, that’s why I did that. But now I’m back and I’m fine.’ ”
Heath’s friend replied with a fitting analogy for the SEALs. “His wife and daughter have horses,” Heath had told Adam, “and they love to ride horses, so that’s what they’re all about. Nothing makes his wife and his daughter happier. Well, horses take a lot of work, they’re dirty animals, so every weekend he puts on his waders, goes out in the barn, and shovels the manure, and the dirty hay, and puts the new hay in, and feeds the horses, and cleans up their piss. It’s not a good job. It’s miserable, but someone has to shovel the shit so the family can enjoy what they have. That is how he framed it for me. ‘You shovel the shit so your family, so the United States, can have what we have and live the way we do.’ ”
That night when their squadron boarded a nondescript passenger jet heading to Afghanistan, Heath asked Adam, “You got your waders?” To which Adam replied, “Oh yeah. Let’s go shovel some.”
At the DEVGRU compound in eastern Afghanistan, the day after they arrived on March 1, Adam’s squadron began work on operations.
The tempo of missions in Afghanistan was never as high speed as in Iraq, with its more populated areas and flatter landscapes. And it was unlikely that anything in these SEALs’ careers would match their rotation in 2008, when they’d obliterated the network of insurgents and IED builders in Iraq with back-to-back nightly raids and sometimes back-to-back raids in a single night.
In Afghanistan the terrain, the intelligence process, and the enemy were extremely complex, requiring more deliberate planning. Since 2008, DEVGRU’s intelligence networks had been tracking a Kunar Taliban leader, code-named Objective Lake James, who “had more blood on his hands than any other Taliban leader in his district,” says an Army officer familiar with operations in the Pech River Valley.
The latest attack James had claimed was on February 20, when his fighters killed twenty-nine-year-old U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Michael Cardenaz with a rocket-propelled grenade as Cardenaz was assisting a mortar team setting up security for the Chapa Dara District Center. Recently constructed in the remote province of Chapa Dara, the building was a town hall of sorts housing the local police force, government offices, a medical and veterinary clinic, and other infrastructure services of the national government.
James was doing his best to upset the local attempts at stability, and killing Americans in the process. “He earned himself a high spot on our list of targets,” says one of Adam’s teammates, “and that didn’t mean we thought we’d find intel that led to bin Laden or anything. They weren’t all romantic missions for us—few of them were. They were ugly, dirty, hard-fought battles to protect our Army and Marine brothers who were trying to stabilize Afghanistan. We all assumed that bin Laden was living safely in Pakistan and that it would take an act of God to find him and a second act of God to be given the go-ahead to get in there and kill him.
“There are many snakes in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and cutting the heads off of each one is crucial to demolishing enemy forces and their resolve. That was what Objective Lake James was—a snake, and we had to find where his hole was.”
Exactly two weeks after he’d kissed his family good-bye, Adam sat on his bed in a small room within the compound studying for the GMAT, his books spread out on the blanket. Taped to every wall were pictures that Nathan and Savannah had drawn.
On the dresser to his right was his laptop, the screensaver a rotating montage of family photos he never tired of watching. The song he was listening to through his headphones made him think of Kelley, and he sent her a quick e-mail to let her know:
I am so proud, happy and fortunate to have you as my wife. I listen to all these songs, and I realize I have the girl I always dreamed of. I wonder how many people can really say that and mean it. Not many, I reckon. My kids are awesome too. Both of them could not have been drawn out any better in a Disney movie.
Y’all have a good day.
I love you,
Adam
Three days later, on March 15, Kelley was about to sit the kids down for a late dinner when her laptop chimed at 6:45 p.m., 3:15 a.m. Afghan time.
“It’s Daddy!” she told Nathan and Savannah, who ran to the computer.
Via a Skype live chat, Adam wrote that he had “just got off work” (his third mission) and was going to study for a couple of hours before bed, but wanted to talk to his babies first. Nathan and Savannah took turns typing him messages about school, the books they were reading, the bowling trip they’d taken, a new martial arts class they were in, what they were having for dinner. “I wish I was having taco salad for dinner,” replied Adam. “I sure miss you. Y’all being good babies for Mommy?”
“Very good,” wrote Savannah, inserting an angel icon. “I miss you sooooooooo much,” she added.
“Are you helping Mom out around the house?” Adam asked Nathan. “Doing the little things goes a long way.”
After more than twenty minutes, Adam signed off: “I miss you. You are my favorite little girl and boy in the whole wide world.”
And then to Kelley he wrote, “It’s good to stay involved. I love y’all, and will talk to you soon.”
“I love you too,” she typed back. “Bye, bye, baby.”
March 17. Just after sunrise, the crunch of footsteps on gravel broke the silence within the squadron’s compound. A man started laughing.
“Keep dreaming!” Kevin Houston chided Adam as they faced each other alongside the plywood building. “You straight up suck at basketball.”
Content with talking smack, the two friends had yet to have that one-on-one tournament they’d been threatening for more than a year. For now, they held lacrosse sticks, Kevin tossing a ball in one hand. This time of day they should have been snoring away, but Adam wanted to learn lacrosse from “the master” (according to Kevin), so they had notched a half-hour “playdate” into their schedule for Adam’s second lesson.
“Let’s go!” Adam said, holding up his stick. Kevin lobbed one over, and Adam caught the ball and hucked it the twenty yards back.
“Hey, ease back,” said Kevin, who describes a lacrosse ball as “a cross between a baseball and a hockey puck.” Given th
e right speed it’ll do serious damage, and there was Adam, holding the net near his right cheek.
“Wing it at me!”
Now he’s a pro, thought Kevin, envisioning the ball accidentally punching out Adam’s good eye. “Naw, man,” he said, “keep it mellow till you get the hang of it.”
“I got it!” said Adam. “Come on, just throw it! Don’t be a pansy.”
For the next half hour Kevin wouldn’t throw the ball as hard as Adam wanted him to, and Adam wouldn’t stop calling Kevin a pansy, among other things—right up until their master chief busted them for being awake during a sleep cycle and barked at them to “get some f—ing rest.”
Turning in, they slept through most of the day. At three o’clock, teammate John Faas poked his head into Adam’s room and found him on his bed, reading.
As his high school’s valedictorian and the quarterback of its football team, John “could have done anything he wanted with his life,” says Kelley. “But he chose to serve his country, and Adam really respected him for it.” The two SEALs were always swapping books and having long talks about history, religion, politics, and war. The rest of their squadron ribbed them endlessly for watching hours of Book TV on deployments and training trips.
“What ya got going there?” John said from the doorway, lifting his chin toward the book.
“Tender Warrior,” Adam replied and showed John the cover. “You can read it; I’m almost done. Check this out,” he said, thumbing backward through the pages. “It was written by Stu Weber, a Vietnam veteran, Special Forces. He became a chaplain.” Stopping at a passage, he handed the book to John, who read,
The Warrior function is … unmistakable in Scripture.… Within the epistles, the mature believing man is often described in militant terms—a warrior equipped to battle mighty enemies and shatter satanic strongholds.
The heart of the Warrior is a protective heart. The Warrior shields, defends, stands between, and guards.… He invests himself in “the energy of self-disciplined, aggressive action.” By Warrior I do not mean one who loves war or draws sadistic pleasure from fighting or bloodshed. There is a difference between a warrior and a brute. A warrior is a protector.… Men stand tallest when they are protecting and defending.
The brotherhood of DEVGRU SEALs is built upon a foundation of mutual respect, and just as Adam aspired to what he considered John’s “genius”—academically and as a warrior—John aspired to Adam’s ability to juggle and, in his opinion, master the apparently paradoxical roles of fierce warrior and loving husband and father. After reading a few more passages from Weber’s book, he realized that the term “tender warrior” perfectly described Adam.
John handed the book back, then Adam jumped off the bed, stood tall, and grunted while flexing his arms and chest. Laughing, John shook his head as Adam swaggered into the hall, flexing again for Brian Bill, who shielded his eyes from the vision of his fellow SEAL, naked except for his Batman briefs.
“Man,” said Brian, “put some clothes on and make us some coffee.”
Inside the small living room central to their hooch—one of numerous small portable buildings that housed the squadron—was a flat-screen television, couches, and the coveted high-end espresso machine, the one luxury item Adam brought with him on deployments because he couldn’t stand what he called “drip garbage” coffee. Adam made his usual brew of rocket fuel and poured cups for John, Brian, and Kevin, then the four men headed, coffee in hand, to the squadron meeting at 1300 Zulu time, 5:30 p.m. local time.
Before they even made it across the compound, gestures from fellow SEALs—a nod, a thumbs-up—told them a mission was on the table. “How far we walking?” Kevin asked when they entered the briefing room.
“It’s going to be a long one tonight,” replied Tom Ratzlaff, the senior sniper and reconnaissance team leader. “Five hours minimum. Shit terrain.”
“Up or down?”
“A lot of both.”
The number of SEALs on an assault force executing a direct-action raid varies from mission to mission and remains classified, as do the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) military units sometimes attached to these operations. That said, more than a dozen but fewer than fifty highly trained warriors had gathered to review the available intelligence and study the images and infiltration routes that gave them a semiclear picture of what they would face that night. In one word: brutal, and that didn’t even include the enemy target, Objective Lake James.
“It was a classic DEVGRU mission,” says one of Adam’s teammates. “High-value target in a high-danger environment. American forces had never been to the valley where Objective Lake James was holed up. The whole area was bad guys; we expected zero compliance from anybody. We needed to get in, hit everything real hard and fast, and get out before we encountered too much resistance. If the sun were to come up, we’d be running out of bullets because it would have been us against the entire valley.
“But the risk was well worth it, because this person that we were going after was going to keep on killing our brothers in the Army and whoever else was based at that FOB, using those roads. Our intel told us he was going to attack soon; it was a race against time. Because he had proven to be so effective in his tactics, there was no doubt he would be successful. More Americans would die if we didn’t get him.”
James’s résumé had been scrutinized—he and his fighters were not the type to surrender. “When you get there,” a briefing officer informed the assault force, “be ready for a fight.”
About forty-five minutes into the squadron’s meeting, Kelley sent Adam a message on Skype, hoping he was there. “Hi, sweetie,” she wrote. When she didn’t receive a response within a few minutes, she sighed and set about helping the kids get ready for school. It was Wednesday, Saint Patrick’s Day, and both Nathan and Savannah were wearing green. While Savannah chattered on in her usual manner about what the day had in store, Nathan was subdued.
“He was quiet that morning,” says Kelley, “which is how Nathan gets when he’s sad. I didn’t have to ask why; I knew it was because he missed his daddy.” What Nathan didn’t tell his mother and sister was that he had awakened that morning worrying about his father, a feeling he couldn’t shake.
After dropping the kids at school, Kelley spent some time with Michelle, taking an aerobics class, having a smoothie, then shopping for household supplies at Target. “It was Saint Patrick’s Day,” says Michelle, “and Kelley has never liked the color green, but everything in the store was green that day, and out of the blue she said, ‘I think I’m starting to like the color green. I’m going to start embracing the color green from now on.’
While his teammates wore double-eyepiece night-vision goggles, Adam was easily identifiable as the lone operator with a mono lens. He is shown here post-raid during a mission in an undisclosed location.
“Okay,” said Michelle. “You do that.”
Soon after night fell, the assault force was driven to the tarmac, where double-rotor MH-47 helicopters awaited. Their crews performed the final flight checks as the men loaded their gear and piled in for the “commute” to work.
In the lead helicopter, Tom Ratzlaff and his sniper team settled into their seats. On liftoff he silently recited his usual prayer when heading into someplace hot: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven … He followed the Lord’s Prayer with, Lord, take care of my wife and kids, protect them and watch over them. Protect my buddies and forgive them of all their sins and me of all my sins. Amen.
Then it was game on. As with the rest of the team, Tom focused completely on the operation, mentally reviewing the enemy-occupied terrain they were infiltrating. He and his fellow snipers had helped choose the landing zone and mapped out the route over which they would lead their teammates through the mountains to Objective Lake James. Once on target, the snipers’ job would be to position themselves so they had eyes on the SEALs that would be assaulting the target, to cover th
eir brothers and put a bullet through the head or chest of any enemy presenting a threat.
Tom never prayed for protection for himself; he considered that God’s decision. Instead, he devoted his body and soul to protecting the team. In his role as overwatch, Tom had never lost a man.
In the Hindu Kush mountains, the helicopters hugged the terrain, flying low and fast along a steep ridgeline. Kevin, who was in the second MH-47, felt the helicopter slowing down. The engines’ pitch changed while the helicopter banked and descended into the mouth of a small side canyon.
Out the window to Kevin’s right, only a granite ridgeline was visible; it was nearly vertical at the top and spilled downward into a steep and rocky slope. Taking in the greenish night-vision hues of the landscape, he leaned toward the window for a better look but could see only treetops—a dark swath of evergreen forest concentrated in the deepest recesses of this narrowing chasm. To the sides and above the helicopter, the jagged slopes appeared to squeeze in on the spinning rotors that labored to keep the machine airborne and steady. The pilots held their altitude, hovering as they searched for a suitable opening to land these dual-rotor beasts.
Gnarly, thought Kevin. Hands down, this was the most hellacious landing zone he’d encountered in his entire career. Nobody in his right mind would fly a helicopter into this ravine, he thought—exactly why it had been chosen as their LZ. The elite pilots of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment could fly and “park” these “buses” like sports cars just about anywhere.
Generally, these types of infiltration happen in seconds, but on this night the pilots circled back up and out of the gorge and came in a second time. Finally, the message came over radio headsets: “We’re roping in.”
As the SEALs led the assault force by sliding down ninety-foot “fast ropes” into the enemy’s backyard, Chris Campbell slammed into a boulder the size of a van. From the boulder he bounced against a slope that he estimated at sixty degrees. Sliding on his rear in the loose granite, he hustled to get out of the way before the next guy landed on top of him. Dust from the rotor wash gave the scene a misty, sinister appearance through his night-vision goggles.