Fearless (18 page)

“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 exclusive 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.

“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.