Fearless (19 page)

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.

P
ICTURE 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.