Fearless (22 page)

O
N
A
PRIL
3, 2002, K
ELLEY DROVE
A
DAM
, now Petty Officer Second Class Brown, to the SEAL Team TWO compound at Little Creek to see him off on his first deployment. She watched as Adam held Nathan, now two years old, tightly against his chest, then tossed him in the air until the toddler was laughing.

“More, Daddy!” Nathan shouted.

“That’s it, little buddy,” Adam said, holding him in one arm while he wrapped his other around Kelley and kissed her nose and Nathan’s, back and forth a few times. “Don’t y’all grow too much while I’m away,” he told Nathan.

He stooped to put his son in the car, then stepped back and threw him in the air one last time before strapping him into the seat. Adam gave Kelley a long hug and kiss and rubbed her stomach, which was barely showing a bump; the baby was due at the end of Adam’s deployment. “You drive safely,” he said to her, “and take care of our babies.”

While Adam flew south with his task unit toward Puerto Rico, Kelley and Nathan drove west to Arkansas where, in order to save money, they would split their time between her dad’s house in Little Rock and the Browns’ place in Hot Springs. “Once the water warms up,” Adam had said to Kelley, “be sure you take Nathan swimming in Lake Hamilton.”

Nearly six months later Adam flew into Hot Springs in time to witness his daughter, Savannah Nicole Brown, enter the world on September 24, 2002.

Tough in every other aspect of his life, Adam was overprotective of Kelley and downright squeamish when it came to childbirth. “He attended to me,” says Kelley.
“Wouldn’t let me lift things, like a box of detergent or whatever, and I’d say, ‘How do you think I’ve survived all these months you’re away?’ But I loved it, and how he’d get real quiet if I started talking about an ultrasound or something going on down there after I saw the gynecologist. He’d get this glazed look, like he did
not
want to be hearing this. There were times he thanked God that he was a male. When Savannah was born he was there, and his eyes got a little teary and he called her ‘My Little Baby’ right off the bat—and that stuck. She had his heart.”

Adam brought Nathan into the hospital room to meet his baby sister later that day, and “Nathan’s little outfit did not match,” says Kelley. “I bit my tongue, but inside I laughed because when it came to stuff like that, Adam was a fish out of water. Put him in the jungle, the desert, mountains, ocean, whatever, and he’d maneuver his way to wherever he needed to be, but he’d get lost in the kids’ sock drawer.”

Everyone who came by Janice and Larry’s to congratulate the family of four also wanted to hear about what Adam had done while deployed. He remained the consummate, quiet professional. “We just kind of did our thing,” he said to Manda’s husband, Jeremy. One of the more exciting tasks he’d been assigned was assisting a sailor who had been injured in the jungle, Adam said, but he wouldn’t elaborate on the story, simply saying that he “helped with the medevac.”

Even Kelley had a hard time getting the full story from her husband because “he underplayed everything,” she explains. Months later she learned that Adam had been awarded his
third
Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for his actions. When she asked what the other two medals were for, he replied, “It was no big deal; just doing my job.”

The commendation certificate, stuffed by Adam into a file in a desk drawer, read,

More official praise thickened the U.S. Navy’s file that archived Adam’s Enlisted Service Record—evaluations that Adam had signed and Kelley never saw. These records documented Chief Harley’s assessment that Adam’s goofy, sometimes clumsy, laid-back demeanor belied his outstanding professional performance as a SEAL.

In one of Adam’s earliest performance evaluations while in Golf Platoon, Harley wrote:

A lieutenant who was the officer in charge during Adam’s first deployment—which included joint training missions with host-nation military in Puerto Rico, Suriname, and St. Croix, and counterdrug missions in Ecuador—described Adam in his next evaluation as “a hard-charging SEAL operator. This warrior gives 100 percent the first time, every time!”

Providing a glimpse into what Adam’s job entailed, that same lieutenant wrote,

Two weeks after Savannah was born, the Brown family returned to Virginia Beach, renting a house with a yard in a suburban neighborhood. While Adam began the twelve- to eighteen-month workup for his second platoon, Kelley figured out the logistics of raising two children.

In Afghanistan, the oppressive Taliban government that provided a safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his fellow al Qaeda terrorists had surrendered ten months earlier, on December 5, 2001, after just two months of war. While SEALs, Marines, and Army Rangers played a role in the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, it was fought predominantly by fewer than a hundred Special Forces Green Berets, working with the CIA and a handful of Air Force combat air controllers. They joined forces with the Northern Alliance in the north of Afghanistan and a ragtag militia in the south led by a Pashtun tribal leader named Hamid Karzai, who would become the first president of Afghanistan.

The swift victory against the Taliban regime then shifted to a counterinsurgency mission of fighting hard-line Taliban insurgents and their allies—foreign jihadists pouring in from Pakistan and Iran. They sought to overthrow the fledgling Afghan government and oust the American-led coalition forces, whom they considered invaders and infidels.

In addition to fighting these insurgents and jihadists and providing security for the newly formed Afghan government, the U.S. military’s priority mission remained the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, the architect of the September 11 attacks on American soil. He was at the top of the list, followed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s founding father, and a laundry list of Taliban and terrorist leaders on the run in Afghanistan and around the globe.

War planners realized almost immediately after the surrender of the Taliban that this was merely the beginning of combat operations in Afghanistan. Then, while
Afghanistan’s post-Taliban government and national police and army were still under construction, another war was being planned in the Middle East. U.S. intelligence, military leadership, and ultimately Commander in Chief and President George W. Bush deemed Iraq—more specifically, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein—the gravest threat to national security.

On March 17, 2003, President Bush demanded that Hussein and his sons, Uday and Qusay, surrender and leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. When that time line was not met, the “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq began. Two days later, about forty-five minutes after the first bombs struck military targets outside Baghdad, President Bush addressed the nation and outlined the objectives of what would be a military invasion of Iraq:

That week, as the bombing campaign continued in Iraq, the master chiefs of SEAL Team TWO conducted an annual closed-door meeting in which they discussed, evaluated, and graded all the enlisted SEALs under their command. They ranked Adam Brown five out of thirty-two second class petty officers.

Adam’s superior, another lieutenant, noted in his March 25 evaluation that Adam was a “proven, tactically proficient operator” and that he had been selected as “operator of the quarter” due to his performance while deployed. Again, Adam was recognized as “always the first to volunteer for the hard jobs and the last to leave. Leads, mentors, and sets the example—The Definition of a Team Player: Advance to First Class.”

Now six months into his second platoon’s workup, with war being waged on two fronts, Adam was virtually guaranteed deployment to a combat zone of a war he fervently believed in.

“Adam trusted our leadership, the checks and balances of our Constitution, and felt it was his duty to go where he was ordered to go,” says Larry. “Beyond that, he
believed in his heart that what we were doing was the right thing. He educated himself so he’d have an informed opinion. Going after bin Laden was a no-brainer; the Taliban, the atrocities they committed, they needed to be removed. Their treatment of women and children was always a big deal for Adam; that got to him. And in Iraq Adam remembered this photo of a Kurdish girl lying dead on the street, eyes open, after Saddam Hussein had gassed her whole town. All this argument about whether or not they had weapons of mass destruction—that was proof enough for Adam that they not only had them but that Saddam Hussein had used them against his own people. He was evil, he was a bully, and to stand by and watch that and not do something about it was unacceptable to Adam.”

Says Kelley, “Adam believed in a spiritual battle between good and evil. Reading the Bible was part of his training, really. Just like what was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, with good people versus bad people, there was good and bad in a spiritual sense, and he wanted to be educated. So he read and read and read—books, the classified reports he could get his hands on—and he watched the news. But more than anything, he couldn’t wait to get over there and see for himself, try and do some good wherever he was.”

One morning Adam donned a fireman’s hat and proceeded to exhibit what Chief Harley says was his “ability to flip a switch and adapt to any situation.”

Wearing the bright red hat, he got down on his hands and knees and went to work. He slinked like a leopard, hopped like a rabbit, climbed onto a desk like a monkey, and with accompanying growls, clicks, and howls, he kept a dozen two- and three-year-olds riveted for the entire hour of Kelley and Michelle’s Sunday school class.

“He was a great big kid himself,” says Kelley. “I had a rule: no climbing on the desks. But I step out for a minute and who’s on the desk when I get back to the room? My twenty-nine-year-old husband.”

Says Austin, “The fact that Adam taught Sunday school really defines who he was. He’d play and act out the animals on Noah’s ark, and he’d tell me that was just the best way he felt he could praise the Lord. He was a human puppet for the kids. They loved Adam.”

Since Virginia Beach is a military town, each Sunday the congregation at Atlantic
Shores Baptist Church prayed to God to watch over all who were serving, and almost every Sunday they also prayed for the families and souls of those killed the previous week. Michelle and Kelley never verbalized their own fears, but as each month of training brought their husbands closer to war, all it took was a glance during these all-too-frequent prayers for fallen warriors. If the wives’ eyes met, they knew they were both experiencing the same sense of dread that only a military spouse can feel when a loved one is bound for war.