Fearless (39 page)

“We don’t know yet,” Dave said.

“But you’re sure?” Kelley asked him again.

“I’m so sorry, but yes. We’re sure.”

“You’re sure?” she said again and looked to Christian, who nodded. “I’m so sorry, Kelley,” he said.

“Why Adam? Why my Adam?” she asked him.

Says Christian, “My own guilt translated ‘Why Adam?’ into ‘Why not you?’ Kelley would never say or imply that, but I was mad it wasn’t me. It
should
have been me. I messed up my family, was unfaithful to my wife, and Adam didn’t and never would. He would have kept being the great father and husband that he was, not like me. I asked myself why would God take somebody like Adam, who is an example—a moral compass for so many of us—instead of me?”

“I just don’t know,” he replied.

In an instant of composure, Kelley said, “There’s got to be a reason.” Then she began to sob again.

“Mama?” Nathan said from the top of the stairs. “Are you okay?”

“Hey, buddy, we’re just talking with your mom,” said Dave. “Why don’t you crawl back in bed?”

Quickly Michelle climbed the steps, led Nathan to his room, and sat on the side of the bed as the ten-year-old closed his eyes. But he didn’t sleep.

“The minute I saw Daddy’s friends there,” he says, “they didn’t have to tell me what happened. I think God had been telling me all day. I already knew.”

On the living room couch, Kelley sobbed for a while longer before asking Dave to bring the children down. Barely awake in Michelle’s arms, Savannah started crying as soon as she saw her mother’s face, while Nathan walked stoically beside Dave, tears running down his cheeks.

Putting her arms tightly around Nathan and Savannah, Kelley told them softly, “Daddy’s not coming home. Daddy’s gone to be with Jesus. He’s in heaven.”

While a small jet carried another notification team from Virginia to Hot Springs to inform Janice and Larry that their son had been killed in action, the MH-47 helicopter with Adam and his teammates on board landed at 9:00 a.m. at the airfield servicing DEVGRU’s compound in eastern Afghanistan.

The squadron’s entire air and ground support staff were on the tarmac, dozens of uniformed men and women standing at attention and forming an aisle between the ramp of the helicopter and a pickup truck. Members of Adam’s assault team, including Rick, Brian, John, and Heath, carried his body to the vehicle and then crowded in around him for the drive to their compound.

Bringing a body bag through the thick layers of security surrounding their base in Afghanistan was uncharted territory. “We basically commandeered Adam’s body,” says Tom. “It couldn’t have been legal—we never checked. We were going to bring Adam in so we could say good-bye.”

But there were no questions, only salutes for Adam as the group passed through multiple security checks. Inside the squadron’s compound, Adam’s teammates laid his body on one of the benches that encircled their fire pit, near an American flag lowered to half-mast. They sat with Adam and passed around bottles of whiskey, and every once in a while one would kneel beside his body for a moment alone, saying a good-bye, saying a prayer. “We know that you are still with us,” said Adam’s teammate Rob Reeves. “You will be with us on our next op, and on our next deployment, and forever.”

When it was his turn, Kevin ripped their squadron patch off his shoulder, set it on the body bag, and pressed it against Adam’s chest. “Go easy, brother,” he said.

Larry had started that Thursday morning the way he always did: with coffee and his Bible. As active as ever with their church, he now also volunteered with the Garland County jail ministry. Almost every Sunday evening for the past decade, he had walked through steel doors and into the cell blocks, where inmates called him Preacher Larry—a man whose son had been behind these same bars and by God’s grace had turned his life around and become a U.S. Navy SEAL.

Someone knocked at the door and Larry closed his Bible, one of several he and Janice had literally worn out over twelve years of study. They loved and trusted Jesus
with all their hearts, but when Larry opened the door and saw four SEALs in dress blues, his faith was stretched to the breaking point.

Oh God
, he thought.
You got this wrong. You didn’t do right here
.

If Adam’s teammates were the best-trained warriors, they were also some of the best at providing aid and comfort to the families of the fallen. So, too, were their wives, who immediately began showing up at Kelley’s house to help in any way they could.

During that long, terrible first night, Kelley never stopped asking, “Why my Adam?!” Sometimes she screamed as if she were having a nightmare. At one point she searched for a hat, a jacket, anything of Adam’s that hadn’t been laundered. Finding a ball cap, Kelley held it closely to her face, closed her eyes, and breathed in, almost hyperventilating in the attempt to memorize Adam’s scent as Michelle rubbed her back. Then she composed herself and insisted on cleaning the house.

“It made her feel normal,” explains Michelle. “We encouraged the kids to do things like watch movies and play video games, and they all just tried to escape reality. It was such a horrible fog, and we were there to help guide them through it.” While Kelley washed dishes, Michelle stood beside her and dried them, aware of the sheet of paper on the refrigerator in Adam’s handwriting: “Pray for the little girl with cancer.” Adam had put it there as a reminder in February after seeing a frail child wearing a surgical mask at their church.

Around sunrise Nathan began to throw pillows around the living room, then toys and books and magazines. He yelled at God and he yelled at the world until Kelley held him and the anger subsided into tears. When he was calm again, he took aside Jeff Buschmann, who had arrived shortly after Michelle, and said, “I need to know something. Did they get the guy who killed my dad?”

Jeff had just gotten word from Christian, who had received the information from Intelligence. “Yes,” he was able to tell Nathan definitively. “Your daddy’s teammates got him. And then some.”

Nathan nodded his head for a few seconds before saying one word: “Good.”

Vindicated by confirmation of the death of Objective Lake James, Adam’s team loaded back into the helicopters that night and escorted his body from eastern Afghanistan to
the military airbase at Bagram, where uniformed servicemen and women, hundreds this time, waited on the tarmac. They stood at attention, flanking the team as they carried the flag-draped coffin into the cavernous hull of the transport plane that would take Adam to Germany, then the United States.

Brian, John, and Kevin remained in the plane to accompany Adam home, while the rest of the men returned to their compound. There they built a roaring fire in the fire pit, and in turn, each committed a piece of Adam’s blood-soaked kit to the flames.

“No matter how late Adam came home from a deployment,” says Michelle, “Kelley always loaded up the car and met him at the gate. She was determined to meet him this time as well.”

Grief stricken, Shawn, Manda, and their families flew to Virginia Beach with Janice and Larry on Friday morning. That evening Janice and Larry joined Kelley, who was escorted by Adam’s commander, on a private military jet to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. For two days Kelley had not slept and had hardly eaten. “She could barely stand,” says the commander, “but she found the strength somehow to welcome him home like she always had. These SEAL wives are a dignified bunch, and Kelley Brown showed me that night that she was a warrior in her own right.”

Adam returned to Hot Springs on March 23, met by the pallbearers he’d named in his CACO form: friends from his youth, Jeff Buschmann, Heath Vance, and Sean Merriott; his brother and brother-in-law, Shawn Brown and Jeremy Atkinson; and his SEAL brethren, Dave Cain, Austin Michaels, and Christian Taylor.

Although Christian did not realize it at the time, he had taken the front-right position on the casket, the same position he’d had on their boat team at BUD/S a decade before, opposite Adam’s front left. Led by Chaplain Tim Springer, whom Adam had met during his planning for Nate Hardy’s funeral in 2008, the men carried Adam from the plane to the waiting hearse, between rows of American flag–bearing Patriot Guard Riders standing at attention behind Kelley, Nathan, Savannah, Larry, Janice, and Manda.

Before the casket was put into the hearse, Chaplain Springer addressed the crowd of hundreds who had known and loved and respected Adam. As Adam had instructed in the event of his death, the chaplain preached the story of the Resurrection, the “one thing,” he said, “that gave Adam comfort and hope.”

At the Hot Springs airport, Adam was carried home by his friends and teammates.

After the chaplain’s brief message, the hearse drove through the streets of Hot Springs, whose residents had turned out by the thousands. American flags waved, citizens saluted, and autos respectfully paused at intersections. The billboard at Lake Hamilton High School read in bold letters A
DAM
B
ROWN
A
MERICAN
H
ERO
.

Later that afternoon and on into evening, Brian Bill, John Faas, Kevin Houston, Dave, Austin, and Christian escorted the members of the Brown family, guarded Adam’s casket, and greeted the public during a viewing that spanned hours. Adam had requested that if killed in combat, he would be buried in his dress blues. His SEAL Trident was prominent on his chest, accompanied by ribbons, medals, and awards his family had no idea he’d received. Missing was the Silver Star still under consideration for his actions the night of his death.

While Nathan and Savannah did not attend the viewing, Kelley carried for them special items to give to their daddy, whom she looked upon sadly but with the absolute clarity that his spirit was gone from his body. She, too, tucked something special into the casket, as well as the one thing Adam had requested—his favorite photograph of his family of four. Shawn included the Arkansas flag he had given Adam the previous year, the one Adam had worn between his body armor and uniform on all his ops.

Once the viewing was over, John shut the door to the room, and the six SEALs stood at attention while Austin took a shiny new Silver Star out of his pocket, pinned it on Adam’s uniform, and closed the casket. “It was way out of protocol,” says Christian, “but we felt in our hearts that he deserved it.”

On March 24, 2010, more than a thousand people crowded into the dimly lit Hot Springs Baptist Church for a celebration of Adam Brown’s life. As the last were seated and the family was led to the front row, a song by Tim McGraw broke the silence of the hushed crowd. “If You’re Reading This” relays the words from heaven of a soldier who has been killed in combat and contains the refrain,

Two poster-size photographs—Adam kneeling in front of a group of Afghan children, and Adam with Nathan and Savannah—were displayed on either side of his flag-draped casket. Leaning against the podium behind the casket was the wooden paddle SEAL Team TWO had presented Adam four years earlier, “The Ballad of Adam Brown” inscribed on its blade.

Chaplain Springer welcomed those attending, and the service began with a prayer and a reading from a psalm written by King David, a great warrior himself:

Then, for nearly two hours, Adam’s friends, teammates, and spiritual mentors took their places at the podium to share verses from the ballad that was Adam Brown’s life.

Pastor Mike Smith spoke of Adam’s dark time and how he had accepted the Lord into his heart while on his knees in the Garland County jail—a shocking revelation to those in the audience who had never heard about those years of struggle. On his CACO form Adam had encouraged people to talk about his drug addiction and what he had put his family through, “probably the most selfless and fearless thing he ever did,” says Christian.