Fearless (42 page)

Janice and Larry experienced the same closure, embracing Kelley when she dropped Savannah and Nathan off at their home a few days later on her way to the airport. They, too, had remembered John’s words and had rejoiced in the death of a man they considered evil.

Kelley flew to Virginia Beach the same day the media announced it had indeed been SEAL Team SIX that took out bin Laden, and attended a get-together with her family of SEALs and their wives. They lifted their glasses to Adam and to another fallen teammate, whose widow stood beside Kelley. They toasted all the men from their command who had been killed in nearly ten years of war, then they toasted those who had lost their lives on September 11, 2001.

As the night wore on, one of Adam’s friends took Kelley aside and told her that bin Laden’s death was further proof that Adam had not died in vain. “It was a team effort, and Adam was a team player. He loved his country, God, and he loved you, Nathan, and Savannah more than anything in the world. When those guys were flying in, I bet they could feel Adam there with them, Kelley. I bet they could feel
all
the guys we’ve lost.”

Although the DEVGRU SEALs I met with would occasionally bring up the bin Laden capture/kill mission during the many hours of interviews I conducted with them over the next few weeks, the topic was always in conjunction with Adam—specifically how he would have loved to have been there. “Adam would have been badgering his team leaders for the primary roles,” said one SEAL with a laugh. “I can just hear that Arkansas accent: ‘Don’t worry, y’all—ah got it!’ ”

The laughter would often bring with it tears; Adam’s death was a deep wound, far from healed.

Kevin Houston had just finished recounting Adam’s death when he broke down and cried. Apologizing, he walked outside on the balcony of the hotel room in Virginia
Beach and stared out at the Atlantic Ocean, the same stretch of water where he and his SEAL brothers had trained over the years.

Then he went on to tell me that he had spent a year pondering the question “How does this happen to a man like Adam?” He had ultimately concluded that the trials and tribulations of Adam’s life were “grooming for a future job. I think that the Lord himself had one of his right-hand men—like an angel or however it works in heaven—set to retire and Adam got called up to fill his place.”

Two weeks later Kevin went to church with his family and Austin and his family, and sat in the same pew they’d always shared with the Browns. At the end of the service, Kevin accepted Jesus into his heart and asked him to be his Savior.

“Adam really got him thinking,” says Kevin’s wife, Meiling, who called Kelley right afterward to tell her, “He finally did it, and I just want you to know, Adam’s life was the seed that inspired him.”

On August 6, 2011, six weeks after that interview with Kevin, I was in the Sierra Mountains enjoying a camping trip with my wife, our children, and some friends when Adam’s teammates, now deployed in Afghanistan, were called upon to assist a combat element under attack and in need of immediate reinforcement.

Seven of the ten men I had met with from SEAL Team SIX—Brian Bill, Chris Campbell, John Faas, Kevin Houston, Matt Mason, Tom Ratzlaff, and Heath Robinson—were locked and loaded on a CH-47 helicopter that was approaching a landing zone in Wardak Province when an insurgent-fired rocket-propelled grenade struck the aft rotor blade, causing the CH-47 to crash into a dry creek bed and explode. Everyone on board was killed: thirty U.S. forces and seven Afghan soldiers.

As my family and I left the mountains, our car filled with the laughter of grimy, happy kids, my cell phone coverage came back, delivering a voice-mail box full of terrible news. Never could I have imagined that nearly every SEAL I’d visited with and spoken to about Adam Brown would perish in the single worst loss-of-life incident in Naval Special Warfare history.

When Kelley sat Nathan and Savannah down, she couldn’t contain her tears.

“Who got killed?” Nathan immediately asked. “That’s what happened, right?”

“I’m so sorry, babies,” said Kelley. “Some of Daddy’s friends.”

Their faces dropped, says Kelley, as “they rattled off the nicknames—Big Bird? Fozzy? Uncle Juicy?—and I nodded after each one, seventeen men. They knew all of them. Most were like uncles.”

“Why?” said Nathan in tears. “Why is God doing this?”

Says Kelley, “I tried to be strong; I thought,
What would Adam want me to say?
So I was honest.”

“I don’t know,” she told the children, “but let’s pray for them and their families.”

Over the next three weeks Kelley traveled from state to state, attending thirteen funerals to honor the men from Adam’s team, putting aside her own grief and painful memories in order to comfort the widows and families, as she herself had been comforted the year before.

Those few of Adam’s close military friends either not on the squadron that was hit or not deployed at the time, including Austin, Christian, Dave, and Jeff, joined her.

The people who knew and loved these men, and the people who knew and loved Adam Brown, continue to ask why. Though the answers to this question vary, they share a common result: solace.

When Austin spoke at Kevin’s funeral, he explained how he envisioned Adam taking Kevin’s hand—and the hands of the others who had perished—and welcoming them to heaven as God’s warriors.

Heath Vance leans heavily on the story of a German colleague whose father’s family had lost almost everything toward the end of World War II. An American GI brought food to the then ten-year-old boy to share with the rest of his family, “an act of kindness by a lone American soldier,” says Heath, “that impressed the boy so much he eventually named his first son after the GI.

“War heroes get celebrated,” he says, “but it makes me incredibly proud to think about Adam and what those gifts of shoes may have done to win the war. How many Afghan kids will remember his name, and how might that heal our world just a little bit? Adam didn’t have an ulterior motive; he wasn’t pushing hard to win the hearts and minds. He did it because he saw children with cold feet and he wanted them to be warm.”

Faces of some of the fallen Naval Special Warfare warriors who appear in this book.

One SEAL returns often to a letter he keeps tucked in his Bible, written by Adam’s commander in Afghanistan two days after he was killed and sent out to every DEVGRU operator. A copy of the same letter is in Larry’s desk drawer, in Kelley’s box of special papers, and in a file meant for Nathan and Savannah when they’re older.

“Adam gave his life for his teammates during a mission which can only be defined as classic SEAL Team SIX work in Afghanistan,” the letter begins. It ends with, “Adam was a friend, teammate, and brother in arms. Adam was a husband and a son and a father. Adam will always be a hero. His actions on his final mission were indicative of the way he lived his life. Fearless.”

Adam’s final resting place in Hot Springs, Arkansas.

One of Adam Brown’s final wishes, written by hand on his CACO form, was that his spiritual testimony—his
complete
story—be told, including “my life before I met Jesus Christ and Kelley.” You can appreciate now just how fearless Adam had been when he requested others to share that dark period from his past. Even in death, he selflessly and publicly risked tainting his own legacy so that others might be inspired to seek faith and overcome their own struggles.

This was a special request that Kelley, Janice, and Larry Brown were determined to uphold.

A few months before his final deployment, Adam and some of his fellow SEALs had met Rick Stewart, executive producer of the NRA Life of Duty online television network, whose mission is to honor those who serve our country. At the time, Rick was producing a documentary about a Special Forces A-team of Green Berets, ODA 574, based on my book
The Only Thing Worth Dying For
, which chronicles 574’s mission into southern Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11.

In March 2010, Tom Ratzlaff contacted Rick about Adam’s death. This resulted in
The Adam Brown Story
(
www.​nralifeofduty.​tv/​adambrown
,
www.fearlessnavyseal.com
), a documentary that was set to debut in April 2011 at the NRA Convention and annual meeting in Pittsburgh, the same venue where I was going to speak about ODA 574.

Rick picked me up at the airport, got me checked in to my hotel room, then opened his laptop and allowed me to preview
The Adam Brown Story
. From the opening scene with eight-year-old Savannah bravely describing her daddy, I was just as riveted, emotionally invested, and inspired as Rick had been when he was moved to produce the documentary.

“So, would you be interested in writing a book about Adam Brown?” Rick asked.

“I’d be honored,” I replied without a second thought. “I’d call it
Fearless
.”

“That’s great,” he said, “because Kelley, Larry, and Janice Brown are flying into Pittsburgh tonight and want to meet you.”

Unbeknownst to me, Rick had told the Browns about my previous books, casting his vote for me to write Adam’s story. At dinner that night, I had the pleasure of meeting the Browns, and with their very first hugs and handshakes they made me feel like family. It had been barely a year since Adam had died, and as I told each of them how sorry I was for their loss, the sadness in their eyes conveyed how fresh and deep the pain still was.

While we were being seated, the hostess took my coat and handed me a coat-check card with the number 24 on it. The significance escaped me, but for the Browns—who noticed the number as I tucked the card into my shirt pocket—it was a sign from God or Adam or both. They had been praying for guidance about telling Adam’s story, and at that moment they were all but certain I would be the author.

After dinner we drove to the Browns’ hotel, where Kelley checked in, then walked over to us and held up her key envelope: room 24 on the 24th floor of the hotel had randomly been assigned to her. That’s when she and Janice explained that 24 had been Adam’s favorite number, and further, it was his and Kelley’s secret code; if he came home late, he would call out “Twenty-four!” to let her know who it was.

“First your coat check, now this,” Kelley said to me. “I know this is Adam talking to me, and I would love it if you would tell his story.” I looked at the Browns and thought,
Are you sure? We’ve just met
.

“You should read my other books,” I said, and Larry responded, “We’ll read them, but it feels right. You’re the one.”

The next day the Browns and I walked the convention center floor with Rick, who introduced us to Ted Nugent, an avid supporter of the military who had just seen the debut of
The Adam Brown Story
. Kelley informed him that I would be authoring the book about Adam and he handed me a business card, asking me to send him a copy when it was published.

Glancing at the card, I immediately got chills at the address.
Okay, what are the chances?
I thought. Within a day, the coat check, the hotel floor, the room number, and now the meeting of a rock’n’roll icon who lives at 2424 Something Street?

I mulled over this string of 24s and Larry’s statement to me—“There is no such
thing as coincidence”—all the way through my arrival in San Diego the following night. Disembarking from the plane, I made my way to the baggage terminal, noticing the groups of people gathered around television screens that were tuned to CNN. I paused at one. Osama bin Laden was dead.

At home, I gave my sleeping kids a kiss, then headed to my computer, where I discovered an e-mail from Kelley with the subject line “Osama bin Laden.”

“Eric, I’m almost certain it was Adam’s team that got him!” she wrote. “I can just feel it in my heart.”

A few days later, the media announced that in fact it was.

Despite the impact and magnitude of the bin Laden mission, Adam’s story stands on its own. Throughout his life he inspired scores of people, and his story has continued to change the lives of many—including mine. He’s reminded me to appreciate every moment with my family, to be goofy rather than grumpy, to get back up no matter how hard I might get slapped down, to sometimes buy my children a cupcake when I pick up coffee in the morning but to call it a muffin “because,” as Adam would tell Savannah, “as long as you call them muffins, they’re okay to eat for breakfast.” And though I hadn’t opened a Bible in more than twenty-five years, his faith encouraged me to question my own questioning about religion.