Fearless (14 page)

“You are
stubborn
. How can I argue against that?”

She laughed, then warned him that she wouldn’t be stubborn forever. It was time for him to make a plan, a real plan that he would stick to.

Adam said that Jeff was encouraging him to join the Navy and aim for EOD, “but ever since I saw that movie
Navy SEALs
in high school, I’ve wanted to be a SEAL. Do you think I can do it?”

“Of course you can,” Kelley said without hesitation, even though she had only the most basic idea of what a Navy SEAL did.

There was a long silence before Adam spoke again. “This is what I need to do,” he said. “I can feel it in my heart. I need to get out of Hot Springs. But the only way I’m going to do it is if you marry me. I want you with me. Will you marry me, Kelley?”

So many times she had prayed about whether she should leave Adam or stay, and “God never told me to leave—not once.” Still, it was a leap of faith when she said, “Okay, Adam. I’ll marry you. But there are going to be some rules.”

The following day, July 19, 1998, Adam returned home to Hot Springs and married Kelley in front of a justice of the peace. They didn’t tell a soul, nor did they celebrate with a special dinner or even a date. While she loved Adam dearly, this marriage was almost a business arrangement. “He knew I was committed,” Kelley says. “Now he had to prove
he
was committed. I had to play it tough and couldn’t let my guard down yet.”

The day after, Kelley went to work and Adam called Ryan Whited, who was now married and living in Hot Springs. Adam shared his plan to join the Navy. “If this is what you feel like you need to do, I’m behind you a hundred percent,” Ryan replied. “But you need to make real sure, because a military prison is going to be awful. And that’s what’s going to happen if you slip up.”

“I’m certain,” Adam said.

Ryan agreed to take him to the local recruiting office, and on the drive there, Adam said that he planned to be completely honest. “Well, you might not want to volunteer that you smoked crack,” Ryan replied. “If you do, I can promise you that you’re not getting into the military. Just wait and see what they ask.”

“If I can’t be honest, then maybe it’s not what God has planned for me,” said Adam.

Inside the spartan office were two large framed photographs: president Bill Clinton and a highly decorated Naval officer. “Check it out,” Adam whispered to Ryan. “There’s Mr. Buschmann.”

“Hey, guys, what’s going on?” asked the recruiter.

“Hello, sir,” Adam said. “I’d like to join the Navy. I want to be a SEAL.”

“Great! Have a seat.”

While they talked, Ryan listened in and paced around the office, examining the posters of aircraft carriers, battleships, and the camouflage-painted face of a SEAL rising out of dark waters. Adam filled out forms, and the recruiter explained that some standard questions would need to be answered and that Adam would be fingerprinted and have to sign under oath. Lying under oath was subject to a fine and possible imprisonment, “so traffic tickets, stuff like that, are okay, but if you’ve ever been arrested or anything like that, tell us up front.”

“Yes sir, I have.”

The recruiter nodded and said, “Okay. For what?”

“I had eleven felonies, mostly stealing, nothing violent, but I don’t think you’ll find them on my record because I went to a drug treatment program after jail.”

“Are you clean now?”

“Well, sir, I’m not sure how long it stays in your system, but I have smoked crack. But I’m done with that. It’s not going to happen again.”

The recruiter leaned in on the table and shook his head. “Adam, I really appreciate your honesty,” he said. “I do, but do you
really
think you can join the Navy? This isn’t a joke?”

Adam pointed to the photograph of Captain Roger Buschmann, Commodore of U.S. Navy Recruiting Command Area Three—the highest-ranking officer in all the Navy recruiting districts in the southeastern United States and the boss of this recruiter’s boss. “Call and ask him.”

“You’re serious?” the recruiter said.

“I’m serious. Maybe he can help. Give him a call. He’ll at least vouch for me.”

In his office in Macon, Georgia, Captain Buschmann received a call from the recruiter in Hot Springs. “Sir,” he said, “I’m really sorry to bother you, but do you know a young man by the name of Adam Brown?”

“I sure do,” said Captain Buschmann.

“He wants to join the Navy. He says he wants to be a SEAL, but he’s … well, sir, are you aware he’s got a record a mile long? He’s had some drug issues, and just a
lot
of issues. I was going to send him out the door, but then he asked me to call you.”

A wave of positive memories washed over Captain Buschmann. Adam Brown was
the boy he’d considered most likely to succeed, the boy who had always followed the rules, even when it wasn’t cool, even when nobody was looking. Months earlier, Jeff had filled him in on Adam’s problems, so he knew about the drugs; he wasn’t aware, however, of Adam’s arrest—or of the laundry list of offenses the recruiter read to him. He couldn’t fathom any of it, because it was so out of character for the Adam he knew. And if there was one thing Captain Buschmann had an eye for, it was character.

“I’ll vouch for him,” he said.

“Sir?”

“Use whatever waivers he needs,” Captain Buschmann confirmed. “Treat him like he is my own son.”

After Adam signed the required stack of waivers, it was official: he was a Navy recruit. The newlyweds took Ryan and his wife up on their offer to stay with them until boot camp began in three weeks, then decided that they should start their life together properly by getting married in a church—God’s house. They discussed whether to invite their parents, but Kelley was certain her dad would not be pleased. And Adam thought his parents would conclude that he and Kelley had acted rashly and try to talk them out of it.

“We’ll just have to prove to them that it was the right thing to do,” said Kelley.

They explained their situation to Ryan, who introduced them to his pastor, and that Sunday, July 26, he called them to the front of his church. Before the congregation Adam and Kelley said their vows and were married for a second time. The pastor then asked his congregation to bow their heads. “God,” he said, “we pray for a miracle in the lives of this young couple.”

Adam called home the next day.

“Dad,” he said, “I have some things I need to tell you and Mom.”

“Okay,” said Larry. “I’m ready.”

“Kelley and I got married.”

“Well, your mom and I love Kelley and we would like to have been there—but that’s okay.”

“There’s something else. I joined the Navy.”

Newlyweds Adam and Kelley, during the period Adam was training for boot camp.

“T
HOSE THREE WEEKS BEFORE HE LEFT
for boot camp, there was something different about Adam I hadn’t seen before,” says Kelley. “There was an intensity. A focus.”

In the evenings while she watched television or read, Adam was on the living room floor cranking out push-ups and sit-ups. During the day, every overhanging tree branch and playground monkey bar he passed gave the opportunity for as many pull-ups and chin-ups as his arms could muster.

When Kelley went to work at the travel agency, Adam swam laps at the YMCA or drove to Wolf Stadium—six years after graduating from Lake Hamilton High—and jogged the track and ran the bleachers. “I could smell the crack sweating out of me,” he told SEAL buddy Kevin Houston years later. “I ran those steps, just like in high school, singing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ in my head—
‘Risin’ up, back on the street, did my time, took my chances’
—I love that song.”

One morning Adam parked his truck on the eastern side of the 70 West bridge and walked down the trail to the shore. He waded into Lake Hamilton, swam the quarter mile to the western shore, hoofed it up one of the trails he’d used as a kid, and tried to run back to the truck he’d borrowed from Larry. By the time he got there he was stumbling and nearly collapsed.

Angry at his weakness, Adam returned the next morning to do it again.

The second week of August 1998, Adam reported to the Naval training center in Great Lakes, Illinois—more than a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. Jeff Buschmann had called him right before he left for the airport to wish him luck. “And
hey,” he’d said, “if you think you’re going to screw this up, go AWOL to smoke dope or something, don’t do it. Because my dad really put his ass on the line for you.”

The following day, twenty-four-year-old Seaman Recruit Brown lined up with a hundred some eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds in his division to get his hair buzzed off, his uniforms issued, and his bunk assigned. Then he had two minutes to use the phone—long enough for him to call Kelley and sing out, “Hey, baby. I’m in the Navy now! I’ll call you again in three weeks.”

Back in Little Rock, where she had moved in with her father, the new Mrs. Brown was “a nervous wreck.” She knew Adam had what it took to make it through boot camp, but she also knew the likelihood for relapse. Every time the idea of failure weaseled its way into her mind, she prayed for Adam to have strength against his addiction. “That was the only thing that would stop him,” she says. “I couldn’t forget how Adam would tell me, every time he messed up, ‘It calls my name.’ ”

It gave her hope that all he was allowed to bring with him to boot camp were the clothes on his back, his identification, and five dollars. Kelley had nixed the five dollars. With money in hand, an addict can find drugs anywhere.

Over dinner with Janice and Larry one night, Kelley could sense their reservations, despite the optimism they conveyed—exactly what she was experiencing. “We didn’t get our hopes up,” says Janice, who had continued to pray that Adam was finding his path. Sometimes the worry consumed her, and then she’d call her now close friend Helen Webb. “Don’t you worry,” Helen told her during one such call. “We are surrounding your Adam with the Holy Spirit. There’s a hedge of protection around him. Those fiery darts of Satan won’t penetrate.”

Her words gave Janice chills—she could physically
feel
something like an electrical charge. Her faith was renewed.

If Adam made it through boot camp, Kelley knew she would be moving to Great Lakes to be by his side on the long journey to become a Navy SEAL.

Completing eight weeks of boot camp was only the first hurdle. In addition to the normal duties of learning how to march, salute, fold your clothes, and make your
bed the Navy way, recruits interested in becoming SEALs held a SEAL Challenge Contract, which gave them three opportunities to pass the SEAL Physical Screening Test (PST):