Fearless (21 page)

“A second later Adam had his pants down to his ankles,” says Austin. “ ‘Where is it?’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’ ”

“Whoa, wait, hold on a second,” said another SEAL from Hotel. “There’re some
rules. Your balls have to be
on
the anthill for thirty seconds; they cannot lift up for one second, they have to be on it the entire time. Otherwise you don’t get the money.”

By now both platoons had formed a large circle around the anthill, then “all the head shed, all the leaders, came over,” says Mark. “You’d think they’d say, ‘This is stupid, don’t do it.’ Nope. They were all over it. ‘Okay, we’ll put in twenty bucks too,’ they said. Same with the corpsmen, the medics—no concerns about anaphylactic shock or anything. In Naval Special Warfare, I’ve found the corpsmen are the most sadistic of our bunch.”

With six hundred dollars in the pot from some thirty takers, Adam shuffled over and got into position, his bare behind hovering above the anthill while a stopwatch was set and Christian stirred up the nest with a stick. As Adam squatted down slowly, the angry, swarming ants rose up to meet his anatomy, climbing on top of each other into a pyramid of defense. The second Adam touched the nest, three SEALs, including Mark, jumped on him and held him down.

“Adam screamed like a little girl,” recalls Christian.

“I will never forget his expression,” says Mark. “His face conveyed such acute agony, while everyone else was cheering.”

“Time!” shouted the SEAL holding the stopwatch, and Adam exploded off the nest, swatting himself furiously. “Get them off!” he shrieked. “Get them all off!”

Looking Adam over, the medics counted almost four hundred bites around his groin, “but it was hard to tell, because there were bites on top of bites,” explains Mark. “Over the course of the day, there was massive swelling. In terms of fruit, think cantaloupes. Small watermelons.”

“All those stories—the burning gloves, the blade incident, the anthill—are all funny, and they all help us understand the man Adam was,” says Chief Harley, who contributed his own twenty dollars to the pot, “but without a doubt, they should
never, ever
diminish his abilities, his personality as a warrior, as a SEAL. He could flip that switch from having this stuff happen, these funny moments, and the next minute we could be downrange and be in harm’s way and he would be the ultimate professional, operator, warrior that you’d want. Adam had that rare ability to go from looking in the mirror and laughing at himself to being the cool-headed professional, the one person I’d choose to have beside me if I was surrounded by enemy and running out of ammunition.”

Adam was granted the rest of the day in the aid station by the corpsmen, who propped his amply spread legs with pillows, iced his groin, put him on an IV, and shot him up with an antihistamine to counteract the venom from the fire ants. The cash poured in. A couple of men who hadn’t even been present gave Adam a twenty just because they’d heard the story.

By September 9 Adam felt good enough to waddle his way through the next evolution of training. On the night of September 10, Golf Platoon was tasked with a combat search-and-rescue operation that took them into the morning hours of September 11. The SEALs returned to their camp around four in the morning and were snoring within moments of hitting their bunks.

“A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center!” shouted the officer in charge as he ran into their tent a few hours later. In a flurry Golf Platoon pulled on pants and boots and ran to the communications tent, where men were stacked like human bleachers—seated, kneeling, and standing around a small television set, watching in solemn disbelief.

As horror upon horror was broadcast, there was “shock, worry, tears, and anger in that tent,” says Harley, “but mainly, there was resolve. There wasn’t a guy in there—Adam included—who didn’t want a pound-of-flesh vengeance for what they were witnessing. They knew we were going to war, and more than anything, these guys wanted to be a part of it.”

“During peacetime, pre-9/11, it wasn’t a popular decision to join the military to protect your country,” says Mark Kramer, “so my decision was sort of validated that day. Adam and I were going around trying to find coverage to call home, and he was right with me, saying, ‘Get us out there—let’s get some payback.’ Adam had this intense love for his hometown and state, which is really what patriotism is. We had both been competitive in sports, talked about the frustration of watching a game from the sideline, so we were hoping and praying that the powers that be would let us go out and do what we were trained to do.”

Kelley, just back from an early morning trip to Wal-Mart for diapers, was holding Nathan tight and watching the news when Adam finally got through.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

“I know,” said Adam. “Pray for all these poor people who are suffering and scared,
and you and Nathan stay home. Stay away from the base. Don’t do anything, and I’ll call you when I can.”

“What does this mean for you?” Kelley asked.

“I’m not certain,” said Adam, “but I know now why God led me to do what I’m doing.”

He called her again that evening, and then once a day while he completed the final week of the ORE. During these talks Kelley sensed a shift in Adam’s being, “like,
clunk
, he found the right gear,” she says. “He had always been a proud American, but his patriotism definitely started defining him and who he was going to be. Those attacks really brought out the old Adam, before all the junk. He started to emerge again.”

On the day Golf and Hotel Platoons passed their final ORE drills and were officially ready to deploy, Chief Harley stood before his men. “They all wanted to go join the fight that they knew was being planned for Afghanistan,” says Harley, “but their stated area of focus was South and Central America. That was where they were going for a six-month deployment.

“So I told them, ‘We don’t know where the front lines are going to be in this war against terrorism, and as part of the big-picture military, it’s our job to cover our zone. Before last week nobody was thinking about Afghanistan, and you know what? That’s too bad. We aren’t going to make that mistake and abandon the rest of the field; we’re going to do our job, and it’s an important job, and I know you will do your country and your families proud. Don’t spend your time home bitching and moaning. Enjoy them and this life and the freedoms we have. That’s what you’ll be fighting to protect soon enough. Mark my words, gentlemen.’ ”

One of the first things Adam did when he returned to Virginia Beach was go to a jewelry store he and Kelley had walked by months before. She had stopped to admire a platinum-and-diamond necklace, completely outside their budget, which Adam now paid for with a stack of twenties.

“I love it, Adam,” Kelley said when he presented it to her as an early twenty-sixth-birthday gift. “I absolutely love it, but we can’t afford this. We need to return it.”

Chief Harley congratulating Adam for his advancement to an E5-ranked SEAL.

Adam then revealed the ant bites, starting at his torso and on down to the heart of the matter. “There’s a little money left over,” he said. “We can put it in savings. I just want you to have the very best.” Adam’s words and what came to be known as the Ant Necklace brought Kelley to tears.

“You are crazy,” she told him as she hugged him. “I love you.”

Not one to boast or brag, Kelley made an exception with the Ant Necklace and wore it proudly to dinner with their friends later that week. While Michelle, Heidi, and Becky admired it, their husbands recounted the event, starting with the dare, continuing with Christian stirring up the nest, and ending with Adam “screaming like a little girl.”

Laughter soon turned to soft talking among the women, who shot glances at Christian, Paul, and Austin.

“What’s wrong?” Austin finally asked.

“I was just wondering why it was Adam and not you that took the dare,” said Michelle, gesturing toward Kelley’s necklace.

“You would have wanted me to?” said Austin.

“Oh yeah,” she said, Heidi and Becky nodding their agreement. “Definitely.”

Adam had expected to be somewhere in South or Central America for Christmas 2001, but an initiative known as Force XXI—a massive reorganization of the United States military—had prompted the Navy’s top brass to rethink the SEAL teams’ areas of focus, organizational structure, and deployment schedules. Currently, an entire team consisting of six task units each focused on a geographic region. With the new plan, only one task unit on Team FOUR would focus on South and Central America. Another task unit would cover Eastern Europe, another the Middle East and Central Asia, another Africa, and around the globe. In other words, each SEAL team could now cover the entire world.

Adam’s task unit was transferred to SEAL Team TWO, also based at Little Creek—a highly unusual move since a SEAL would generally remain on the same numbered team for the duration of his career. Led by Chief Harley, Golf and Hotel Platoons became Team TWO’s South and Central American task unit, a reorganization that postponed their deployment and added six more months of training.

This meant that Janice and Larry Brown would have all their children and grandchildren (Nathan; Josie, Shawn and Tina’s little girl, nine months younger than Nathan; and Maddy, Manda and Jeremy’s four-month-old baby girl) home for Christmas. Following family tradition, they went to church on Christmas Eve and, between visiting and eating, watched National Lampoon’s
Christmas Vacation
and
The Outlaw Josey Wales
.

As usual, Shawn and Adam ended up outside tossing a football back and forth, their breath hanging in the cold like smoke, chatting about the world, the Razorbacks, and fatherhood. “I’d like to coach Nathan when he gets older,” said Adam. “If it works out, God willing, we’ll be back here in time for him to play ball for the Wolves.”

Says Shawn, “Adam started talking about moving back to Hot Springs early on as a SEAL. After 9/11 it was a blur, but I remember Adam saying that he was going to be fighting for us, for our way of life. Not ‘us’ as in our family, but ‘us’ as in America.”

Since October, Green Berets had been on the ground in Afghanistan, as well as some SEAL teams conducting reconnaissance missions in advance of two raids by Special Operations Forces: an airfield seizure in southern Afghanistan and a raid on
one of Mullah Omar’s compounds. The hunt for Osama bin Laden had begun, and while Adam assured his family that his first deployment would be to South America, he didn’t hide his enthusiasm for getting into the fight in Afghanistan as soon as possible.

“I was in awe,” says Manda, “because Adam was just Adam all over again—but in a different uniform. He was my hero as this crazy football player who loved Lake Hamilton High; now he was a SEAL, and his team was our entire country. But he wasn’t loud about it, like he’d been before. He’d matured and was more quiet and humble, and that to me made him more powerful.”

“I was so proud,” Janice says. “Think of those months after September 11 and all the American flags that were going up everywhere. We put one up, a big one. And when I saw a flag, I think, like any military mother, there was a little something extra. In fact, I was getting used to being proud of Adam instead of worrying about him, but 9/11 changed all that, and there I was worrying about him again, worried that he was going to war.”

Larry felt the same conflicting emotions, but trusted that God had a plan and that Adam’s part in it would be revealed. “He told me it was his calling,” says Larry, who remembers that particular Christmas as the first time he’d discussed politics with his son. There was no need for debate; they were both on the same page. “People were arguing back and forth about whether or not this was a holy war, and Adam and I couldn’t figure out why,” says Larry. “For the terrorists, it wasn’t anything
but
a holy war, stated clearly by them. There was no doubt in our minds that they were waging a holy war, and Adam—as an American, as a warrior, and as a Christian—was not going to stand for it.”