Fearless (23 page)

While the wars waged on, Adam quietly continued to fight the personal battle that had begun the first time he’d smoked crack some eight years earlier. His faith, family, and determination had kept him drug free for almost five years, but his body and brain had been altered by the drug and they would seek that pleasure forever. He had a one-beer limit, a tough maximum to adhere to in a community where “if you don’t go out drinking with the boys,” says one SEAL, “you’re not really one of the boys; it’s the reality of the job. But there are exceptions, and Adam was one of them. Austin was another. Both solid operators who didn’t get obliterated. They’d either limit themselves or sometimes I’d look over and realize Austin was drinking water. They were a good influence, and most of the guys respected them for it.”

But Adam was human and would push his own self-imposed limits. On a Friday in late June, Adam and Kelley went out for a night of pizza and bowling with Christian, Paul, Austin, their wives—all of whom had been pregnant during the South American deployment—and children ranging in age from a few months to Nathan, the oldest at three. The Browns returned home to a neighborhood get-together that Kelley encouraged Adam to attend while she put the kids to bed.

After two hours Kelley glanced out the window and saw that the lights were off at the neighbor’s house. Then she realized that their car was gone. She called Adam’s cell phone throughout the night, but he wouldn’t pick up, and by the next morning Kelley knew without a doubt what had happened. She was both crushed and furious.

According to the neighbor, Adam had left with another neighbor to have a beer at a bar, and Kelley surmised that one beer led to another and another. Somewhere in there, with his willpower weakened by the alcohol, Adam had searched out the drug or maybe somebody had offered it. Either way, he’d done it.

Kelley asked Christian if he would go out and search for Adam, and together
with Paul, the two SEALs spent all of Saturday driving around the worst neighborhoods of Norfolk and Portsmouth. “When we couldn’t find him, I was devastated,” says Christian. “Kelley was really troubled, and I felt like I was letting them both down. They were family.”

“Thank you,” Kelley told Christian that evening. “He’ll be home tomorrow. This is the last time this is going to happen.”

For Kelley it bordered on miraculous that Adam had lasted this long without a relapse, because “it was the devil to him. Toward the end of his dark time he’d come home and say, ‘I can’t believe I let him get me. He paints this pretty picture, but I
know
it’s wrong and I don’t want to lose y’all.’ ”

Kelley had spent that day and evening playing with the kids and praying, not overly concerned that something bad had happened to Adam. No doubt he was hiding somewhere, afraid to return home because he was ashamed and angry at himself for giving in to the voice he had overpowered for so long. She believed this was another test, another hurdle put before her, and while God had never told her to leave Adam before, this time she felt guided to do just that. “I wanted to shock him,” she says.

Kelley filled Janice and Larry in on what was going on, receiving their full support to go forward with her plan. When Adam finally walked in the door Sunday morning, his head was hung low. Quietly, so Nathan, who was playing in the living room, could not hear, she said with all the venom she could muster, “How dare you. You have a family. How
dare
you!”

He shook his head and appeared “beat down and ashamed,” says Kelley. He began to speak.

“No,” she said. “I’ve heard it all before.”

Studying his eyes, Kelley could tell that Adam was no longer under the influence of the drug, so she placed nine-month-old Savannah in his arms, picked up the suitcase she’d packed the night before, walked out the door, and drove away. While she completely trusted Adam with the children, it took all her willpower to leave her family and camp out for the next twenty-four hours in a room at the Navy Lodge at Little Creek. She read her Bible, watched television, and walked around the base for hours, listening to the ringing of her cell phone as its message box filled with Adam’s apologies and promises.

In addition to apologizing to Kelley, Adam was apologizing to God for being weak. And he prayed that Kelley would give him one more chance. He was also
handling all the things Kelley usually did for their children—mixing formula for Savannah, changing diapers, preparing meals, bathing them. At bedtime, Adam held Savannah and sang to Nathan the happy song that he and Kelley had been lulling him to sleep with for almost a year. But tonight, for Adam, it was just plain sad:

Kelley returned home on Monday morning having not answered even one of Adam’s calls. She wanted him to understand what it felt like to have a spouse, the parent of your children, disappear.

“Please forgive me,” he said as she passed him by and went straight to Nathan and Savannah and hugged them. “I’m sorry.”

“Get to work,” Kelley replied. “We’ll talk about a few things when you get home.”

For the first time in his Navy career, Adam was late for his job that morning. In the afternoon, at Christian’s request, he headed to a Village Inn restaurant.

Christian was already seated when Adam showed up, looking “like a beat dog—you know, when a dog knows they did something wrong, just guilty. I take this job seriously, and I knew he did too. But we all have weaknesses and that makes people real, and controlling those weaknesses makes people strong.”

“I really messed up,” Adam said.

“I know,” said Christian, and then he let Adam have it. “I am beyond disappointed; I am pissed. There is no room for that in this job. No way. We train at high levels, shooting real bullets. There is no room for error. I mean, seriously? We are Navy SEALs! I have to be able to trust you, man. We’re going to war soon. You have to be the guy that’s got my back when we go in and we’re on target.”

“I know,” said Adam. “You’re right.”

“And you’re letting your family down,” Christian went on. “Kelley is an angel putting up with this. What the hell! I have to be able to trust that you’ve got my back, and if you’re thinking about doing something else, thinking about doing crack and not protecting me or anybody when we’re doing our job … I need to know where your mind is when we go into a room and we need to shoot and make decisions.”

“That’s it. I swear I’m never going to do it again.”

“All right then,” said Christian. “I trust you. We’re done here.”

That evening Kelley informed Adam that there would be no more chances; the next time it happened, she and the kids would be gone for good. “It was tough talk,” says Kelley. “He believed it, I said it so he’d believe it, but I can’t honestly say I really would have left him if he did it again. We prayed that night, we read the Bible, the verses on strength, and I told him he was letting God down too.”

A month and a half later, Team TWO was training in a MOUT (military operations on urban terrain) village on a base in Alabama. Defending the buildings within this setting were an opposing force of SEALs armed with M4 rifles and 9mm simulation rounds—actual bullets with liquid, paint-filled tips, advertised as nonlethal for training purposes. Often referred to as paintballs on steroids, they are painful and can penetrate the skin. Protective gear for the neck and eyes is mandatory.

Adam was moving up a stairway when he came under intense fire and was hit in the chest. He lifted his arms to signal that he was “dead” and began to walk down the steps to “reset” the assault by regrouping with his team to try again. At the instant he turned, a final round aimed at his head slipped past his wraparound sunglasses and hit him in the right eye. He trotted outside the building, where his team was waiting. “Man, I got dinged,” he said to Austin, then pulled off his glasses. “How does it look?”

The outer corner of his right eye to the center was covered with blue paint. Near the tear duct, it was blood red.

“Can you see out of it?” asked Austin.

“Naw, everything’s blurry,” Adam replied calmly.

After being treated at a local hospital’s emergency room, Adam called Kelley. “Baby, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “I’m okay, but I got shot in the eye with a sim round. Just grazed it, but I’m coming home. It’ll be late; I’ll get a ride.”

From the way Adam downplayed it, Kelley assumed that his injury was probably a black eye. But when he came home—the bandage off because of pain and his eye swollen to a squint—“my heart nearly fell out of my chest,” she says, remembering the bloody tears that streamed down his cheek. “It was mangled, just trashed.”

“Are you going to lose your eye?” she asked, hugging him tight.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m scheduled for surgery in the morning.”

At Portsmouth Naval Hospital, Adam and Kelley were told the bullet that had glanced off Adam’s eyeball had all but destroyed his cornea, as well as damaged the lens, surrounding nerves, and muscles. Adam was now eligible for a medical discharge as a disabled veteran, at a level of disability that would pay a significant sum each month for the rest of his life. He refused to even consider the option. “One, I’m not disabled, and two, I’m not a veteran,” he said. “I haven’t even fought for my country yet.” The doctors explained that he was still considered a veteran for having served in the military.

“That didn’t count, as far as Adam was concerned,” says Kelley. “End of discussion. There wasn’t an ounce of quit in him. What we did do was move out of our house into a smaller apartment, to save a little more money in case this was a career-ending injury.”

For the next few months, which Adam spent alternating between doctors’ appointments and his ongoing training cycles, the ophthalmology staff fought to restore the sight in his injured dominant eye. He could see shadows and detect movement peripherally, but beyond that the eye was essentially blind. In addition, there was severe swelling of the eyeball, which the doctors had a difficult time getting under control.

“The pressure was painful,” says Kelley, “but he wouldn’t let on. I’d see him grimace when he didn’t know I was looking.” Furthermore, Adam had come to believe that what appeared to be a freak accident “was actually God tapping him on the shoulder, letting him know he wasn’t happy that Adam had succumbed to that voice,” says Kelley. “He was so depressed for a few weeks, and then he decided it was just another challenge, another lightning bolt God was throwing at him, to see if he’d get up or stay down.”

The ongoing prescription was for steroid drops and an eye patch that delighted three-year-old Nathan. “Arrrrgggh, matey,” Adam would say, donning a pirate hat. He’d sword fight with his son and draw maps that would lead them to treasure he buried in the sand at a nearby playground. “If he had to be home recovering after a procedure,” says Kelley, “he was going to play with the kids as much as he could.”

Adam’s task unit was scheduled to deploy to Iraq in April 2004. This gave him seven months to both heal his eye as much as possible and retrain himself to work around the injury. Even with limited vision he was able to excel in—and successfully
complete—a highly competitive one-month Naval Special Warfare Assault Breacher Course. The “breacher” is the SEAL who gains access to a building or compound during a raid so the rest of the assault team can enter the target structure. He is the first to sneak up to an objective while the rest of the team holds security from a distance. As an explosives expert, the breacher can also safely implode whatever stands between the SEALs and the enemy: a door, a gate, or a wall.

For as long as Savannah could remember, Daddy wore an eye patch and gave her nose a pinch every chance he could sneak one in.

In addition, Adam taught himself to shoot using his nondominant left eye. This didn’t affect how he held a handgun, but aiming an M4 carbine required that he turn his head and lean out over the stock for accuracy.

Once the platoon workup was finished, Adam was cleared by Medical, having exhibited proficiency in SEAL tasks, but with the notation that he was doing so with limited vision in his dominant eye. He flew to Baghdad for a six-month deployment, and upon his arrival, Adam’s superiors decided that his limited vision was a liability. They would not allow Adam to participate with his platoon in direct-action combat missions on the ground.