Fearless (26 page)

“Mommy,” he said, “y’all let me know if you need me to do anything.” Then he went about his business, which at the moment was building Legos.

The following morning Kelley opened the sugar bowl to make sweet tea and found a little scrap of paper within. It read,

Every day she’d find another note. In the cookie jar:
I miss you today. Love, Adam
. In a dresser drawer:
I wish for a kiss. Love, Adam
. Inside the egg carton:
Give yourself a hug & pretend it’s me. Love, Adam
.

Cherishing each discovery, Kelley refrained from searching for all the notes at
once. She kept them in her wallet and reread them whenever she needed a lift—and by the end of Adam’s first month of deployment, the once crisp papers were like those in their family Bible, worn and soft. They sustained her.

At the memorial service for the fallen SEALs, Captain Van Hooser had defined what coalition forces were up against in the landlocked country where Adam was deployed:

Indeed, Adam respected the land he surveyed from Bagram Airfield, where he and his task unit were initially based. As a SEAL, he knew to “never underestimate the enemy” but he also “rejoiced,” according to his journal, when he saw children playing in a field with a soccer ball as he patrolled in and around the ancient city of Bagram.

Adam continued the journal entry to his children:

During his personal quest to learn about Afghanistan, Adam had read a book titled
The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan
by Christina
Lamb. The letter he referred to was sent to Lamb by a secretly educated young Afghan woman named Marri.

For two pages the letter described Marri’s background and various anecdotes of life before and after the Taliban, ending with,

For the first few weeks in-country, Adam and his task unit flew from Bagram to outlying villages. Their living quarters were eight-foot-by-eight-foot plywood rooms with a blanket for a door, a bunk, and some shelves in a building built by Army engineers when the Taliban had surrendered four years before. Adam’s missions were with a team of doctors who provided care to the locals, and in many cases their animals, while the SEALs provided security.

After a month of supporting this MEDCAP/VETCAP (Medical Civic Action Program/Veterinarian Civic Action Program) mission, winning the hearts and minds
of the indigenous population, the task unit was ordered to relocate. Adam was preparing his gear for the move when his buddy, FBI agent Billy White, who had been accompanying the SEALs on the mission, stopped by his room, the walls of which were covered in graffiti from its many different residents. One message was, “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow … what a ride.’ ”

Billy liked it so much he jotted it down in his journal. Then he noticed Adam’s Bible, the cover bent, pages marked, and it sparked a conversation about their shared Christian faith—and how they both believed God had led them to fight in this war.

“Neither of us had seen actual combat at that point,” says Billy, “and we talked of being warriors and Christians, and mentally dealing with killing. Specifically, we talked about how the Bible says thou shalt not murder; it does not say thou shalt not kill. There is a time to kill, to protect your home, your family, your freedom. And when I said that to Adam he replied, ‘Amen, brother.’ ”

The following morning Adam and Billy were in a vehicle heading south from Bagram, part of the relocation convoy of five Humvees. They rounded a corner and saw an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoy coming from the opposite direction, barreling down the middle of the narrow two-lane blacktop at sixty to seventy miles an hour, roughly the same speed as Adam’s convoy. The lead vehicles in both convoys edged over into their own lanes, but in doing so dropped their outer tires into the powdery dirt, instantly creating a large dust cloud.

Adam was riding in the front passenger seat of the second Humvee, his right hand holding on to the upper frame of the open window, when the wall of dust appeared. Their driver barely had time to tap the vehicle’s brakes before it was swallowed by the blinding cloud, and an instant later the left front bumper impacted with the second vehicle in the ISAF convoy, causing a glancing head-on collision. Adam’s Humvee flipped three times while cartwheeling down the blacktop.

The dust cleared and Dave Cain—a SEAL in the undamaged lead vehicle—saw Adam leaning into the backseat of the smashed Humvee, administering aid to somebody who was “howling like a dog that got run over by a car,” says Dave.

Billy was pinned between the caved-in roof, a piece of which had speared through his left quadriceps muscle, and the seat and floorboard. His lower left leg was crushed, and a bone protruded through his calf muscle from a compound fracture. The left
side of Billy’s head and his ear were torn open, his left wrist was disfigured and broken, and his M4 carbine, which he’d been holding muzzle up between his legs, had been driven through his left armpit into his back so that it could be seen bulging against the skin there. These were only the visible injuries.

Adam was seated in the front right seat of this Humvee when it was involved in an accident on the road to Kandahar.

“Adam was applying pressure, trying to stop the bleeding on Billy’s leg,” says Dave. “Billy was screaming. Another guy had gotten thrown out and was in shock, sort of stumbling around. The guy next to Billy thought his back was broken but was still trying to help Adam with Billy. Then a corpsman from the rear of our convoy ran up and Adam yelled at him, ‘Give Billy his morphine! Give him his morphine!’ ”

As Adam helped extract Billy and the other injured men from the mangled vehicle, Dave noticed Adam’s right hand: its fingers were dangling by skin and tendons, every digit but the thumb severed. When the Humvee began to flip, the hand that had been gripping the window frame was crushed between it and the road.

“Adam, your hand is messed up,” Dave said.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Adam. “I’m all right. Focus on these guys.”

A corpsman overheard. “Hey, I need to take a look,” he told Adam. After examining the injury, the corpsman carefully laid Adam’s fingers back into place and bandaged his hand.

Local men, women, and children had begun to gather, watching the scene. A
stopped convoy dealing with a medical trauma was a target of opportunity, and the enemy could easily be hidden within the crowd.

“Let’s keep these people back!” yelled Adam, standing up and grabbing his M4 with his uninjured hand. Says Dave, “He balanced the stock on the forearm above his bandages and started holding security. I told him, ‘Adam! Sit down, man. We got it. Relax.’ But Adam shook his head and kept pushing people away from the wreckage.

“When the helicopter landed, there was Adam, still holding security for his own medevac, refusing to get loaded until all the others were tended to and on board. Only then did he lower his weapon and join them.”

K
ELLEY WAS DRIVING NORTH, APPROACHING
the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, when her cell phone rang. From the forlorn tone of Adam’s voice, she knew instantly something was wrong.

“I’m coming home, baby,” he said.

“Oh, Adam. What happened? Are you okay? Talk fast, I’m coming up on the tunnel.”

“Well,” he said, “I got in an accident.”

Unable to pull over, Kelley entered the tunnel and lost the call. Once she was on the other side, Adam called back and filled her in—somewhat. “He was so casual about these horrible injuries,” Kelley says. “He was in the hospital and was like, ‘I hurt my hand pretty bad, my fingers got cut off, but I got ’em sewn back on.’ He was most worried about his friend who was in surgery and in critical condition, lucky to be alive.”

Adam asked her to call his parents. “And Itty Bitty,” he said, “have everybody we know pray for a guy named Billy White.”

Initial surgeries for both Adam and Billy were performed the day of the accident in the Heathe N. Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield. The following morning they flew together to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where Billy was operated on more extensively. Adam remained with Billy so he could accompany him home three days later. When they returned to the States, Billy went to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC, and Adam was driven home for reconstructive hand surgery at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia Beach.

“It wasn’t until he got home that night,” says Kelley, “that I saw his fingers hadn’t just been cut off; they’d been
crushed
off between the Humvee and the road. It looked so painful.”

The next day Adam checked in at the hospital and insisted on a local anesthetic so he could watch the procedure. “He chatted with the surgeons with his hand laid open on the table,” says Kelley. “He watched them work on his nerves, muscles, tendons. Every cut, stitch, screw, and pin, he saw it all.”