Fearless (27 page)

Janice and Larry had monitored Adam’s situation from Hot Springs since the accident. “Kelley always kept us informed,” says Larry, who would then pass the information on to Shawn and Manda. “We’d known he was going to Green Team after this deployment. And with his eye, he’d already dealt with so much. I was scared to ask what this injury meant; we just prayed. God knew Adam real well by then. I turned to Romans 8:28: ‘And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.’ That became a theme when Adam got hurt. I’d ask ‘Why?’ and that was my answer.”

Over the next four weeks Kelley cleaned and debrided Adam’s hand. Twice a day she would unwrap the ointment-saturated surgical gauze from around each finger, pulling away the dead flesh. “There was pus and blood and goo,” she says. “I was lightheaded the first few times, but I got used to it. His index finger had an exposed nerve, and we’d save that one for last because when I unwrapped and rewrapped it, it shot a jolt, like an electrical shock, through him that nearly knocked him down.”

The pins and screws were surgically removed the second week in December. Green Team was scheduled to begin in June 2006—less than six months away—and “Adam’s biggest concern wasn’t if he’d ever be able to use his hand for
normal
things, like holding a fork or writing with a pencil,” says Kelley. “He was thinking pull-ups.” Would he be able to hold on to the bar and do fifteen, the minimum requirement? Would he be able to draw his pistol, pull with his trigger finger, assemble his weapons? “He went down the list, everything he knew he’d have to do to qualify and what he’d have to work on. Because now both his dominant eye
and
his dominant hand were a mess.”

While Adam’s grip gained strength in rehabilitation, his overall dexterity and fine motor skills weren’t the same. A month after the surgery, he began to retrain himself
to shoot—both pistol and carbine—with his left hand. This was far more difficult than what he’d done in Sniper School, where single shots were patiently set up, the rifle steadied, if not by its own tripod, then atop a tree stump, log, or whatever was available. And even though he had used both his nondominant eye and his left hand, pulling the trigger as a sniper was a slow, deliberate move, unlike what he would need to do when faced with split-second decisions in the realistic combat testing of Green Team.

Adam’s hand looking remarkably good with his fingers reattached.

Adam’s biggest concern was the Close Quarters Battle (CQB) portion of the course, in which he would have to clear rooms, search houses, react to bad guys: tough shooting exercises that require both lightning-fast reactions and pinpoint accuracy. “This doesn’t even compare to what Adam was up against,” says one Green Team cadre instructor, “but let’s say you’re right-handed and somebody tells you to start writing left-handed. You have to retrain yourself to write fast, you can’t drop below the line with your letters, the letters have to be perfect, and you’ve got to know and write down the answers to do-or-die questions almost simultaneously. And do all this with bad guys shooting at you. Adam had to rewire his brain to react ‘left’ when his whole life he’d reacted ‘right,’ in a course where half of the very best guys who have two good eyes and two good hands still fail.”

By January Adam was drawing his pistol and making consistently accurate shots. “Almost like he had been ambidextrous and didn’t know it,” says Jack Elliot, an armorer who helped maintain weapons for the SEALs. “We teach our guys to shoot with their off hand in case their good one is injured in battle, so I’ve seen a lot of guys try and shoot nondominant hand. Adam was smooth. I’d joke with him: ‘C’mon, come clean, you’re a Jedi, right?’ And he’d say, ‘Naw, I just pray a lot.’ ”

With only a couple of weeks of shooting left-handed under his belt and his fingers barely healed, Adam volunteered for what was presented as “an extremely challenging counternarcotics mission” in South America. As the leading petty officer, he headed a twelve-man SEAL unit tasked with creating a premier maritime fighting force from the ranks of Colombia’s marines.

When he arrived in Colombia and met the forty marines who had been chosen for training in a variety of ocean-borne tactics and procedures, Adam found one overwhelming problem: only about ten knew how to swim. So, for the first three weeks of the tight two-month schedule, some of the most elite warriors in the world got into a murky swimming pool and, according to one of the SEALs present, coaxed the anxious Colombian marines into the water. Once they mastered dog-paddling, they eventually achieved success at what another SEAL had first considered a “hopeless task.” Adam’s evaluation read,

Back home in April, Adam was awarded a gold star, representing his fourth Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal for his accomplishments in Colombia. The following month, as he prepared for his transfer to Green Team, the SEALs from Team TWO presented him with a wooden paddle that had a brass plaque on the blade engraved with “The Ballad of Adam Brown.”

Two weeks before his move to Green Team, Adam was clearing out his locker at Team TWO when his chief stopped by to deliver the bad news: Adam had been medically disqualified from the course. “His file was reviewed,” says another instructor. “And even though he’d been cleared and was on the roster, somebody went back in and reconsidered, figured there is no way he will pass without perfect vision, and
because it’s a dangerous course—lots of live ammunition, explosives—they did not want that liability.”

Adam got in his car and drove home. “He was furious and in disbelief,” says Kelley. “Adam was a man of his word, and he couldn’t stand that they were going back and forth. He knew he could do the job and was determined to make it happen.”

They explored every angle to appeal the decision, and they prayed. “He said he would leave the Navy and return to school if that was his path,” Kelley says. “He said he would even shoulder the humility of not succeeding at DEVGRU, but still be the best SEAL he could be. He’d go to bed disappointed, but he’d wake up fired up, saying, ‘I’m not done.’ ”

After a week of hitting brick walls with every appeal, Adam seemed out of options. Then one day, as he drove to work on the base at Little Creek, he noticed the familiar gait of a runner on a trail next to the road. Pulling alongside Captain Van Hooser, his former commander, Adam called out through the window, “Good morning, sir! Can I interrupt your run for a minute?”

Despite having commanded thousands of SEALs over the years, Van Hooser knew exactly who Adam was. He remembered the blade incident, and how Adam had not interrupted the training dive in spite of his wound. He was impressed by the way Adam had described being shot in the eye as merely a “ding” and was aware that he had passed Sniper School—just missing being the honor graduate—while shooting left-handed with his nondominant eye.

Adam gave Van Hooser a rundown of his current predicament and said, “Sir, my injuries are no big deal. I can do this. Let me try to qualify, that’s all I’m asking. If there is anything you can do to go to bat for me, I won’t let you down. I just need the chance.”

Van Hooser, a by-the-book Navy man, normally did not interfere with the service’s qualification systems. “That was my protocol,” he says. But like every other SEAL, he’d learned the rules so he would understand if there was ever a time to bend or break them.

“Let me think about it,” he said to Adam. He didn’t need to think long. That same afternoon he contacted the command at DEVGRU; a few days after that he called Adam into his office. “They’re asking around,” Van Hooser told him. “It’s under review.”

Dozens of SEALs who had trained or served with Adam, from BUD/S onward, received a phone call over the next two weeks as Adam’s enlisted record and reputation were scrutinized. The response of one SEAL summarized the overwhelming sentiment: “It doesn’t matter if he’s missing an eye or has an injured hand. This is Adam Brown you’re talking about. Bring him on. Give him a chance.”

Days before the Green Team selection process was scheduled to start, Adam was summoned to a meeting with the commanding officer of the training cadre. “You’re going to be under a microscope,” he said. “No special considerations; you are up against the same qualifications as everybody else. In fact you’re probably going to be watched more closely than anybody else. But if you pass Green Team, there will never be another question about your eye or your hand. Never.”

Brad Westin, Adam’s buddy from Sniper School, along with a few dozen other SEALs from both East Coast and West Coast teams, were sweating—and not just from the humidity. It was the first day of Green Team, and they had gathered at a classified Eastern Seaboard training compound where Brad was amazed to find Adam among those assembled. Because of Adam’s eye and severed fingers, “I figured his career as a SEAL was finished,” Brad says.

“Adam! Are you in? Really?” he asked.

“I’m in,” said Adam. “They told me I get to stay in the Navy if I can make it through Green Team.”

Brad slapped him on the back, as did Dave Cain, who had been with Adam in Afghanistan. Only half of the class, which represented the handpicked best of the best—determined, motivated, and very qualified—would remain by the course’s end. And every one of the SEALs had a massive advantage over Adam.

They began the course with a PT test that 99 percent of the world’s population would likely fail. First stop: a minimum of fifteen dead-hang pull-ups with no time limit. A candidate must come to a complete hang, elbows straight, before executing the next pull-up, in which the chin must come up and over the top of the bar. Adam completed twenty-two.

Then, with only a few minutes’ break, push-ups: all the way down to touch a SEAL’s fist under the chest and all the way up to arms straight, with a three-minute time limit for a minimum of eighty push-ups. Adam did one hundred twenty.

Followed immediately by sit-ups: with a partner holding down feet, three minutes to do a minimum of ninety. Adam made it through one hundred thirty.

Another short break, then three miles of blacktop running in 22:30 or less while wearing cammie pants and running shoes. Adam’s time was 18:24.

One last short break before the bay swim: an 880-meter (just over a half mile) sidestroke in no more than thirteen minutes. Adam finished in 11:22.

Adam’s scores were average to above average among the students, all of whom passed.

After that, the real fun began—six months of rigorous training that would take them to specialized schools and facilities across the United States. There they would either exhibit perfection in or fail out of courses in combat pistol and rifle marksmanship, close quarters battle, military free-fall parachute operations, land warfare, urban warfare, desert warfare, maritime Visit, Board, Search, and Seizure (VBSS) tactics, tactical ground mobility operations, protective security detail training, and various other, classified, classes.

“The whole point of Green Team is to create as much stress and pressure on the student as possible and see if they can deal with it,” says an instructor who worked with Adam. “We don’t build them up; we break them down.” When something doesn’t go as planned or expected, “the guys who still perform the task with no mistakes are the guys we’re looking for.” Says a senior instructor, “You either perform under pressure or you fail, and we are not in the business of failing.”

Although the specific qualifications and training tactics of the CQB phase—the crux of Green Team for most SEALs—are classified, “to give you an idea of what Adam had to master, consider where we start them off,” says another instructor. “CQB begins with two-man teams doing one-room pistol clearance. They’re taught to enter the room exactly as we say, clear their lanes as we’ve instructed, and if there’s a target they engage it or they handle it if it’s a noncombatant. In addition to that they can only be within two feet of where we tell them to be inside the room.