Fearless (29 page)

Lifting both of his arms in the air, Adam shook his fists and looked up toward the heavens. “Thank you!” he said. Then, to Dave, “What do you want to do?”

“Let’s just relax. Go to town, grab some food, see a movie, and do nothing.”

The following day was clear, calm, and “stable” for Adam and Dave, both of whom made it through to the next phase of Green Team.

Adam called Kelley right after he got the news. “Hey, Itty Bitty, how y’all doin’?”

“Doin’?” Kelley replied with trepidation. “I don’t know, Adam. How
am
I doing?”

“You’re doing just fine, because your man passed free fall. That’s one step closer to DEVGRU, baby. We’re almost there!”

W
ITH ONLY HALF THE TRAINEES REMAINING
, Adam graduated from Green Team in late November 2006, a feat predicted by his chief from SEAL Team TWO six months earlier when he wrote in his final evaluation that Adam was “clearly in the top one percent of the [SEAL] community.”

In Virginia Beach Adam enjoyed a quiet celebration with Kelley, Nathan, Savannah, and their closest friends, who understood the need to be discreet about this fabled tier one counterterrorism special mission unit. The trail of publicly accessible military records that began when Adam enlisted on July 24, 1998, ends with a sheet of paper that notes his transfer to the Naval Special Warfare Development Group in November 2006:

From here on, anything pertaining to the newly designated Special Warfare Operator First Class (SEAL) Adam Brown would be stamped
TOP SECRET
.

Behind the barbed-wire-topped walls of the closely guarded DEVGRU compound in Virginia Beach, a draft was in progress among the tactical squadrons of SEAL Team SIX. The squadrons’ leadership had reviewed the Green Team graduates’ ranks in the
class as well as the comments of the cadre. Word of mouth among squadron team members also weighed heavily.

While Adam was not ranked at the top, his personal recommendations were superb, so he was quickly drafted into the same squadron his friend and mentor Chief Harley had been in years before. Brad Westin joined him, while Dave Cain went to another. The previous year Austin and Christian had been drafted into separate squadrons, which meant three different rotational schedules for Adam and his friends, who would all be gone from home eight to nine months of the year. Each had a month of block leave and would be deployed, on standby alert, or training for the remaining eleven months.

Most of their training would be abroad or out of state, but even while on standby alert, these SEALs trained. They were always a private jet ride away from anywhere their services might be urgently required: a hostage situation involving Somali pirates, the disposal of a drug cartel, or an operation intended to kill or capture the most wanted terrorist in the world.

After the draft Adam, Brad, and Dave checked in at their squadrons’ “team rooms”—their first glimpse behind the top-secret curtain of DEVGRU, where a classified number of operators work together, with multiple support personnel seeing to their every possible need.

“Think of them like the Knights of the Round Table,” says a former DEVGRU SEAL. “The knights had a contingent of support—weapons bearers, two or three attendants to carry their armor, tend to their horse, whatever. While the SEALs don’t have those types of personal assistants, the command takes care of everything they need to operate at the highest level—administration, supply, medical, logistics, communications, intelligence, operations, and weapons training. The support team numbers work out to two or three people, both military and civilian, for each operator, and even the support personnel are critically screened and have top-secret clearance.

“It’s a team effort, a tight-knit community, and everybody knows if they’re working there, they’re proud Americans who are trustworthy, motivated, and talented—the best at what they do. They’re all patriots.”

February 2007 found Adam in a mud hut within the walls of a compound leased from a tribal leader in northern Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

The sharp Hindu Kush peaks to the west were topped with snow. To the east was the bloated Kunar River; Adam could hear the rushing waters as he drifted off to sleep. If he walked the hundred yards from the outstation to the river’s edge, he could fling a rock and nearly hit Pakistan on the opposite bank. Considering the location and the fact that Adam was a Naval Special Warfare sniper who had consistently hit targets a mile away, should an opportunity arise, say, across the river, he could engage the target from a lofty crag, camouflaged within the dark shadow of a rock overhang.

As this outstation’s assistant team leader, Adam and his boss—a senior DEVGRU operator—were, among other things, a sniper team on a “classified national mission.” By definition among the brotherhood, Adam was a “hunter” employed by a unit that did not officially exist, and so it was fitting that his first deployment abroad as a DEVGRU SEAL had landed him in what was described by a teammate as the “vague, mysterious, even shadowy” Kunar Valley, filled with enemy combatants dug into the surrounding mountains, blending among the populace in the villages and using the river valley as a highway from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Impossible to identify (“They don’t carry the ‘I’m a bad guy’ flag,” says one SEAL), these hard-line Taliban insurgents, foreign jihadists, aspiring terrorists, and good old-fashioned organized criminals all had the same goal: upset any attempts at regional (thus national) stability for either their own monetary gain or to accomplish Allah’s will.

The coalition outstations in northern Kunar and the observation posts (OPs) surrounding them were mortared and shot at almost daily, but that was nothing compared to the Pech River Valley, which was the Wild West, Indian Country, Ambush Alley, and other wartime clichés rolled up into one huge disadvantage if you’re the outsider trying to gain a foothold. That’s what all the outstations, forward operating bases (FOBs), command outposts (COPs), and observation posts represented: footholds in the uphill battle being waged in Afghanistan seven years after 9/11.

While the presence of Afghan National Army and coalition (predominantly conventional U.S. Army or Marine Corps) forces at these “frontier” outposts was intended to stabilize the regions, they also provided security for regional projects such as building roads, schools, and medical clinics; digging wells; and teaching sustainable farming techniques. In essence, the outposts protected the local population from the neighborhood bullies, who were well armed, motivated, and ruthless in threatening and killing locals who cooperated with coalition forces.

One of the functions of DEVGRU operators was protecting the conventional
coalition forces, a job they accomplished by targeting and taking out the “bullies.” The outstations in Kunar and across Afghanistan were intelligence depots for the surrounding areas, with operators ascertaining the viability of targets in their sectors, to judge if a certain reportedly “bad guy” really was a bad guy, and if so, how bad. Was he a priority—actively attacking American outposts and placing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on roads—or was he only talking about it? Was he working alone or with a cell or a neighboring cell? Where was he getting his weapons, and what kinds of weapons did he have? Was he accessible? Could a regular SEAL team, a platoon of Marines, a couple of squads of Army infantrymen get to him? Was this guy a high-level target, meaning he had a résumé of previous attacks against coalition forces? Did intelligence confirm an imminent attack? This would warrant sending a squadron’s strike force, the bulk of Adam’s teammates based nearby, to go in and get him, but was the risk worth the reward? As operators put it, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Adam had learned early in his deployment that two distinct battles were waging in Afghanistan: One was against the terrorist population, primarily al Qaeda but also a plethora of Islamic extremists, both foreign and domestic. The second battle was against the Taliban insurgency. “Even though there was some overlap at times,” says an operator, “we were fighting one to end terrorism and the other to secure Afghanistan as a country.”

Punctuating it all, the hunt for Osama bin Laden was “at the front of the back of everybody’s mind,” says another operator. “We all hoped to stumble upon him, or the clue that would lead us to him, but on a day-to-day basis we had other fish to fry.”

In his daily routine Adam reviewed intelligence reports from a range of classified sources, worked out (a favorite being a run with a two-thousand-foot elevation gain up to an observation post), and gained understanding of the terrain in order to plan better operations. He would hike or ride an ATV into the mountains to visit the observation posts manned almost entirely by Afghan army soldiers.

“He would push out farther than anybody,” says one OGA (other government agency: for example, CIA, DEA, FBI) operator who frequented Adam’s outstation. “He happened to be visiting an observation post when it got hit. I’d been in the region for years, and we never went into the surrounding mountains to pursue these guys; we just dealt with the attacks and held the ground. But Adam was a JTAC [joint terminal attack controller] and he didn’t like getting shot at. He was at the right place at the right time, and called in artillery from a firebase and fast movers [jets], vectored them
in on these guys he was tracking visually, killed some of them and had the others on the run. He asked why they’d never done that before, and the Afghans told him he was the first American they’d seen that far out.”

In short, Adam came in and, as usual, pushed the limits. “He was aggressive,” says the OGA. “Loved to talk football and said, ‘Sometimes the best defense is a strong offense.’ He wanted to overpower them and believed we could. He was definitely the ‘glass half full’ kind of guy. He believed in what we were doing, and you could tell he wanted to make a difference.”

Rarely did Adam leave an observation post without first helping with fortification efforts, such as filling sandbags. He also handed out extra MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) to children in the surrounding villages until he witnessed an Afghan man taking one away from a little girl. From then on he would hand out two to each child: one for the child’s family and one for the child to eat right then as he stood guard.

In addition to providing meals, he was known for giving local kids rides on an ATV. “That ATV and his smile were probably Adam’s most effective weapons,” says
the OGA. “Those kids who he put up front and let them drive down the road, they probably don’t remember too many of the Americans, but I bet they remember Adam because of those rides. He played with them. That’s important. When some AQ [al Qaeda] recruiter tries to tell them Americans are evil and they should be killed, they might think twice because of Adam.”