Fearless (30 page)

Adam at a frontier outstation in Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

“Coming home to the wife and kids after being over there,” says one of Adam’s teammates, “is like the space shuttle coming back to Earth from outer space. It’s all about reentering the family atmosphere with the proper trajectory, speed, and timing. If you come in too fast, you’ll blow up.”

Adam was able to ease back into home life more smoothly than many of his teammates, according to Kelley. In fact, he continued to tell her that her job was far more difficult than his, recognizing that for the several months he’d been gone, Kelley had assumed the role of both parents—homemaker, coach, chauffeur, cheerleader—and shouldered single-handedly everything that had gone wrong or right. “He didn’t step in and expect to be the boss overnight,” she says.

Kelley ran a tight ship, and Adam respected her greatly for it. “The house was always immaculate,” says Austin’s wife, Michelle. “She’d do things like organize the cupboards. I’d throw my kids a Pop-Tart, and she’d have a snack tray with all the food groups. Her kids were polite. They had a schedule, and she stuck to it. I don’t think anybody would disagree that she set the bar pretty high in almost everything, and she was always put together. I’d be like, ‘You can look like that
and
bake brownies?’ ”

No matter the time of day when Adam returned from a deployment, Kelley piled Nathan and Savannah into the car to pick him up at the compound gate. “In the military they’d teach the men how to assimilate back home,” says Kelley. “They’re supposed to go to their wives before they hold their babies, that kind of thing. But Adam didn’t need any schooling. He’d just wrap us all up. Falling into his arms and then watching him lift up the kids was like a blanket. Like I’d been cold while he was away and he warmed me up.”

Following Adam’s return, there was always one “Daddy Day” each for the kids, such as a day at the mall for Savannah or laser tag for Nathan. There was a date night for Adam and Kelley when they could catch up on all they’d missed out on in each other’s lives. Because of operational security, Adam couldn’t talk in any detail about
what he’d been doing. But if something big had been reported in the news, “like one of the guys on the ‘deck of cards’ had been captured in Iraq,” says Kelley, “or an al Qaeda leader was killed in Afghanistan, I’d mention it and he’d say, ‘Hmm, how about that …’ That was how I knew he’d been part of it. I’d look into his eyes and see if they were different, like if what he’d seen or done had changed him, but he was still my Adam.”

Says Austin, “Adam didn’t take the kids to play—he
played
with the kids; there’s a difference.” Savannah and Nathan with Daddy at a Virginia Beach waterslide.

After his most recent deployment to Afghanistan, Adam did “repeat something he’d told me before, something that got reinforced when he was over there,” says Kelley. “It wasn’t bragging; it was just matter-of-fact. He told me, ‘I’m not afraid. God gave me this gift—I don’t feel fear.’ ”

“That,” says Kelley, “terrified me.”

In June 2007, after two weeks with his family, Adam was off again, this time to Holland for training in specialized fighting techniques. He returned to Virginia a month later with a limp, nothing unusual for him, but at the DEVGRU medical center an orthopedic surgeon reviewed his x-rays and pointed out the loose bone fragments in both ankles from years of pounding abuse.

The surgeon was amazed that Adam could walk, much less perform as a SEAL,
and told him he would usually recommend ankle-fusion surgery for such battered joints. That would leave Adam with stiff, permanently flexed ankles—a career ender. “Not an option,” Adam told the doctor, which left the alternative “Band-Aid” option: removal of all the loose cartilage and bone shards “floating” in and around his ankle joints.

The day after the surgery, Adam showed Kelley what the surgeon had taken out of his right ankle. “This,” he said, holding up a jar containing a four-inch-long bone fragment, “was the problem.”

Three months later, Christian was getting ready to deploy to Iraq with his squadron when he asked Adam to have a beer with him. “I’ve got some things I need to tell you,” he said.

On his way to meet Christian, Adam noticed a young woman staggering down the sidewalk a few blocks from the bar. He pulled the car over and offered to call her a cab, but she waved him off.

Adam found Christian sitting alone at the bar counter and told him about the drunk woman.

“Unreal,” Christian said, meeting Adam’s eye. “That’s my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?” asked Adam in disbelief.

“Yeah,” said Christian. “It’s a long story and I’m not proud of it. I’ve been cheating on Becky, and I wanted to come clean to you before I deploy. I was going to introduce you to her, but we got in an argument and she stormed out of here.” He explained to Adam that he hadn’t told him because he didn’t want Adam to look down on him. “Becky doesn’t know, and you can’t let her,” he said. “I’m going to tell her after this deployment.”

“I won’t look down on you,” said Adam, “and I won’t tell a soul. That’s your job.”

“Adam kept his word,” says Christian. “And even though I took two years to tell him about my affair, I knew that was how he would react. Deep down, the main reason I hadn’t before was because I knew he’d tell me to stop, and I wasn’t ready—I was getting the best of both worlds. I was a dirt bag, but Adam didn’t rub it in.

“He never took the holier-than-thou approach as a Christian either. He wasn’t a snob. But he and Austin spent a lot of time trying to convert me. He didn’t do that with everybody—he wasn’t a Bible thumper—but we were best friends and respected
each other and ribbed each other about everything. We exhausted ourselves arguing; every example he had that God existed, I had a comeback of why he didn’t. But I was way too much of a wussy to call myself an atheist, and because I wouldn’t commit to being a true nonbeliever, Adam saw that as a chink in my armor. He tirelessly tried to get us to go to church and give it a shot. Finally, I promised I’d go … someday.”

Planners for DEVGRU don’t discount the potential for any type of mission—they can’t allow their SEALs to fall into the rut, for example, of only taking down compounds and caves in Iraq and Afghanistan—so training exercises are planned in a variety of places, including major American cities. DEVGRU often partners with business owners or local government officials to use old or condemned buildings as training facilities, turning them into temporary “kill houses” for realistic Close Quarters Battle drills and breaching exercises. In some, these tier one SEALs plan and execute the explosive takedown of an entire building, bridge, or other structure.

Toward the end of September, Adam’s squadron visited a professional football stadium. While the city slept, assault and sniper teams worked various scenarios that could present themselves at such a location, say on Super Bowl Sunday.

During a break from drills in which the SEALs would surgically “take out” a gunman in the crowd, Adam set his weapon down, lowered himself over the field railing, and headed for a rack of footballs on the sideline. His teammates followed.

Sometime later a trained ear might have heard the heckling, curses, and quarterback calls one would expect at a sandlot pickup game. One could imagine someone yelling “I’m open!” while charging for the end zone, almost see that someone dive to make the catch. That airborne moment would have made quite a replay: a camouflaged, fully extended Navy SEAL snagging the ball in a spectacular grab. The
pop
of a knee giving out upon landing—not so much. But as would be officially cited, the cause of Adam’s crushed tibial plateau was a slip on the stadium stairs while bearing the full weight of his kit and body armor.

The following morning, a phone call: “Hey there, Itty Bitty, guess what? I’m coming home.”

“You have
got
to be kidding! What now?”

“I broke my leg.”

“Really? Really, Adam? How did it happen?”

“Training accident.”

“They were endless,” Kelley says about Adam’s injuries. “But I would get so mad when the guys would say he was accident prone. I’d tell them, ‘No, he isn’t—he just puts out harder than anybody. He doesn’t know how to hold back, so of course he’s going to get injured.’ ”

When Kelley picked Adam up at the airport, she sensed that he was behaving strangely on the drive to the DEVGRU medical center, not really answering her questions about how the injury occurred. Before heading home, Adam had told his teammates that he was more frightened of Kelley’s response than he was of the doctor’s diagnosis.

Word travels fast at DEVGRU, and two SEALs in the waiting room spilled the beans when they asked Adam what it felt like to play ball on an NFL field. Adam was shaking his head, waving his hands, doing everything he could to shut them up.

“You were playing football?” Kelley said. “
That’s
how this happened?”

“We did play a little catch, and I did have a fall,” he said, sounding like a kid trying to explain why his hand was in the cookie jar. “But that only tweaked it. The stairs are what
broke
it.”

Adam’s tibial plateau—the upper surface of the tibia, the shinbone—had “caved in, shattered,” according to the doctor who saw Adam. He underwent reconstructive surgery two days later at Portsmouth Naval Hospital, and was given a set of crutches and strict instructions to bear no weight on that leg for at least four months. “I can’t believe I’m pushing you in a wheelchair,” Kelley said to him as they left the hospital.

“Adam was thirty-three years old and had arthritis,” she says. “He had serious ankle problems, back problems, constant pain in his eye—always taking drops to relieve the pressure—and he never complained about it, never whined about it once. But I felt the burden of it. I felt sorry for him. I would make jokes when I was pushing him in the wheelchair, like ‘You sure are lazy! You need to get out and walk!’ Then I’d break down and tell him, ‘You can’t do this to yourself, you just can’t. You’re falling apart, and you’re
young
. I want you to be around.’ ”

A week after Adam’s surgery, Savannah broke her leg in gymnastics class; the week after that, Nathan broke his arm playing football. “Neighbors would see us get out of the car,” says Kelley, “and I’d smile and wave. They must have thought,
What
is that woman doing to her family—beating them?
What else can you do but laugh? It was a rough time, but it got rougher. Come February, I was counting my blessings. We all were.”

A few weeks before Adam was injured playing midnight football, the Browns had bought and moved into a house that was closer to work, church, and friends. Perfect for the kids, their new two-story home was on a cul-de-sac and backed a greenbelt. What it didn’t have was wood floors.

“How hard could it be?” Adam said to Kelley about installing the dark mahogany flooring they’d bought as an early Christmas present to themselves.

Tossing aside his crutches, Adam began hopping around on his good leg, carrying planks as Kelley repeatedly reminded him, “You’re not supposed to be putting any weight on that leg.” But Adam’s squadron was headed to Iraq in January 2008, and he was determined to both toughen up and heal his broken leg as soon as possible, with the added benefit of getting the floors done.

“And we had so much fun,” says Kelley. “After the kids went to bed, we’d start up each night. He’d cut them in the garage, I would help him lay them out. When he got frustrated—cut a piece wrong so it wouldn’t fit—he’d let that piece of wood have it with his hammer, so there were dings and little chips if you looked real close, but it sure was pretty. We were proud of that floor.”

Adam’s squadron deployed without him in mid-January. He hoped to join them in the middle of February; in the meantime he acted as his squadron’s operations chief, a position that some describe as a lifeline between the deployed squadron and headquarters, supporting everything from the mission abroad to urgent family matters. It was a job usually reserved for more senior operators, but Adam accepted the challenge with “Can do, sir. I got it.”

At home he continued to work on the floors, which were nearly done on February 3, when Austin and Michelle came over to watch the Super Bowl.

If they were in Virginia Beach at the same time, the four couples—the Browns, Michaelses, Jacobses, and Taylors—had always gathered for the big game. But in 2008 Paul Jacobs was deployed, and Christian and Becky Taylor had separated after Becky pieced together the affair and moved his belongings into storage; neither was feeling particularly social. Taking full responsibility for their family problems and the
breakup of their circle of friends, Christian was in the dumps, his dejection compounded by the recent loss of his good friend Mark Carter, a SEAL in his squadron who had been killed by an IED.

In the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, at nearly ten o’clock, Adam’s beeper went off. He looked at the message and “his face dropped,” recalls Kelley. “He showed the message to Austin; they both knew it meant somebody in Adam’s squadron had been killed and Adam was to report for duty as part of the notification team.”