In the target compound, roughly five males, six females, and six children were present at various times of day. James and his men were expected to fight rather than be captured, so the civilians complicated the raid. History had shown that this enemy used both women and children freely as human shields, but the SEALs were trained to handle these scenarios.
What made Objective Lake James one of the three most difficult (described by Command as “audacious”) missions in the war up to then were two facts. Located in a narrow valley deep within wooded mountains, the objective was surrounded by enemy who had chiseled their homes into formidable, often terraced slopes and rocky cliff faces. This meant the SEALs could not fly in, land or fast rope near the target, perform their mission, and fly out—their usual modus operandi. They would have to infiltrate by foot a great distance over extremely difficult enemy-occupied terrain, hit their target, and hike out to the helicopter landing zone (HLZ).
Adam and his team were prepared to do whatever it took not to alert the village or the rest of the valley’s residents. That meant staying as quiet as possible and using suppressed weapons or knives to kill or capture the targeted individual. Once they had completed their task, they would search the premises for intelligence and detain the civilians. If doors did need to be blown open or the enemy fought back, the entire valley would hear and come out with weapons blazing, and it would be a battle all the way to the HLZ—a thirty- to sixty-minute hike. The SEALs knew that length of time under fire would feel like an eternity.
An easier way to take out James and his men would have been to drop a bomb, but that was not an option because of the women and children in the compound and the families in adjacent homes. This had to be a surgical strike, aimed at one insurgent and his cell of fighters who, if not eliminated by Adam’s team, would continue to attack American or coalition forces.
That much was certain.
While prepping his equipment for the mission, Adam folded the Arkansas flag his brother, Shawn, had given him. He always carried it into battle, tucking it proudly between his body armor and his uniform.
Every SEAL who encountered Adam Brown knew in short order where he was from. He loved his home state right down to the dirt. “It is the one state in our country that can sustain itself,” he’d tell you while explaining his Arkansas Bubble Theory. “Y’all could put a bubble over it, cut us off from importing anything from the rest of the world, and we would not only survive, we would eat well and prosper.”
The one thing Arkansas doesn’t have is an ocean, and when Adam entered the U.S. Navy’s grueling twenty-seven-week Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training course in 1999, he’d swum in the sea only a handful of times. At the beginning of BUD/S, an instructor had told his class, “The reputation you forge here will follow you to the teams. Your reputation here will define you.”
Adam’s reputation certainly did define him, but the stories that made him a legend began long before BUD/S in the southern proving grounds of Hot Springs, Arkansas. That was where he earned the nickname Psycho for taking on the biggest players on his peewee football team, where he boldly faced a loaded shotgun, where he jumped from a moving vehicle off an interstate bridge into a lake, where he saved a life, eluded capture, and performed his first nighttime raids. Says Adam’s high school football coach, Steve Anderson, “He did things a Navy SEAL would do long before he was a SEAL.”
His reputation continued among his SEAL buddies in DEVGRU. “He didn’t have a ‘fear bone’ in his body,” says Kevin Houston. “Tough as nails” is the way Brian Bill describes Adam. Heath Robinson likens him to a bored-out engine without a regulator: “He was a machine, wide open in everything he did—full throttle.” With that mindset came injuries, but according to Dave Cain, a SEAL who was there when Adam’s fingers were severed in Afghanistan, “He could endure pain better than anybody I’ve ever known … if he felt it at all.”
In truth, Adam did feel pain—lots of it. He was just incredibly determined and resilient, a toughness that began at birth. “He came out injured,” says his mother, Janice. According to his father, Larry, Adam was ready to be born three minutes after his twin sister, Manda, when “the doctor discovered he was breech. So they had to dislocate his shoulder in order to get him out.”
“He barely cried,” says Janice. “The doctor put his shoulder back in place, and while Manda was still crying after coming into this cold and bright new world, little Adam was quiet, sort of curious, looking around, like he was saying, ‘Okay, what else you got for me?’ ”
Adam Lee Brown was born on February 5, 1974, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His father, Larry, had grown up there, the second of six children in a blue-collar Baptist family that went to church on Wednesday night and twice on Sunday. Larry’s father, Elmer, was a World War II veteran who drove a truck for an oil company, a business he ran for months when the owner was out with a serious illness. Larry told his father that he should insist on a raise, but Elmer replied that it would be taking advantage of an unfortunate situation.
“It wouldn’t be right,” Elmer said when his family gathered around the dinner table one night, “and you do what’s right, no matter what.” Then he reminded them, “God is watching us, all the time.”
Once dinner wrapped up each weeknight, Larry’s mother, Rosa, would rush off to the night shift at a nearby shoe factory, coming home in time to make breakfast and send Elmer off to work. Larry began contributing to the family coin jar in elementary school with a paper route, and later, as a teen, he baled hay in the summer and worked in chicken houses year-round. He attended Hot Springs High School—in the same class as future Arkansas governor and U.S. president Bill Clinton, though they didn’t know each other. During his campaigns, when Clinton talked about the character-building life of hard-working Arkansans, Larry knew firsthand what that meant. His junior and senior years in high school, he washed logging trucks on the weekends and the other five days worked three to eight in the morning at a doughnut shop, finishing the shift with just enough time to run to school.
It was a hard life, but the siblings were tight, the parents loving, and as a family, they were content—never wanting for anything, even though they didn’t have much to speak of. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Elmer would tell Larry, “and when you’re done, you’ll be stronger for it.”
After high school Larry became an electrician’s apprentice, and a year later he began dating Janice Smith, a high school senior who had grown up only a few blocks away but with a very different family situation. She never knew her father and was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents instead of her mother, who had to work two jobs in order to support her three children. The situation didn’t really bother Janice, though. She loved her grandparents dearly and respected their values, one of which was “Always do the right thing.”
As she grew older, Janice realized that her mother’s priorities centered around money. Even though it was out of necessity, it still “didn’t feel right.” Following her heart did, and she eloped with Larry Brown her senior year.
Their relationship was all about fun and young love, but Janice knew she wanted a family someday. Larry was already working hard to be a provider, making money as an electrician and attending night school in Little Rock to earn his license so he could join the union.
His maturity did little to endear him to Janice’s mother or grandparents, however, who didn’t like the idea of Janice being married while still in high school and persuaded her to have the marriage annulled. They broke up, and within a week a heartbroken Larry was notified that he was a potential draftee for Vietnam. He didn’t wait to be drafted, so he went to the recruiting office in downtown Hot Springs and chose the Navy, whose signals intelligence and radio operator schools seemed most in line with his work as an electrician. Also, everybody he knew, including his father, an infantryman who helped hold the line at Bastogne in World War II, advised him to stay off the ground.
He and Janice wrote back and forth wh
ile he was in boot camp, and when she closed a letter with “Love ya,” he proposed again. This time they were married in the backyard garden of her grandparents’ home. He was twenty; she was nineteen. After the wedding they drove to Florida and moved into a trailer near Naval Air Station Jacksonville, where Larry was based.
He was ordered to war as a radioman on a P3 bomber that patrolled the coastal waters of Vietnam, eavesdropping on and hunting Chinese submarines and other enemy watercraft. Returning home from his tour in time for the arrival of their first child, Larry Shawn Brown, on December 13, 1968, he deployed again less than a year later. He didn’t see much action, but he did see the shell shocked, the wounded, and the body bags as they passed through his air base en route to hospitals or home. He also watched small teams depart for secret missions—elite volunteers from the Army Special Forces, Air Force Commandos, and Navy SEALs, all operating in the dark and dangerous jungle and its waterways.
When Larry flew his missions, he imagined what the men “submerged” in the jungle below were facing. He held them in the highest regard, and he thought of them every night when he ate a warm meal and crawled into a dry bed.
Once Larry completed his four years of service, he put the war behind him and moved with Janice from Florida back to Hot Springs, finished his electrician’s apprenticeship, and began working for a local contractor. Determined to provide for his family without Janice having to work, Larry earned enough so they could save a little money each month. After three years of frugal living, they had scraped together the down payment on a thirty-thousand-dollar starter house in a subdivision two hundred yards from Lake Hamilton. It wasn’t large, maybe fifteen hundred square feet, but following nearly a decade of tiny apartments and trailers, it felt like a mansion—the perfect home in which to expand their family.
A month before the due date of their second child, the doctor gave Janice some startling news.
“Mrs. Brown,” he said with a smile, “there’s a little something extra I failed to notice before.”
“Extra? Like what?” Janice asked.
“Extra, like an extra baby. You’re having twins, ma’am.”
2
Something Special
WHEN ADAM’S TWIN SISTER, MANDA, was born three minutes ahead of him on February 5, 1974, it was the last time she beat him at anything. Adam was the first to scoot, first to crawl, first to walk, and first to climb out of the crib … and plummet to the floor.
The first time Adam smacked his head as he escaped the confines of his crib was at nine months. While goose eggs and bruises bred caution in Manda, they didn’t faze Adam. He’d cry a bit, then be off exploring. After three such escapes, Larry cut a foot off the legs of the crib to shorten Adam’s fall.
That was one of many safety precautions Janice and Larry implemented to prevent Adam from injuring himself. Janice would often recruit Shawn, older by five years, as a second set of eyes while she rushed to prepare dinner. “Keep an eye on Manda,” she’d tell him, “but watch Adam like a hawk.”
Adam didn’t come with brakes. He loved to climb, be it stairs, fences, or a ladder in the garage. If Adam was missing, the first place his parents would look was up. Soon after his second birthday, Janice glanced out the living room window and saw that Adam had pushed a chair across the back porch and was using it to climb up on the railing—twelve feet above the ground. Before she could react, he stood up tall and jumped out of sight. Horrified, Janice charged outside and down the steps, to find Adam rolling on the ground and laughing. The spanking she gave him was so hard it left a handprint on his bottom. “Never, ever do that again!” she yelled.
A few days later, he did it again.
At age three, Adam climbed onto the kitchen counter and dug into an open can of peaches, slicing his hand on the sharp edge. He stayed calm during the car ride to the emergency room, as they waited to see the doctor, through the exam—all the way until he was about to get stitches and the nurse insisted on strapping him into a papoose-like straitjacket. Crying and screaming, he struggled like a wild animal until he was soaked with sweat and panting. “Help me, Mommy. Help me,” he pleaded with Janice, his lower lip quivering.
Janice and Larry didn’t know Adam had launched himself off the roof of the family car until the roll of film, photographed by seven-year-old Shawn, was developed weeks later.
“That was Adam’s soft side,” Janice says with tears nearly thirty-five years later. “It was also when we knew this was a kid that could not be held down.”
In spite of his strong-willed, unstoppable nature, Adam was a sweet child. As a toddler, he would sit patiently while “Meme”—his name for Manda—wiped his face after meals, then give her a big hug. Well into elementary school, he would climb into his mother’s lap and cuddle. From the moment he learned to talk, he was full of praise for others, complimenting Manda’s crayon coloring, telling Janice how good dinner was, always using “please” and “thank you,” and exhibiting impeccable manners in holding doors open for others and saying “sir” and “ma’am.”
Janice and Larry modeled good behavior for their children. If they were out shopping and a woman dropped her coin purse, Janice would pick it up and hand it back. In case her kids missed the point, she would say to them, “If someone drops something, you help them pick it up.” Other golden words of wisdom were taught at opportune moments: “If somebody falls over, you offer them your hand.” “Would you like it if somebody called you that?” Upon noticing a kid being bullied on the playground, Larry would say, “If you don’t help, you’re no better than the bully.”
“From those little lessons we tried to pound into them,” says Janice, “some of them stuck.”
Through hard work and a tight budget, Larry was able to support his family so Janice could be the full-time, dependable, engaged mother she’d never had. But in the late seventies a bad economy took a toll on construction in Arkansas, the main source of income for Larry, and the family’s savings dwindled. On November 4, 1979, just after the evening news announced that five hundred militants had seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, Janice and Larry sat down at their dinner table to discuss their own crisis: Larry’s work as an electrician had dried up—he’d collected his final paycheck—and their savings would last little more than a month. Christmas was on the horizon, and with a mortgage and a family to feed, Larry had no choice but to follow others in his Arkansas union and find work out of state. He soon left for a four-month contract at a powerhouse in Craig, Colorado.
The kids really missed their daddy, and while the circumstance was completely different from that of Janice’s childhood, the situation of a missing parent was still sadly reminiscent of work taking precedence over family. But she put on her game face and cheerfully reminded the twins, who were four, that it was temporary, while Shawn, who was nine, learned the family mantra: “You gotta do what you gotta do, and when you’re done, you’ll be stronger.”
When the contract ended in Colorado, the closest job to home Larry qualified for was a six-month position in Missoula, Montana. Even on a shoestring budget they could barely pay their bills, so Larry began to entertain the idea of selling or renting out their house in Hot Springs and taking the family on the road. He leased a small house in Missoula, left his Bronco in its driveway, and on April Fools’ Day—fifteen years to the day after his first date with Janice—flew back to Hot Springs to drive his family to Montana.
Be strong, Janice thought, fighting tears as their house—with a For Sale or Rent sign in the front yard—shrank behind them in the rearview mirror. We’re together. That’s what’s important.
Crammed into the front seat of a U-Haul truck, the Browns traveled light: a stack of mattresses, a wooden porch glider, their television set, and a few boxes of kitchen items, toys, and clothes. They rolled into Missoula the day before Easter, taking less than an hour to unload their belongings. Setting up their bedrooms, which meant plopping mattresses on the floor, could have been a depressing start to the
ir new life, but Janice and Larry were determined to make it business as usual. The next day three delighted kids woke up to find a dusting of snow outside and a trail of candy and Easter baskets hidden throughout the house.
By the following week, Shawn, Manda, and Adam were back in school and playing sports, Larry was in his new job putting in as much overtime as he could, and Janice was holding them all to a schedule.
Larry’s contract ended, and the Browns stuck around Missoula long enough for Shawn to finish his baseball season. Then they hitched a horse trailer—loaded with their meager belongings—to the Bronco and headed for Lake Charles, Louisiana. When Larry called his mother, Rosa, to tell her luck was with them and he’d gotten a job at a powerhouse there, she replied that it wasn’t by luck but rather “by God’s grace.” Though Rosa didn’t often thump the Bible at her son, she was quietly concerned for him, his young family, and the road they were on. He hadn’t read the Bible since he’d returned from Vietnam, and her grandchildren had rarely, if ever, seen the inside of a church. As such, finding a church was not an issue for the Browns, whose priorities upon arriving in Lake Charles were renting a cheap house and enrolling the kids in school.
By now it was football season, and Adam was old enough for the youngest division. Manda signed up for the pep squad, and Shawn joined Pop Warner. Whenever Shawn came home from practice, Adam would ambush him in the living room, trying to tackle his older brother, who at eleven was twice the size of the six-year-old. No matter how many times Shawn pushed him away, Adam would come right back at him. Eventually, Shawn would sit on him to get him to stop.