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.”
“I gotta go, Itty Bitty,” said Adam. “I’ll call you when I can.”
The notification team was informed that two SEALs, Nate Hardy and Mike Koch, had been killed on a mission in Iraq. At Adam’s suggestion they decided to wait until the next morning to notify Mindi Hardy, reasoning that this new mother with a seven-month-old baby boy should get one last good night of sleep before her world collapsed around her.
Early the next morning, Adam, flanked by two other SEALs and Chaplain Tim Springer, walked up to the Hardy home and rang the doorbell.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” Adam later told Kelley. He barely left Mindi’s side during the long hours of that first day, then he juggled his time between the Hardy home and the team room, planning everything for his fallen teammate—from the memorial service to the military funeral at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington DC.
Then, three days after Nate and Mike died, Louis Souffront, a twenty-five-year-old explosive ordnance disposal technician attached to Adam’s squadron, was also killed in Iraq.
“There was a dark cloud over the command,” says Christian, who found Adam alone in his squadron’s team room the night of Louis’s death, putting together the uniform Nate would be buried in. “Adam was exhausted but determined to make sure everything was perfect.”
Beyond the uniform, Adam cross-checked Nate’s military service records and made sure all his ribbons, medals, and awards were properly credited and exhibited. With Kelley’s help he assembled the wooden shadow boxes that held Nate’s photos, awards, unit patches, and a folded American flag that he would present to Mindi and Nate’s parents from the DEVGRU command.
Adam was a pillar of strength during those difficult early days, according to Mindi. “There was a calm about him,” she says, “like he was a chaplain himself. His arms were o
pen and warm, and he took care of me and watched over me.”
But whenever Adam hurried home for a shower and hugs from his own wife and children, “he cried,” says Kelley. “I never saw him so vulnerable. Telling Mindi that horrible news while she was holding her little baby crushed him.”
Throughout this sad ordeal, Adam sought moments of refuge, comradeship, and ultimately spiritual strength from Chaplain Springer. He told the chaplain the only thing that comforted him was the story of Christ’s resurrection. Springer said he wholeheartedly agreed.
On February 13, just as Adam was confirming the final funeral arrangements for Nate, Christian informed him that Master Chief Tommy Valentine, a highly decorated war veteran from another squadron, had been killed in a high-risk free-fall parachute accident. “When it rains it pours,” Christian said, shaking his head.
Two days later, Kelley joined Adam as he oversaw the side-by-side burials of Chief Petty Officers Nathan H. Hardy and Michael E. Koch, both twenty-nine years old, at Arlington National Cemetery.
A few days after Nate and Mike were killed, a letter written by someone calling himself The Angry American began to circulate around the Internet. Adam printed it out and hung it up in his squadron’s team room:
Last Sunday while most of America was enjoying the Super Bowl, several members of our Task Force were commencing an assault on a terrorist stronghold in Iraq. During the assault two of our brothers from the Navy were shot and killed while clearing a building that was occupied by terrorist insurgents. Ultimately, the building was reduced and all of the terrorists in it were destroyed by the assault force.
Remember these names, Mike and Nate. They were good men doing honorable work in the name of freedom. The terrorists they sought to destroy were responsible for unspeakable acts of evil including the construction of improvised explosive devices and explosives to equip homicide bombers. For those of you who may not understand the enemy we face out here let me remind you that the previous week this group of terrorists took two innocent and unwitting women who had Downs Syndrome, rigged them with explosive vests and detonated them 20 minutes apart in a crowded market causing several deaths and hundreds of injuries. These terrorists used innocent people as unwitting vehicles to destroy more innocent lives. There is good and there is evil in this world. The enemy we face is evil. Mike and Nate were fighting on the side of good to prevent further acts of evil that would result in the loss of more innocent lives.…
Their work is done here now, but there are many of us who will honor their sacrifice by continuing the fight against evil terrorists. They will be remembered through our actions.
For any of you out there who doubt the validity of this war and the evil that resides in our enemy I ask you to study your history again. Over the last 20+ years dating back to the bombing of the Marine Corps Barracks in Lebanon, various factions of radical Islamic Terrorists have been committing heinous acts of terrorism against the free world. We are fighting the same enemy here. The brethren of an evil ideology that spawned the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 claiming almost 3,000 innocent lives.…
While the American media strives daily to erase the memory of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and paint this war as an unjust occupation of a sovereign nation, men like Mike and Nate are out here hunting down and destroying the enemies of the very freedom that allows our media to try and discredit us. Terrorism is real, evil is real, this war is real and real men and women are in this fight because righteousness and freedom are worth fighting for.…
Sincerely,
The Angry American
Five days after the funeral, Adam arrived by helicopter at a remote forward operating base in Diyala Province, Iraq. That night he slept in the bunk that had been Nate’s.
The death toll in Iraq was pushing four thousand American lives lost, more than 70 percent to IEDs planted on roads that coalition forces traveled daily. Adam’s squadron was focused on eradicating the IED and suicide bombing networks prevalent across the country, a mission of “dire importance,” according to the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization. To destroy the bombing networks, American forces created an extensive intelligence network. Once the identities of dozens of the highest-level leaders—a mixture of foreign terrorists and domestic insurgents—were identified and confirmed, the DEVGRU SEALs were tasked with either killing or capturing them in their homes and safe houses, almost always under cover of darkness.
“When you blow a door open, it is just smoke, a black hole,” describes Adam’s teammate Heath Robinson. “At some point, you have to commit to going into that dark void and taking care of business—ready for anything. It could be a guy attacking you with a knife or grenade to somebody shooting at you to somebody being right in your face who you need to immediately disarm. Or, in that same proximity, it could be a woman or a child or an old man. Or it could be one of your own guys who entered from a different breach.
“I use the volume knob to describe the levels of intensity. When you go through that black hole, you are spun up to ten. You come around the corner and you cave in some guy’s head who is shooting at you, then you come around the next corner and there is a woman on the ground with two kids on her lap crying, and bullets are still flying, but you have to lower the volume back down to about a three. You turn down the amps and you calm down the mother, let them know you aren’t there for them, then scoop up the kids and put them outside, then you dial up to ten and go back in and finish the job.”
Known for his compassion, Adam was always the first to do something like break open a light stick for a baby to play with or give a candy bar to a terrified child. But he wasn’t the only one. In a group of men whose business is killing, the fury they release upon the enemy is rivaled only by the humanity they display for innocents caught in the crossfire. On one particular assault, “we’d dropped two guys that were directly engaging us, and there was a third guy winging bullets in our general direction,” Heath says. “The bullets were hitting the walls and there are these kids who got up out of their beds—because they often sleep in the courtyards—and it’s pitch black for them, and they are running around while this guy is spraying bullets all around them. So this huge bear of a guy on our team stops shooting, jumps into the courtyard, grabs these two Afghan kids in one arm, shoots and peels back behind us, and tosses the two kids out of the way.”
Another night at another compound, another strike force of SEALs was under fire, and another teammate, “at total risk to himself,” says Heath, “jumped down from a wall, where he had perfect cover, and into the line of fire where the enemy was randomly firing shots. He started grabbing women and children—five or ten of them—in the middle of this firefight and throws them over the wall. They got bruised up, but better than getting shot.
“Adam and I talked about how blessed we were to work with the most phenomenal team. Every one of them is unbelievably talented, smart, courageous—every word you can use to describe a true warrior of the highest caliber. That is the caliber of the people I work with and the caliber of who Adam was.”
A different teammate describes how he and Adam were going after a bomb maker at another objective when they entered the interior room of a residence. “It all happened real fast; this guy was firing at us, we engaged, there was motion to the right, and Adam spun around but didn’t fire. It was a bed, with somebody under the covers moving around. It takes a lot of restraint to not open up on something like that, but Adam walked over, pushed back the covers, and there was this two- or three-year-old kid. His father was the bomb maker we had just killed. Adam picked him up in his arms and carried him outside.”
Night by night, Adam’s squadron continued to dismantle the enemy IED network.
March 22, Adam and his teammates hit two compounds simultaneously near the foothills of the Hamrin Mountains, where enemy combatants were known to enter Iraq from Iran. Two assault teams and a sniper team went to each of the target compounds—containing five to ten mili
tary adult males (MAMs) apiece and located about a quarter mile apart—patrolling in on foot from separate helicopter landing zones. With the warming temperatures of the impending spring, many locals were sleeping in their courtyards, which significantly increased the need for stealth.
The SEALs were ready to breach the gates of the two compounds when a startled farm animal made a noise and alerted one compound’s militants, who came out of their rooms and began firing blindly into the night.
Stealth no longer an option, the SEALs used interpreters with bullhorns to inform the MAMs they were surrounded by coalition forces and could surrender, an option given whenever possible in these situations. This enemy, however, is often content to die, especially if that means taking “infidels” along, and the firefight continued until every armed insurgent was killed.
Adam operating with SEAL Team TWO in Iraq.
Awakened by the gunfire, the insurgents at the other compound had also fought to their deaths. Upon searching the two dwellings, the SEALs discovered a plethora of intelligence that would dispel any lingering doubt that al Qaeda was present in Iraq and that both bomb-making materials and bombers had come from Iran. Seventeen terrorists and insurgents were killed that night. At least six of them were positively identified as suicide bombers because of their shaved bodies, consistent with final preparation for suicide operations.
In the early morning hours, the two groups of SEALs met up at their rally point between the compounds, prepared to fly out together. That’s when Dave Cain noticed from the way Adam was walking that he appeared to be in pain. His head was also hanging uncharacteristically low.
“You doing okay, Adam?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m all right. It’s just, you know … it’s Easter.”
Dave associated the holiday with painted eggs, chocolates, and a bunny. Now Adam told Dave he was troubled that he’d slain men—sent them to hell—on the morning of his Savior’s resurrection.