Fearless (16 page)

At 3:30 a.m. Kelley would rise and make a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and bacon or ham and wake Adam up at 3:45 with a cup of coffee. He’d wolf down the food, pull his clothes on, and they’d be on the road by 4:00, Adam snoozing with his head on Kelley’s shoulder. She’d wake him up when they arrived at the gate between 4:30 and 4:45, and he’d push her nose like a button, kiss her on the lips and forehead, and say, “Bye, Itty Bitty.” He’d drop off his duffel of sparkling clean clothes in his room (everybody was assigned a room, even those who lived off base) and line up on the concrete meeting area called the grinder, ready for PT at 5:00 a.m.

By the time Kelley was back on the freeway heading east, Adam was already either sweating from a combination of push-ups, sit-ups, dips, and pull-ups; wet and cold from a trip into the Pacific; or enduring being a “sugar cookie”—jumping into the ocean and then rolling around in the sand. After running anywhere from two to six miles, he’d eat a second breakfast with the single guys, who stayed on base. “You cannot eat enough” is a BUD/S instructor’s mantra; it’s impossible to replace the calories burned on a daily basis.

Unable to go back to sleep, Kelley would spend the hours before going to work prepping for dinner, cleaning the house, and taking Sidney for a longer walk. Weekends
were for recovery for both Adam and Kelley. On Saturdays they’d sleep in late and watch movies, and on Sundays they’d regain their spiritual strength for the upcoming week by attending church.

Kelley came home for lunch one day, after three weeks of this schedule, feeling unusually exhausted. She sat on the couch, closed her eyes, and woke up after an hour. In the past, she couldn’t nap if she tried, but the following day the same thing happened. “Maybe you’re pregnant,” a coworker suggested.

“No,” said Kelley. “Of course not.”

But after dropping Adam off the next morning, she bought a pregnancy test at a pharmacy and rushed home to take it. Positive. “Oh, Lord,” she said aloud. “Really?”

Returning to the pharmacy, she bought two more tests; both were positive.
Right now? Right at the start of BUD/S?
she thought. Beyond the shocking reality of impending parenthood, she was worried about putting Adam into a tailspin.
Okay, how am I going to tell him?
she asked herself.

That evening she didn’t say a word about the pregnancy during the drive, just got Adam home and put him in a bubble bath. Then she sent Sidney into the bathroom, her collar hooked up to a balloon that read, in big letters, “Congratulations! You’re having a baby! ”

Standing outside the door, Kelley waited for a reaction but none came. Finally she walked in, saw that Adam hadn’t noticed the dog or the balloon, and handed him a small plastic stick.

“Honey,” he said, “I’m fine. I feel fine.”

“No, no, no,” said Kelley. “It’s not a thermometer. See this?” She pointed to the pink line and then the balloon and said, “It’s a pregnancy test, baby. I’m pregnant.”

They stared at each other, for a minute or more.

“Okay, this just makes it even more important,” said Adam. “I
have
to get through BUD/S.”

A
S A NEW FATHER-TO-BE
, A
DAM TACKLED
the gauntlet headfirst. On his boat team he chose the front-left paddling position, next to Christian on front-right—arguably the two toughest positions. Together they dug deep with their oars, first to crash through the cresting waves that broke over them as they paddled out through the surf, racing the other boat teams and battling painful “ice cream” headaches brought on by water temperatures in the high fifties.

During the long, rigorous paddle, his boat crew would try to rotate out with him but Adam routinely refused. “ ‘Ah got it,’ he’d say in that deep Arkansas twang,” says Christian. “I would get so mad, because if
he
wasn’t going to switch,
I
wasn’t going to switch. And I was getting smoked—he could suck it up more than anybody.

“Competitively, Adam was my nemesis. I’d push it as hard as I could, and we were neck and neck running, neck and neck on the obstacle course, same with swimming, and it just annoyed me. In surf-torture they’d make us lie down and link arms in the sand, freezing cold waves splashing over us, our teeth chattering like we’re running a jackhammer, and I’d look over at Adam next to me, and he was blue from the cold and grinning, like he was loving it. I remember thinking,
What is driving this guy?
”

With Hell Week about to begin, Adam stood before the performance review board. He had passed the fifty-meter underwater swim, underwater knot-tying test, and drown-proofing test. He had finished the twelve-hundred-meter pool swim with fins in under forty-five minutes; one-mile bay swim with fins in under fifty minutes; one-mile ocean swim with fins in under fifty minutes; one-and-a-half-mile ocean swim with fins in less than seventy minutes; two-mile ocean swim with fins in under ninety-five minutes; obstacle course in less than fifteen minutes; and four-mile run in boots and pants in less than thirty-two minutes.

But he needed to work on his swimming times, the review board told him. He’d barely made the two-mile ocean swim within the ninety-five-minute time constraint, and the next two-mile swim had to be finished within eighty-five minutes, with the final two-mile swim in phase three in under seventy-five minutes. The fact that the board was coaching Adam, not reprimanding him, meant the instructors liked him. He had continually exhibited the teamwork and can-do attitude they were looking for.

Ninety-eight students entered Hell Week: five days of relentless, round-the-clock physical and mental hazing with only four to five hours of sleep the entire time. At its end, Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura made a guest appearance, calling out the ceremonial “Hell Week is secured!” to Adam, Christian, and the sixty-three other students who remained. Ventura, whose real name is James Janos, had graduated from BUD/S Class 58 in 1970 and served during the Vietnam era on Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) TWELVE. He shook hands with the men and told them they were one step closer to being part of the greatest fraternity in the world. “Don’t give up,” he said.

Later, the soft-spoken base chaplain Bob Freiberg gave a personalized Bible to each of the sixty-five, letting them know that they didn’t have to read it “or even keep it.”

After thanking the chaplain, Adam opened the book and read the inscription:

Adam knew exactly what he was going to do with his camouflage-covered Bible—but first he had to make it through the rest of BUD/S.

“You’re beautiful!” was the first thing Adam said to Kelley as he stumbled to the car—the first time he’d seen her since the start of Hell Week.

“You’re delirious,” she said with a laugh. “How you feeling?”

“I’m just fine. How are
you
feeling? Everything okay? How’s our little baby?” He rubbed Kelley’s belly, which didn’t yet show any sign of being pregnant, and she said, “Hungry.”

“Me too,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

Adam was asleep before they reached the freeway, and at home Kelley got him bathed, fed, and into bed, where he slept for another fifteen hours. “I have to cut ten minutes off my time or it’s done,” he said to her as soon as he awoke, referring to the two-mile ocean swim. “I’ll get rolled or they’ll drop me.”

A student who couldn’t pass all the requirements could be dropped completely from the course or, if instructors saw potential, rolled into the following course during any of the three phases of BUD/S. This meant that if Adam couldn’t pass the two-mile ocean swim, the instructors could roll him into Class 227 at phase two. While waiting for his new class to get to the second phase—which would take about two months—he would have to maintain his fitness level and assist the instructors.

He had three weeks to improve his time, and he knew he’d already given his all just to make the ninety-five-minute cutoff. With rigorous training he had improved his strokes and bettered his time by the final week of phase one, but not by enough.

“I got a call from Adam before this big open-ocean swim, and he asked us to pray for him,” remembers Larry. “We had the whole church praying for him on that day. I was at a men’s prayer breakfast when a friend, Ted Smethers, prayed aloud that Adam would not only qualify, he would beat his best time by so much that it would be evident to everyone that God did it, not Adam.”

On the crucial day, Adam came in at under seventy-five minutes. He not only cut twenty minutes off his prior best time, he also beat the required time by a full ten minutes.

The second phase of BUD/S, dive phase, is considered by many to be as difficult as Hell Week. In pool competency, students must perform specific tasks underwater—sometimes with mask, fins, and dive gear; sometimes without—displaying perfect technical procedures without panic while being harassed, to the point of near drowning, by the instructors. It’s not uncommon for an unconscious student to be hauled out of the pool, vomiting water. This was most often the case with mentally tough students like Adam who wouldn’t give up—students who would rather die than quit.

But no matter how much he tried, Adam could not pass pool comp, and when the review board informed him that he would be rolled to the dive phase of the next
class rather than dropped, he was both angry with himself and relieved. He also added up the months in his head: Class 227 would finish very near Kelley’s due date.

Twelve students were rolled during pool comp, including Christian, medically rolled for stress fractures in one of his legs. Also rolled was a fellow student five years younger than Adam named Austin Michaels, one of the single guys whom Adam and Kelley invited over for home-cooked meals on weekends.

When Adam said grace before dinner one night, Austin realized that they shared the same religious beliefs, and he was stunned when Adam confided in him about the dark times he and Kelley had gone through. From that point forward the Browns and Austin were family.

Adam and Austin began the second phase of BUD/S for a second time with SEAL Class 227. Christian Taylor was also on the roster and ready to go, his fractures now healed.

“You again,” said Christian when he saw Adam, only half joking.

A couple of weeks later Christian and Adam were facing each other in the ice bath, teeth chattering and lips turning blue, after getting in trouble for putting away their dive gear before the instructor told them to.

The ice bath was a trough of freezing cold water, affectionately referred to as a slushy by instructors who used it as a motivational tool. After adding a pitcher of ice cubes to the water Adam and Christian were sitting in, their steel-faced instructor said, “The only way you’re getting out of this slushy is to make me laugh. One of you better have a joke or something that is going to make me laugh.”

He dumped another pitcher of ice into the trough, crossed his arms, and stood over them like an emotionless robot.

Shivering violently, Adam said, “Hooyah, instructor, I have one for y’all.” Class 227 gathered around while Adam relayed a story that had been infamous at Lake Hamilton High, an embarrassing incident at a party that happened to a buddy and the buddy’s girlfriend, both of whom drank too much
and
suffered food poisoning. For full effect Adam told the self-deprecating story, detail by detail, as though it had happened to him.

The account included meticulous descriptions of bodily functions occurring
simultaneously—to the horror of the poor fellow’s girlfriend, who had a front-row seat to it all. By the end, the instructor was laughing so hard that Adam and Christian could barely make out his words: “Pays to be a winner, Brown.”

Which meant they could get out of the ice bath.

While “cold, wet, sandy” is the theme for BUD/S, “Pays to be a winner” is the mantra of instructors who demand teamwork—anybody who hasn’t pulled his weight is long gone by phase two—yet also create competition by offering rewards, usually rest, to those who finish first. The winning boat team on a course out through the surf, around a buoy, and back to the beach gets to lounge in the sand while the other boat teams do it again. A poor result on the obstacle course might find an individual running it again that night while the rest of the class eats dinner. Instructors know that every student is exhausted, but “winners” prove they can dig deep when they’re at
their breaking point, finding that something extra when their bodies tell them nothing is left.