Fearless (31 page)

“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 open 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:

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 military 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.

“Man,” Dave said, “I don’t understand how you can do what we do and be religious.”

“One, I’m spiritual, not religious,” Adam replied. “And two, I can’t believe you can do what we do and
not
be.”

The actions of the DEVGRU squadrons, targeting the networks of suicide bombers and IEDs in late 2007 and early 2008, nullified the Hollywood perception that tier one teams are reserved for the occasional high-level mission, training for weeks at a site built to replicate their target before embarking upon that mission.

“These guys are so good at what they do,” says an officer who oversaw Adam’s squadron, “because they have an op almost every night, sometimes more in a single night than guys did in their whole careers pre-9/11. They never stop training, sure, but nothing compares to on-the-job training.”

Between February and April 2008, Adam and his squadron teammates killed 117 enemy combatants and captured 152. For his part Adam was awarded his first Bronze Star with combat valor. The citation reads,