Fearless (33 page)

On July 13, 2008, U.S. Army soldiers based at a remote command outpost near the village of Wanat in Nuristan Province, Afghanistan, were surrounded and attacked by an estimated two hundred Taliban insurgents. Nine Americans were killed and twenty-seven wounded in what became known as the Battle of Wanat.

Days later Navy admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to the media, saying that “all involved with operations on the [Pakistan-Afghanistan] border must do a better job of policing the region and eliminating the extremists’ safe havens … that are launching pads for attacks on coalition forces.”

Three months after the Battle of Wanat, Adam headed to that very same border region, returning to the northern Kunar District where he had targeted extremists on his initial DEVGRU tour in Afghanistan. On Adam’s first run up “PT hill,” the workout he’d done dozens of times on his previous deployment, a light rain turned to hail near the summit, painting the trail white. A few weeks later, snow flurries announced that winter was coming.

In Virginia Beach the weather was pleasant. Nathan and Savannah were at school, and Kelley was about to head out on a shopping excursion to put together a Thanksgiving care package for Adam when he called, a rarity—generally they e-mailed every few days. She asked Adam what he’d like in the package, but he replied that he needed nothing for himself. “Could you just grab some shoes for the kids here?” he asked. “Smaller sizes, they’re little kids. Some shoes and some socks. Instead of anything for me, just mail those.”

Adam called Janice and Larry and told them the same thing. Says Kelley, “He’d see the Afghan children walking around barefoot or in flip-flops, and it was starting to snow. He’d say, ‘I can’t stand it. It makes me think of our kids. It’s almost winter, and I haven’t seen them wearing anything but sandals. They have got to be freezing.’ ”

Kelley purchased twenty pairs of shoes from Target; Janice bought another twenty. Both women shared the request with their respective church congregations, who promised more donations.

In the Kunar, the early winter months were accompanied by rocket and mortar attacks that pounded the outstations. This unusually heavy enemy activity—generally reserved for the insurgents’ spring offensive—punctuated the ever-present danger of an ambush or an attack.

Says a Green Beret who worked with Adam during the deployment, “Here we are, packing extra ammo and grenades when we went outside the wire, and Adam was stuffing his ruck with shoes, knocking on doors in the villages, keeping track of their sizes on a notepad and telling them all that more were on the way. He’s got his weapon slung and he’s on his knees in the dirt, helping kids who have never tied a shoe in their life. This is a war zone, and he’s passing out shoes.”

Ultimately, Adam would distribute over five hundred pairs of shoes (and socks) to the children of Kunar Province.

A decade before, when Adam had shown up at Jeff Buschmann’s apartment in Corpus Christi, Jeff would not have believed that his drug-addicted best friend could ever rise to the top of what he considered the most elite fighting force in the world. He also wouldn’t have believed that two kids from Hot Springs, Arkansas, would randomly end up at the same remote outpost in the Hindu Kush mountains at Christmastime.

Adam provided the children of Kunar Province, Afghanistan, with warm socks and winter-worthy shoes during this deployment.

Although Adam had stayed in touch with his friends from Hot Springs by e-mail and phone, he’d missed the Lake Hamilton High School ten-year reunion and it had been years since he and Jeff had seen each other face to face. In early December 2008, Jeff received an assignment to conduct classified intelligence work at an outstation in Kunar Province. He looked at the name of his point of contact and was amazed to see that it was Adam Brown.

Jeff, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, had graduated from flight school near the top of his class, but decided—in part because of Adam’s involvement—to also go the Naval Special Warfare route. He did his stint in the fleet as a surface warfare officer, then transferred to Special Boat Team TWENTY-TWO as a Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen (SWCC) before attending Naval Special Warfare postgraduate school and Naval Intelligence School.

In his role as intelligence officer, Jeff arrived in Kunar and spent the week before Christmas tracking a senior al Qaeda agent who had recently popped up on the local radar. His old buddy Adam accompanied him outside the wire, the two riding their ATVs to outlying villages, meeting with locals, verifying reports, and conducting other classified intelligence activities. “When I was with Adam, no matter what we were doing, I always felt completely safe,” says Jeff. “He never told me he was worried about me, but I knew he was. He would always double-check my gear, and he would go over anything he thought was important to my safety, so thoroughly you would have thought he was kidding.”

On Christmas Eve Jeff pulled out a DVD of the Arkansas High School State Championship—won three weeks earlier by the Lake Hamilton Wolves—that he’d received from a coach. He and Adam had a beer, watched the game, and talked about old times.

“Remember when Richard’s dad paddled our rears in front of the cops?” Adam said.

“I’d forgotten that!” Jeff replied with a chuckle. “That wasn’t too bright, was it?”

On the drive to school that day in 1990, the boys had pointed wooden rifles, props for a school play, out their windows at pedestrians, drivers, essentially anything that moved. As soon as Jeff and Adam entered the school, Principal Williams called them to his office, where two sheriff’s deputies, who had responded to numerous complaints about the two punks pointing guns at people, waited.

“I know both their fathers,” Principal Williams told the deputies, doing his best
to keep the boys out of big trouble. “How about you watch me beat their asses? Will that suffice as punishment?”

Both Jeff and Adam remembered the look on one of the deputy’s faces when he grinned and said, “Yeah, let’s do that.” And they could still feel the sting on their rears as they endured Principal Williams’s wooden paddle.

While both men laughed at the memory, Jeff reflected on how, for Adam, this had been only a temporary reprieve from the Garland County jail. He felt fortunate to have witnessed his friend’s rise from darkness to the top tier of the American military, where he performed a crucial job. Jeff was proud of Adam, thought he was an inspiration, and loved him like a brother, but he didn’t have to say any of that. “Adam always knew what I was thinking,” says Jeff. “We didn’t need words.”

Christmas morning was celebrated with a run to the top of PT hill, where Adam and Jeff posed for photos while holding American and Arkansas flags. “It was cold, but dry—no snow. We did some target practice and worked out with weights later in the day,” remembers Jeff. “Adam talked about how much he loved the seasons back home,
how pleasant the woods are in the fall and how he’d rather just go for a run on an old logging road or trail than be cooped up in a gym.”

Jeff Buschmann and Adam flying their state colors at an observation post a stone’s throw from the Pakistan border.

Christmas morning in Hot Springs “just wasn’t the same without Adam,” says Janice, “even though we felt blessed that Kelley and the kids and Shawn and Manda’s families were all here. We knew we’d been lucky all these years Adam had been home for Christmas; guess we got spoiled. Plus I was always worried when he deployed. He’d tell me, ‘Mom, we are so well trained.’ But I knew he was at some remote location just like the one we’d heard about on the news that had gotten overrun. So yeah, I was worried. And a little sad.”

Once all the grandchildren had opened their stockings, Larry read aloud the e-mail he’d received from Adam that morning. The subject was “Family.”

When Adam returned home in February 2009, he was in excruciating pain. “He had been getting these little blisters on his eye for about a year,” says Kelley. “It was like it
was boiling from the pressure. They’d pop up and then rupture, and it hurt so bad it would knock him down for a couple of days.”

The condition was bullous keratopathy, a swelling and blistering of the cornea, and the dry air of the Afghan mountains had compounded what had already been diagnosed as a “severe case.” The cells of Adam’s cornea could not maintain the fluid balance, causing the cornea to retain water and bulge, pushing against the eyelid. Blinking and movement created blisters that burst.

Adam could have returned from his deployment at any time, says Kelley, “but the man would just not quit. When his leg was broken and his eye would blister up, he’d limp around, and I’d ask, ‘How’s your eye?’ and he’d say, ‘It’s keeping my mind off my leg.’ ”

Because of the severe trauma from the paint bullet five and a half years earlier, the doctor told Adam he wasn’t a candidate for a corneal transplant. The only option was lubricating the eye and controlling the swelling with drops. “Or,” said the doctor, “we can remove your eye.”

With less than two years remaining in his contract, Adam was thinking seriously about leaving the Navy but kept it under wraps to everyone except his closest friends and Kelley. “Talking about retiring and actually retiring are two totally different things,” says Christian, who advised Adam to really consider the decision. “You don’t want to hang up your guns too early,” he told him.

Given Adam’s service-related injuries and nearly eleven years of service, a medical retirement with disability benefits would have provided him with a nice package at any time; he didn’t even have to wait for his contract to be up. “Adam would still not consider it,” says Kelley. “He was going to push through his commitment, through 2010. He said they had trained him to do a job and he wasn’t going to do it halfway. He was going to finish and retire with an honorable discharge.”

Between his last deployment and the next one scheduled for the beginning of 2010, Adam added another commitment to his already full plate: college. Determined to earn his bachelor’s degree, he began taking one course a month in an online university program, with the long-term goal of attending business school. He would not let this new commitment interfere with family or work. “He barely slept,” says Kelley. “I’d wake up and he’d have snuck out of bed after I fell asleep and be at our
desk in the bedroom, working on a paper or studying for a test, a crumpled-up Kleenex where he was dabbing his eye because it never stopped watering.

“He wanted to get an MBA,” she says. “And I didn’t doubt it. He had conquered his drug addiction—my Adam did not fail. You know where he was going to go? He didn’t say he was going to
apply;
he said he was going to
go
to Harvard. Case closed.”

Adam’s eye was surgically removed on July 27, 2009. In simplified terms, it was scooped out and the muscles were left intact for use with a prosthetic eye. As with his hand, the two-plus-month healing process was slow, painful, and “disgusting,” says Kelley, who had a difficult time placing the prescribed drops into his empty eye socket.