Here in the Valley of Fire northeast of Las Vegas, Adam is home. He knows it intimately, all forty-six thousand acres of it. He taught himself the area’s natural history and can share all kinds of interesting facts about the wildflowers and animals with his hiking comrades. Since 2017, Outdoor Travel Tours, Adam’s tour company, has led folks into the desert so they can fall in love with it too. “This is the most amazing place I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “It consumes me. There are arches, natural holes, and petroglyphs, and all are easily accessible. There are lizards, flowering cacti, and Gila monsters. Four thousand years ago, Native Americans roamed this very land.”
As we hiked into the dazzling Nevada desert, Adam recited the Marine machine gunner description, which he had memorized and recited countless times in his head while deployed to Iraq: “A machine gunner is to provide a heavy volume of close, continuous, accurate support of fire to suppress and destroy all enemy personnel out of small arm’s capability.” Adam had carried this knowledge on a card in his shirt pocket along with a notebook that contained everything he needed to know as a machine gunner. He could disassemble and reassemble his machine gun in three minutes. He took his job seriously.
Toward the end of Adam’s first deployment, an IED blew up a truck carrying three of his comrades, one of whom was a fellow machine gunner. “Why not me?” Adam wondered. “It so easily could have been me.” There was little time to grieve, and they had to continue going out on the next patrol. “We would come back from a patrol and there would be empty beds.” Adam constantly thought he would be next, incessantly fearing his own death. “Imagine going out every day, knowing people are trying to kill you,” he said. “That’s a horrible fucking feeling, just waiting to possibly blow up and die.”
When Adam got out of the military, certain noises and smells brought him back to the war. “I fell into a deep hole and became a fat bastard. Pair that self-image with my PTSD and it was really hard.” To cope, his mind would return to his boyhood stomping grounds on his grandfather’s sixhundred-acre wilderness property in Maine. There he had enjoyed his favorite activities of hunting, kayaking, mountain biking, and hiking. He remembered what his grandfather taught him: there is peace and hope in the natural world.
ADAM EVENTUALLY MOVED TO LAS VEGAS AND LANDED A JOB DRIVING AN armored truck for Brink’s security. In a single casino stop, he picked up $14 million, mostly money that people had lost. It was then that he realized he did not have to sacrifice happiness for a paycheck, so at his father’s suggestion, he became a desert guide for a tour company. One of the companies he worked for was Bullets and Burgers, an outfit for which he guided novices into the desert where they got to shoot machine guns. Then Adam got a phone call from a Marine brother, Tom Gathman.
In Iraq, Adam’s machine gun squad had been attached to Tom’s rifleman squad, part of the First Platoon. They had lived in the same bunkroom for seven months and quickly became friends. When Tom called to ask Adam if he wanted to quit his job as a tour guide and join him on an Appalachian Trail thru-hike the next year, Adam said, “Hell, yes.” Adam knew he wanted to travel, to experience freedom again. “As a Marine, we fought for freedom,” he said, “but I did not have it and I wanted it.”
Prior to joining the Marines, both men had a tendency to get into trouble with the law and both had pending misdemeanor charges. Enlisting in the Marines, however, cleared their records and put them on a more sustainable path. In that sense, the Corps saved their lives. “I didn’t enlist in the Marines for the country,” Adam said. “I needed direction and discipline in my life. The majority of us were kids who didn’t know what we were signing up for at the time. My mission was to stay alive and keep the others next to me alive.” There are many reasons to join the military but, perhaps surprisingly, service to your country is not always number one. According to exhaustive surveys conducted by the global-policy think tank, the RAND Corporation, which offers research and analysis to the US Armed Forces, the overwhelming majority of servicemen and servicewomen cite economic reasons for enlisting. Military service seems to be a job first and a calling second. Some are attracted to benefits like the GI Bill, and others—like Adam and Tommy—are seeking direction in their lives or merely want to get out of Dodge.
I MET ADAM AND TOMMY THE WINTER BEFORE THEY BEGAN THEIR THRU-HIKE. Tom hails from a small town in Pennsylvania, not far from my home, so I invited the men down for dinner to discuss any last-minute trail-related questions they might have and for an overnight stay in the cabin on our property. When I learned it was Tom’s birthday, I baked him a cake, lit candles, and sang. That evening started our wonderful friendship.
When Adam and Tom hiked past my home on the Appalachian Trail, two-and-a-half months after our evening together and a little over a thousand miles into their long hike, I offered them some trail magic—showers, meals, and some “slack-packing”—the term for when a thru-hiker gets to day hike a stretch without the burden of overnight gear and supplies. (With our children grown and out of the nest, Todd and I enjoy helping hikers). I kept their gear and returned them the next morning to the same road crossing where I had picked them up the evening before. I slack-packed them for four days and got to hear more of their stories.
Tom called Adam by his trail name, “Machine.” There were two reasons for the name: he was a machine gunner, and he hiked like a machine. Adam could hike seventeen-mile days in Georgia when most thru-hikers struggled to do ten. “Tom was the only one who could push himself like me,” explained Adam, “and I like to think I was the only one, back then, who could push him to greater heights.” The two men had a lot of fun competing with each other and took turns leading and setting the pace. “Whoever had farts that day was in the rear,” Adam clarified.
Adam did a lot of thinking on the trail. He relived scenes from Iraq, but with each mile he was processing his emotions, doing the thinking necessary to grieve, heal, and grow. Gradually, he replaced those scenes with new thoughts about how to move forward and live better. “I was exposed to fucked-up shit before the military and also in the military,” he said. “I didn’t want to continue living like that.” While in the military, Adam participated in a study on post-traumatic stress. “This shit isn’t going to go away,” he realized. Losing brothers, with no opportunity to grieve but moving on to continue with the mission; getting rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) shot at him, and picking up body parts—it all took its toll.
The VA wanted to prescribe a cocktail of meds for Adam, but he never took them. His troubled childhood showed him what abusing prescription pills looked like, and he wanted nothing to do with drugs. He had even refused prescribed Vicodin in 2009 after a motorcycle accident required seventy stitches. Adam had tried talk therapy before the thru-hike, but it had not been a productive experience. His therapist had been a chaplain in the Middle East, and when Adam shared how he had prayed over dead bodies, the chaplain began to cry. “I felt like the therapist,” he said. “I thought, ‘fuck this shit’ and I left there with more post-traumatic stress than when I came in.”
ALTHOUGH ADAM HAD FOND ASSOCIATIONS WITH NATURE FROM HIS grandfather, he never felt its true power until he was on the Appalachian Trail. On the journey, he finally began to trust people again. He met strangers along the way and started to feel that he wanted to embrace them. “Once you have seen evil in the world, you assume it is everywhere,” he explained. “But I came to realize that I fought for these people. So many things changed on the trail. I also fell in love with Nicole.”
One week before leaving for the hike, Adam met Nicole and fell in love at first sight. For more than a thousand miles, the couple stayed in close contact and talked nearly every day. As a surprise, I arranged for Nicole to be at my house in Pennsylvania when Adam passed through on the trail. “At first, it was really hard for me to deal with Adam not showing any