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coalition forces.
    That much was certain.
    While prepping his equipment for the mission, Adam folded the Arkansas flag his brother, Shawn, had given him. He always carried it into battle, tucking it proudly between his body armor and his uniform.
    Every SEAL who encountered Adam Brown knew in short order where he was from. He loved his home state right down to the dirt. “It is the one state in our country that can sustain itself,” he’d tell you while explaining his Arkansas Bubble Theory. “Y’all could put a bubble over it, cut us off from importing anything from the rest of the world, and we would not only survive, we would eat well and prosper.”
    The one thing Arkansas doesn’t have is an ocean, and when Adam entered the U.S. Navy’s grueling twenty-seven-week Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training course in 1999, he’d swum in the sea only a handful of times. At the beginning of BUD/S, an instructor had told his class, “The reputation you forge here will follow you to the teams. Your reputation here will define you.”
    Adam’s reputation certainly did define him, but the stories that made him a legend began long before BUD/S in the southern proving grounds of Hot Springs, Arkansas. That was where he earned the nickname Psycho for taking on the biggest players on his peewee football team, where he boldly faced a loaded shotgun, where he jumped from a moving vehicle off an interstate bridge into a lake, where he saved a life, eluded capture, and performed his first nighttime raids. Says Adam’s high school football coach, Steve Anderson, “He did things a Navy SEAL would do long before he was a SEAL.”
    His reputation continued among his SEAL buddies in DEVGRU. “He didn’t have a ‘fear bone’ in his body,” says Kevin Houston. “Tough as nails” is the way Brian Bill describes Adam. Heath Robinson likens him to a bored-out engine without a regulator: “He was a machine, wide open in everything he did—full throttle.” With that mindset came injuries, but according to Dave Cain, a SEAL who was there whenAdam’s fingers were severed in Afghanistan, “He could endure pain better than anybody I’ve ever known … if he felt it at all.”
    In truth, Adam did feel pain—lots of it. He was just incredibly determined and resilient, a toughness that began at birth. “He came out injured,” says his mother, Janice. According to his father, Larry, Adam was ready to be born three minutes after his twin sister, Manda, when “the doctor discovered he was breech. So they had to dislocate his shoulder in order to get him out.”
    “He barely cried,” says Janice. “The doctor put his shoulder back in place, and while Manda was still crying after coming into this cold and bright new world, little Adam was quiet, sort of curious, looking around, like he was saying, ‘Okay, what
else
you got for me?’ ”
    Adam Lee Brown was born on February 5, 1974, in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His father, Larry, had grown up there, the second of six children in a blue-collar Baptist family that went to church on Wednesday night and twice on Sunday. Larry’s father, Elmer, was a World War II veteran who drove a truck for an oil company, a business he ran for months when the owner was out with a serious illness. Larry told his father that he should insist on a raise, but Elmer replied that it would be taking advantage of an unfortunate situation.
    “It wouldn’t be right,” Elmer said when his family gathered around the dinner table one night, “and you do what’s right, no matter what.” Then he reminded them, “God is watching us, all the time.”
    Once dinner wrapped up each weeknight, Larry’s mother, Rosa, would rush off to the night shift at a nearby shoe factory, coming home in time to make breakfast and send Elmer off to work. Larry began contributing to the family coin jar in elementary school with a paper route, and later, as a teen, he baled hay in the summer and worked in chicken