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houses year-round. He attended Hot Springs High School—in the same class as future Arkansas governor and U.S. president Bill Clinton, though they didn’t know each other. During his campaigns, when Clinton talked about the character-building life of hard-working Arkansans, Larry knew firsthand what that meant. His junior and senior years in high school, he washed logging trucks on the weekends and the other five days worked three to eight in the morning at a doughnut shop, finishing the shift with just enough time to run to school.
    It was a hard life, but the siblings were tight, the parents loving, and as a family, they were content—never wanting for anything, even though they didn’t have much to speak of. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Elmer would tell Larry, “and when you’re done, you’ll be stronger for it.”
    After high school Larry became an electrician’s apprentice, and a year later he began dating Janice Smith, a high school senior who had grown up only a few blocks away but with a very different family situation. She never knew her father and was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents instead of her mother, who had to work two jobs in order to support her three children. The situation didn’t really bother Janice, though. She loved her grandparents dearly and respected their values, one of which was “Always do the right thing.”
    As she grew older, Janice realized that her mother’s priorities centered around money. Even though it was out of necessity, it still “didn’t feel right.” Following her heart did, and she eloped with Larry Brown her senior year.
    Their relationship was all about fun and young love, but Janice knew she wanted a family someday. Larry was already working hard to be a provider, making money as an electrician and attending night school in Little Rock to earn his license so he could join the union.
    His maturity did little to endear him to Janice’s mother or grandparents, however, who didn’t like the idea of Janice being married while still in high school and persuaded her to have the marriage annulled. They broke up, and within a week a heartbroken Larry was notified that he was a potential draftee for Vietnam. He didn’t wait to be drafted, so he went to the recruiting office in downtown Hot Springs and chose the Navy, whose signals intelligence and radio operator schools seemed most in line with his work as an electrician. Also, everybody he knew, including his father, an infantryman who helped hold the line at Bastogne in World War II, advised him to stay off the ground.
    He and Janice wrote back and forth while he was in boot camp, and when she closed a letter with “Love ya,” he proposed again. This time they were married in the backyard garden of her grandparents’ home. He was twenty; she was nineteen. After the wedding they drove to Florida and moved into a trailer near Naval Air Station Jacksonville, where Larry was based.
    He was ordered to war as a radioman on a P3 bomber that patrolled the coastal waters of Vietnam, eavesdropping on and hunting Chinese submarines and other enemy watercraft. Returning home from his tour in time for the arrival of their first child, Larry Shawn Brown, on December 13, 1968, he deployed again less than a year later. He didn’t see much action, but he did see the shell shocked, the wounded, and the body bags as they passed through his air base en route to hospitals or home. He also watched small teams depart for secret missions—elite volunteers from the Army Special Forces, Air Force Commandos, and Navy SEALs, all operating in the dark and dangerous jungle and its waterways.
    When Larry flew his missions, he imagined what the men “submerged” in the jungle below were facing. He held them in the highest regard, and he thought of them every night when he ate a warm meal and crawled into a dry bed.
    Once Larry completed his four years of service, he put the war behind him and moved with Janice from Florida