 Brown played baseball and basketball in high school, and eventually made it onto a semi-pro baseball team in Fayetteville, North Carolina.In a 2009 interview with "The Year in Special Operations", he commented on his short-lived semi-pro baseball career, saying, "I played three games with them and found that life couldn't be sustained on $3 per game".Losing interest in college, and with his father in Vietnam, he walked into a recruiting office and joined the Army as an infantryman.