Sam Brown, a retired U.S. Army Captain and current leading Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Nevada, shared his personal story of being seriously injured by an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan.
He detailed his long recovery, including meeting his wife while in the ICU, and his subsequent determination to return to active duty.
“The day that I got wounded we were supporting this international mission—the U.S., the Brits, Canadians, Afghans, and other coalition countries—and we were working on moving this turbine to a dam on the Helmand River,” Brown said.
Brown’s campaign emphasized his military service, business background, and family values. He highlighted key issues such as immigration, the economy, and education, criticizing the current senator’s approach.
“So we were part of this sort of security element for that. One of the fellow platoons in my company—a fellow platoon—was attacked and ambushed during that operation. We were the nearest friendly forces to respond and provide support. As we were moving into position to provide support that’s when my vehicle hit the roadside bomb and left me with really severe burns, wounded three of my guys, and killed one of my guys,” he said.
“I was medevacked back to San Antonio to the Brooke Army Medical Center there,” Brown said. “At the time, I was—I still believed for months that I was going to be able to recover. I thought that ‘oh, hey, Doc patch me up, get me better, send me back to my guys.’ It took me months to really reconcile just how bad off I really was. It turned into a three-year recovery instead of just what I was hoping would be a couple of months.”
“My wife first met me when I was in the ICU, in a medically induced coma wrapped with gauze,” Brown said. “I looked literally like a mummy wrapped head to toe. That’s how she first encountered me. She sort of tracked my recovery and one of the things that, I guess because I couldn’t be down-range with my guys, I looked for ways to sort of help and encourage others.”
“So in the midst of my recovery I would check in with my healthcare providers and say ‘is there anything I can do for you?’ or ‘is there anyone else I can go encourage?’ I’d do these things to take my mind off my own pain and my own recovery, and I guess Amy saw that and was attracted to that. My toughest moment in the recovery was not the physical pain and the rehabilitation from that. It was my heart was breaking because I had given myself to my nation and I had come back so severely disfigured and wounded that I was struggling to believe that anyone would ever love me for who I am because I looked so grotesque at the time.”
“A chaplain one day, I was talking to him, he said ‘Sam: don’t worry, one day you’ll meet someone who sees through your scars and sees your heart and falls in love with who you are there.’ He was right. Amy did. She loved me despite my condition and the long journey we had ahead of us and married me. We’ve been married for almost 15 years now and we’ve got three beautiful children—a 12-year-old son, a 10-year-old daughter, and an 8-year-old son. They’re the joy of our life and we both feel a strong conviction.”
“Amy also served in the military. She actually deployed to Iraq after we got married. We just love this country so much,” Brown said. “The generation of Americans who are not in a position to set the conditions or the circumstances of what the next will inherit as adults, that’s part of what drives us in this pursuit of running for the U.S. Senate.”
Brown believes that Nevadans have been negatively impacted by Democratic policies and aims to bring about change.
“To me, it’s one of the strongest indicators yet that Nevada is going to be one of the most contentious states and one of the best opportunities for us,” Brown said. “The Democrats are seeing numbers that they fear. There’s no reason they would invest or commit that much money early on. There’s certain to be more as well. I take that as a really good sign for us. Here’s the dynamic: This is a David versus Goliath type race. Jacky Rosen, as you might recall, was handpicked by Harry Reid at the height of his power and was effectively guided in through her Senate race back in 2018. She has had just this cordon of power protecting her and installing her since she first got into office.”
“That continues through Chuck Schumer today. Whereas, contrasting that to who I am and my campaign. This is a campaign that is powered by grassroots. Four years ago, I was a small business owner and a family man who in my off time was out knocking doors and rallying for President Trump in his reelection. Today, to be a frontrunner candidate with 94 percent of my donors being small dollar donors, this is a true David versus Goliath moment and frankly something I’m excited about.”
“One hundred percent they feel it,” Brown said. “When you look at where people are energized, you have people who get energized positively about something and you have people who get energized negatively about something. The Democrats are really failing right now to create any sort of energy around their candidates. In fact, with the presidential, kind-of primary on their side—we have the caucus on our side—Steve Sisolak was out there along with Gavin Newsom campaigning for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. They literally had an event as someone’s garage and had maybe 30 or 40 people there. On the same, President Trump had thousands of people at his rally to caucus event this past Saturday. So there is a huge disconnect between the energy in this state and what people believe in.”
“Those two issues [immigration and the economy] are major concerns for Nevadans as well,” Brown said. “The tragedy of the border crisis is it doesn’t have to be this way. President Trump demonstrated what securing the border looks like. Joe Biden has those same tools at his disposal yet has done nothing but pursue legislation to ‘give him the power,’ but that’s a bald-faced lie and I believe that people see through that. The thing about Jacky Rosen that is specifically offensive to folks is she sits on the Homeland Security Committee.”
“She has had for the last five years direct oversight. She should be helping hold the administration accountable on our border policies. Yet, it wasn’t until I started calling her out that she returned to the border for the first time about two weeks ago. Her previous visit to the border was in July of 2019. This is a dereliction of duty and it’s something Nevadans are fed up with.”
“On the economy, that is a bundle of issues. Here’s the sad reality for us here. We have the highest unemployment in the nation,” Brown said. “By the way, we see there are major companies out there that are laying off tens of thousands of people in recent days. Nevada is almost always hit the hardest when we have layoffs and when we have a downturn. But we have the highest unemployment in the nation. We also have the highest gas prices in the nation, so when people go to the fuel pump we have the highest prices in the nation as well.”
“So, that combination makes affordability of living really tough on folks. We’ve got a senator who just yesterday, Jacky Rosen tweeted, demanding the Fed lower interest rates to help people with affordability. She doesn’t understand economics—and it’s not her place to make that demand anyway. She has the tools at her disposal. Why don’t we cut government spending? Why don’t we return back to American energy independence? Those are things within her purview that would help Nevadans.”
“So you have the border, you have the economy, you have energy kind of bundled in there, but the next big issue that really impacts voters here is education,” Brown said. “Our schools, unfortunately, rank with the lowest performing scores in the whole country. The Democrats have just continued to sell out their agenda and their policies which are driven by the teachers unions. This has reduced access to school choice for parents and for students. In fact, our governor, one of the things he ran on was trying to increase opportunity for parents and students in this last legislative session and the Democrat-controlled Assembly here just stonewalled it and shut it down. This is something that we’ve got to get creative and help empower parents to be able to deal with these failing schools and these policies of the teachers unions.”
“I do believe that there will be a sort of a continuation of having to reconcile where we’re at,” Brown said. “A lot of pain was inflicted upon Nevadans during COVID under Sisolak’s orders and Biden as well. This is something that a lot of small businesses haven’t fully recovered from, or they’re just hanging on by a thread out there. There is this kind of ominous feeling that economic downturn is coming. When you look at these manufacturing companies in this state and the supply chain issues, while most things are accessible they’ve got suppliers going out of business. There are ominous signs here and for those that are still making it there’s not optimism the way that the Democrats want us to believe. ‘Oh hey, the stock market hit an all-time high.’ Well, that doesn’t necessarily translate into peoples’ everyday lives in terms of small business owners and individuals here.”
“This is the playbook that the Democrats have used which is gaslight their voters and tell them something that isn’t. The risk that they have right now—the Jacky Rosens and others across the nation—is that Americans have been so ill-affected by their policies for so long and Democrats have told them ‘we’re going to do this for you, we’re going to do that for you’ and in general and across the board most people’s lives are worse off now than they were four years ago,” Brown said.
“I think that what they basically have is that they’re going to lose credibility. So when Chuck Schumer goes out there and spends $36 million against me or for her over the next nine months I believe it’s going to be falling on deaf ears because people have been bamboozled for so long and there’s a lack of credibility at this point. That’s my sense. We’ll see how that plays out over the next nine months.”
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