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Brown and Sproles talk about three times a week and those calls mean a lot to both of them.

"When I hear from C it brightens my day," Sproles said in a telephone interview with Houston television station KRIV from Afghanistan. "Anytime I can get in contact with him it feels real good knowing that my friend is right there to talk to me whenever I need to talk to him."

Brown always loved football, but hadn't been offered a scholarship to play in college and had given up on a future in it when Sproles suggested they enlist. About a week later Mississippi Delta Community College offered Brown a scholarship.

He went on to play there for two seasons before spending the next two seasons at Louisiana-Lafayette. As a senior he had 101 tackles, three forced fumbles and two tackles for loss.

About 300 members of his unit, the 114th Field Artillery Regiment, were deployed to Afghanistan early this year and are expected to remain there for 16 to 18 months. Brown said he will fulfill his military obligations in a little more than a year.

Greenwood is a town of about 19,000, deep in the Mississippi Delta where jobs are scarce and almost 34 percent of the population lives in poverty. Brown said he joined the Army because he didn't want to end up on the street, selling drugs or worse. He parents left when he was just a baby and he and his two brothers were raised by their grandmother Magnolia Brown.

There was plenty of love, but very little money as the ailing woman struggled to raise the children. She died when Brown was a sophomore in college.

"Everybody probably got a hard life, but mine, it was really hard," Brown said. "Growing up without parents in the household when your grandmother's sick and working and she can barely afford food to be in the house was tough."

At a young age the boys, C.C., whose real name is Ceandris, and his brothers Lavincio Brown and Freddrion Brown discovered football as an escape from their troubles.

Lavincio Brown, 24, said the trio often played football in the graveyard because "it had the best grass." He said his brother always had a knack for the sport.

"Even when we were younger he was the hardest hitting person out there," he said in a telephone interview from Greenwood.

"He was always a hard worker. He was determined to be great."

C.C. Brown was devastated by the death of his grandmother but said it only pushed him to work harder to achieve his goals.

"It inspired me a lot because I knew she wanted me to do right and she wanted me to take care of the family after she passed away," he said. "She would be happy because you could pretty much say I was the first person in my family to do something really successful."