Scars and Stripes

Tim Kennedy, Nick Palmisciano

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781982190934
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

From decorated Green Beret sniper, UFC headliner, and all around badass, Tim Kennedy, a rollicking, inspirational New York Times bestselling memoir offering lessons in how to embrace failure and weather storms, in order to unlock the strongest version of yourself. Tim Kennedy has a problem; he only feels alive right before he's about to die. Kennedy, a Green Beret, decorated Army sniper, and UFC headliner, has tackled a bull with his bare hands, jumped out of airplanes, dove to the depths of the ocean, and traveled the world hunting poachers, human traffickers, and the Taliban.But he's also the same man who got kicked out of the police department, fire department, and as an EMT, before getting two women pregnant four days apart, and finally, been beaten up by his Special Forces colleagues for, quite simply, "being a selfish asshole."With his vivid and stirring voice, Scars and Stripes "is an authentic gut punch of a life lived with grit, resiliency, and a never-quit attitude in the face of heartbreaking failures and incredible success that every American can learn from" (Patrick Murphy, veteran and former United States Under Secretary of the Army). Kennedy reveals that failure isn't the end—rather it's the first step towards unearthing the best version of yourself and finding success, no matter how overwhelming the setbacks may feel.

CHAPTER ONE THE CREEK GANG

I move quietly through the woods in standard fire team wedge formation. It’s a balmy day, to say the least. The trees above us nearly block out the sun, save for a few streaks of light that illuminate tiny pockets of the forest floor, but the heat is relentless anyway, rolling in underneath the leaves and hanging in the air like a thick blanket. It feels like I am sitting in a sauna. The only things missing are the old naked dudes and the ability to leave. My skin feels dry, even though I can feel myself sweating through my clothes. Nature is baking us and there is nothing I can do about it. I push my discomfort to the back of my mind.

I have to stay focused.

People are counting on me.

I am the point man, meaning I am at the front of the movement. Nick is behind me to my near left. Andrew Hackleman is behind me to my near right. Both are set about five to ten meters away, depending on how the terrain spread us out. To my far left some twenty meters away is Chad Koenig. David Gaddis is behind me in the team leader position, controlling our movement as we parallel the creek that will bring us to our objective.

This mission came down the pipe only twenty-four hours ago. This was the big one. High-value target. Dangerous man. Every unit, team, and agency in the region was looking for him, thus far to no avail. Now it was on us. We scoured the maps of the region as well as his last known location and, as we had been taught, developed several courses of action. All the other units were looking for him in the city or in the nearby towns.

That’s not where we now hunted. We determined that he most likely would have moved from the city into the woodline at its outskirts, which was almost a jungle this time of year, and hidden himself in the deep bramble, walking the creek bed until he could disappear entirely or link up with someone who could help him escape.

We had spent the early morning making our last-minute preparations. We choked down our food, checked our packs, and readied our weapons. When we were satisfied with our pre-combat checks, we stepped off into the unknown as we had hundreds of times before. This was different, though—he was our biggest prey yet. There was a tinge of excitement (and yes a little fear), but as I looked to my right and left, there was no group I’d rather have with me as we once again crossed the Rubicon.

It was the second or third hour of our painstakingly quiet movement along the creek bed when I felt an uncanny change. The foliage transformed dramatically. Something wasn’t right. It looked… planned. The natural brush had broken up and our walk was easier. The plants were now tall, lush, and green, and shaped like… marijuana.

Holy shit, we are walking through someone’s secret pot field.

As I scan the horizon there is pot as far as the eye can see. Our crew seemed to register this all at the same time as we exchanged glances. Where there are drugs, there are drug dealers, and drug dealers tend to not like their product being messed with.

Now don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I am necessarily worried. After all, I am with a badass group of pipe hitters who can handle anything that comes our way. The issue is that this giant field of weed added another problem. We don’t care about the weed. We just don’t want to have to deal with drug dealers thinking we care about their weed at the same time we’re chasing our dangerous high-value target.

That thought leaves me as I hear a twig break in front of me. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I give the hand signal to the team to freeze. My hands are clammy as I double-check the grip on my weapon. I hear another snap. Then another. Now I can see some movement twenty meters away in the field of weed. I can feel my adrenaline spiking. That fight-or-flight response is starting to set in. It washes over me as it has so many times before.

I motion to the team to follow me to the target and begin to cover the last twenty meters as quietly as possible. My heart is beating so hard I can see it moving through my shirt. I worry he will hear it and it will give away our position.

The boys are right behind me. They’ve moved into a tight wedge and we’re almost shoulder to shoulder.

Suddenly a man seems to explode out of the weed field. He’s unshaven, wearing a weird T-shirt, and is about two feet taller than I am. Honest to God, he’s like if André the Giant and Charles Manson had a kid. He’s the scariest goddamn thing I have ever seen in my entire life.

I scream out loud and drop my weapon. Before it hits the ground, I am already ten feet away from him at a full sprint. My team is right alongside me, also weaponless and scared shitless.

This is a good time to mention I am eleven years old. My brother Nick is thirteen. And the rest of our elite team, that my dad affectionately called the “Creek Gang,” were also tweeners. The “weapon” I dropped ten feet back was a stick I had sharpened into a point. The giant dude who had just scared the ever-loving shit out of us was a guy who had just escaped a mental institution a few days ago and was considered dangerous. He was all over the news. The police had been looking for him nonstop. We found him.

We just weren’t ready to find him.

We thought we were. Our CONOP (concept of operations) to find him had been perfect. Our analysis of the operational environment was spot on. Our tracking tactics were solid and our movement disciplined. We had even practiced how we would fight him when we found him.

But when the rubber hit the road, we learned the threat of real violence is a whole lot different than our imagined violence. The plan had been to subdue him with our spears. We practiced hitting each other’s arms and legs and parrying potential fist or knife attacks. Then once we got him down, we were going to tie his hands up and march him back through the woods where we would deliver him to the police, winning acclaim for our heroics. To my eleven-year-old brain, that plan seemed not only reasonable but foolproof. But as Mike Tyson says, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

But now, as I was seeing a green blur whizzing past my head on either side and getting hit with the occasional tree branch, the reality was that there was a little piss dribbling down my leg, and I was running faster than I had ever run in my entire life.

I learned right then and there that I had no mastery over violence or fear. I was pissed (no pun intended) and a little ashamed. I didn’t want that kind of weakness in me.

---

In case you haven’t figured this out yet, I’m an atypical dude, with atypical parents, and an atypical childhood. I don’t exactly know how I ended up like this, but here’s my closest guess as to the recipe that made me: To start, add three cups of “I grew up in the ’80s.” So, like many of you Gen X types, every day was an adventure. There were no cell phones. No helicopter parents. We left in the morning and came home when the streetlights came on. Then add two teaspoons of my mom, a highly educated, classically liberal woman who valued books, art, and dance. She’d probably fit best teaching at an elite East or West Coast college than anywhere else on the planet. Now, add three heaping tablespoons of my dad, an elite counternarcotics officer who literally was going up against Pablo Escobar on the daily at the peak of the War on Drugs. He had seen the worst in life and wanted his children to be tough, quick-thinking, and able to survive in any condition. He valued martial arts, gun work, and more risk taking than most parents would feel comfortable allowing. Finally, add one bucket of my insurmountable drive to prove I can do anything and you now have an idea of what makes me “me.”

Where did that drive come from? My parents have a theory.

I was born with a bad heart. Specifically, I had a ventricular septal defect. Just in case everyone reading this book isn’t a cardiologist, a ventricular septal defect is when you have a giant hole in the middle of your heart between the chamber that pumps out the good oxygenated blood and the chamber that pumps in the crappy unoxygenated blood that just ran through your entire body. So my good blood and my bad blood were always mixing, leaving my newborn body without enough oxygen. Basically, from zero to three I always had a bluish hue and did not look healthy. I had low energy. None of it was good. My mom and dad were faced with every parent’s worst nightmare as the doctors floated the idea that I might not make it. The doctors expected to have to perform open-heart surgery to keep me alive, which is still dangerous now but in the ’80s was a total crapshoot.

My parents had a choice. They could do the surgery now, and if all went well I’d live, albeit in a weaker state than the average person, or they could wait to see if I would heal on my own, knowing I might grow too weak to survive the delayed surgery and die.

My parents have tremendous faith. They wanted me to have a chance at a normal life. They postponed the surgery and asked their friends to take part in a prayer circle. Simultaneously, I was given a steroid that was meant to strengthen my heart (which I stayed on for years).

While Little Timmy remained blue and had 25 percent of the aerobic capacity of other kids his age, he apparently did not give a shit. I remember none of this, but I am told I was a force to be reckoned with. I started to walk at eight months. I began climbing out of my crib, unfazed by the fall to the floor after getting my stubby legs over the top. At eighteen months, when I saw my older brother swimming in our pool, I just jumped in, also wanting to swim. When I sank and was pulled out by my father, I grew angry and jumped in again. In fact, my first memory is of being underwater, sinking, looking up at my father through the blurry lens of the pool water. He let me stay in the drink… for a bit.

For most people that memory alone is probably something to be unpacked in therapy, but it’s gonna have to get in line. I’ve got a lifetime of near-death, traumatic, and generally absurd experiences that have shaped me into who I am today… but it all started with that bad ticker.

An airplane needs air resistance to gain lift. A sword needs to be beaten and shaped to be made sharp and hard. I needed to be held back in order to move forward.

And, since then, I’ve never stopped moving forward.

---

Recess. Thank God. My favorite part of the day.

I have mixed feelings about kindergarten. I love being around all the kids. I love learning new things. I really like my teachers. But I absolutely despise having to sit down all day. I can handle a few minutes at a time, but hour after hour of just sitting and listening to people is painful. The last ten minutes before recess are the worst. I just stare at the clock and it seems like that glorious moment will never come.

Now I’m here. Thirty minutes of freedom. The air is fresh. The sun is shining. And I’m going to run around on my little stubby legs and have a blast!

Then I see her.

Laura LaCuri walks across the playground, and I can’t stop looking at her. She has the prettiest eyes, the cutest nose, and she is just so sweet. It doesn’t matter if you’re an athlete, a nerd, smart, or slow, she is sweet to you every time. I never get nervous around girls, but there is something about her that always gives me butterflies.

She looks different today, though. Her mom just cut her hair, and as much as I like Laura, her mom kind of did her dirty. She looks like someone put a bowl around her head and just cut in a circle. It doesn’t matter to me, though. She’s still adorable.

As I run around playing tag, red rover, and anything else we dream up, I see a group of boys walk up to her. I know bad when I see it, and these guys look like they have bad intentions. I start walking toward them.

As I get close, I hear their ringleader. “You’ve got boy’s hair! Are you a boy now?” he mocked. “Boys don’t wear dresses!” another buffoon chimed in.

Laura starts to cry. I am filled with rage. As the bullies take off laughing, I follow them. They climb onto the giant wooden jungle gym everyone alive in the ’80s knows and loves. I walk right up to the ringleader, and I punch him in the face. And then, to add injury to injury, while he’s crying and holding his face, I push him off the jungle gym.

Moments later, I find myself in the principal’s office. My parents are on their way and they are not happy. They arrive and we are told that I will not be invited back for the first grade.

This doesn’t bother me: It was worth it.

I hate bullies.

---

The wind whips through my hair as the horizontal rain bites through my shirt. My cheeks are red with cold, and my white T-shirt is stuck to my body like a second skin. There’s so much water coming at me that I find myself having to clear my nose and throat every few minutes by hocking a lugey. Store signs have blown down and tree branches are everywhere; the roads are littered with them, and there is not a car to be seen. I squint through the rain at the crew moving quietly with me: my brother Nick, Chad, David, and the brothers Cunningham, Jared and Jordan.

While most people are hunkered down in their homes during this El Niño tropical storm, the Creek Gang is busy thinking up ways to take advantage of this exciting opportunity. As soon as we saw the creek start to swell, we drew up our plan. The Salinas River, in my native San Luis Obispo, California, is usually a long and lazy river until it leaves my neighborhood. Then shortly thereafter, it turns into a Class IV rapids, meaning it gets faster, steeper, and meaner pretty quickly. Today, with the gift of this tropical storm, the river is trucking! And, those Class IV rapids are now Class V or VI, meaning they are pretty much a guarantee of sudden death to anyone who falls in the water.

For the Creek Gang it was mission impossible, and it was too good to pass up.

Our plan, should we choose to accept it, and we all did, was to steal some inner tubes, go a few miles away from my house to a bridge that crossed the river, jump off the bridge with the inner tubes, and ride this water highway all the way to the mouth of the rapids. That morning, we had slung a rope with handholds across the river. The plan was simple. As we hit the mouth of the rapids, we were going to grab the rope, bail on the tubes, and pull ourselves to shore. Was it a perfect plan? We thought so.

I feel exhilaration as we descend on the tire store in a sprint from the woods. We each grab an inner tube and sprint back even harder, disappearing back into the tree line. Adrenaline tickles my skin and pushes energy out of my eyeballs as we run as fast as we can away from the scene of the crime and toward the bridge. (To be super honest, it was easy. No one was really manning the store because of the storm, the inner tubes were outside unwatched because they had little value, and even if someone did see a group of kids grabbing inner tubes, it’s doubtful they would have thought much of it. But in our minds, we were on the verge of capture.)

When we finally arrive, a little out of breath from our imagined race from authorities who didn’t exist, hunting for inner tubes that no one cared about, we are shocked at the water levels rushing past the bridge. Typically, the drop from the road to the water is about twenty feet. Today it is ten feet, and it is absolutely roaring! That of course makes this mission all the more exciting.

We find the largest truss under the bridge and line up, one by one, inspired by the Army commercials where paratroopers run out of the plane in a perfectly disciplined line as they plunge into the abyss. Once lined up, one of us, I think my brother Nick, yells “Go!” and we all drop into the river.

My feet hit harder than I expected, and because of the size of the tube, I fly through the hole slapping my face on the surface as the water shoots up my nose. My hands, attached to arms that are now in a “V” above my head, clamor to find something to hold on to so that I don’t get separated from the tube. They find a home on the inner edge, and I manage to pull my head up a little more. My ears ring with the rush of the water around me, echoing through the tube. I feel like I’m in a tunnel. I pop my hands up a little more and finally feel I have a solid grip. I pull myself up and get my feet onto the tube so that the only thing still in the water is my butt.

I start counting. One… two… three… four… five… plus me makes six! We’re all here.

Looking around, it seems like all of us had some version of the same struggle I just had, but our young minds quickly forget our previous peril, and we are all grinning ear to ear. If anyone was hot on our tails, they’ll never be able to...