An American Hero’s Story of Patriotism, Grit, and Leadership: Tim Kennedy

The following remarks were delivered during the Opening Session of the 93rd General Meeting on May 12, 2025. It has been edited for content and phrasing.

INTRODUCTION: Tim Kennedy is a retired U.S. Army Green Beret who enlisted in 2004 and served in some of the most challenging environments around the globe. Beyond his military career, Kennedy gained fame as a mixed-martial arts (MMA) fighter. His ability to combine physical prowess with mental toughness has earned him a reputation as a leader both inside and outside the octagon.

In addition to his military and athletic accomplishments, Kennedy founded Sheepdog Response, a tactical training and self-defense company, and Apogee Cedar Park, a charter school. He has also been featured on numerous TV shows, including History Channel’s “Hard to Kill” and “Hunting Hitler.”

MR. KENNEDY: How are you guys doing? There’s still snow on the mountains. In Texas, we don't get to see snow very often. And when we do, the entire state shuts down. We had the snow-pocalypse that came about three or four years ago, and we had, prepare yourselves, 3 inches of snow.

We all face different types of adversity and different types of struggles, and temperature is no exception. We humans are very adaptive beings, and we adjust to the places where we work. That's why we all look different. We have different skin colors. That's why a powerlifter looks way different than Simone Biles, the gymnast.

I'm going to talk a lot about myself, but after that introduction, there's nothing really else to say. I guess your big takeaways are like this guy is dumb and he just won't die.

And to all the moms out there, happy Mother's Day. In particular, to my mom, because she actually said that multiple times, “Man, he's dumb and he just won't die.” I joke a little bit, but as we talk about adversity, pain, struggle, and being able to work in a meritocracy. You work in a field where, if you make a mistake or aren't paying attention to detail, there can be significant, catastrophic consequences. It’s similar to my world, both in fighting and in the military. I’m still in the military, and I'll proudly serve until they say that there's no use for me.

I also have a nonprofit, a nongovernmental organization. We enter conflict areas to rescue people who become stuck or trapped there. In the past five years, we were in Afghanistan. I'm sure you saw the videos of people falling from the planes, trying to hold on to wheel wells. The story of the Pineapple Express, which was me and three other guys on the ground evacuating people out of Afghanistan – Americans and our allies. There were a bunch of incredible organizations that were part of that, and not a single person to take credit for the success of what was one of the scariest and most horrific periods of my life.

What I saw in Afghanistan was more horrific than being deployed to Afghanistan as a soldier, as a Green Beret, as a sniper, or in Iraq during our hunt for (Abu Musab al-) Zarqawi. We'll talk about that later. It’s a pretty cool story.

Go forward a few months; I'm on the border of Mexico working to counter human trafficking, drugs, and smuggling as a senior enlisted advisor to a Joint Operations Task Force. Then, after Mexico, I end up in Ukraine. When Russia crossed the border, many Americans who lived abroad were affected. I don't know what's going to happen in India and Pakistan, but there are tens of thousands of Americans in both countries. And India and Pakistan don't really care about Americans the way that Americans care about Americans, so we'll be there as well.

In October, we moved to Israel immediately following the terrorist attack to help evacuate the tens of thousands of American tourists who travel to Israel. Over the past five years, it's been a pretty intense life. After 20 years in Special Operations and 18 years as a professional fighter, something that became very clear is that I've never had the opportunity to be successful with luck, or if I take this jacket off, there's no “S” in there. I'm a 5-foot-11 hairy troll. So how has there been so much success? How did we manage to privately relocate more than 10,000 people from Afghanistan within 10 days during the withdrawal? This wasn't the government. Those weren't C-17s. These were private movements of people. How were we able to smuggle people out of Israel when pretty much every single plane had been shut down?

We had a Fox News correspondent, Ben Hall, in Ukraine. It’s a really sad story. He wrote an incredible book (“Saved: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home”). A Russian ordinance struck his vehicle, and everyone else died. He was horrifically wounded. He was on his way into this area of Ukraine and was on the phone with Fox News when the line went dead. Jennifer Griffin, who is the Department of Defense correspondent, ran down the hallway to the Joint Chief of Staff and said, “I think something just happened to our Fox News correspondent.” And he said, “Well, the American military is not allowed to go into Ukraine right now. This is peak war in Ukraine.”

Jennifer then ran back down the hall to where she could get her cell phone and called Sarah Verardo, my friend and co-founder of Save Our Allies. Sarah then called me and said, “Hey, we have a guy in Ukraine that just got blown up. We need to find him, and we need to get him out.”

Super simple, right? I was like, thanks, Sarah. When my phone rings, and it's Sarah on the line, it's usually, “Hey, do you have a Geiger counter, and would you be interested in going to Pakistan tomorrow?” “No, I don't have one. And no, I am not interested, but my bags are packed, and I'm ready to go.”

We were able to find Ben Hall, who was surely going to die. We put him on the train that belonged to the president of Poland (Andrzej Duda), who was having a secret meeting with (the Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy. We took him on that train to the border of Poland, where a Blackhawk was waiting. This man had lost limbs and was on the edge of death. We had to forge the Secretary of Defense's signature to allow the Blackhawk to be positioned on the border of Poland and Ukraine, so we could sneak Ben onto this aircraft and then put him into the American military system that is the best in the world. We have the best surgeons in the world who deal with amputations. It's a sad thing that, after 20 years of war, we have become remarkably skilled at it. So we got Ben Hall, and thanks to the Secretary of Defense, or rather his signature, he was able to be put into American military care. He was flown to Germany and then to Brooke Army Medical Center in the great state of Texas. It's an incredible place.

How could this happen? How is it possible that all these beautifully connected and very elaborate plans were executed at such a high level? There are the guys on the ground who are talented and gifted in violence. They're creative. You can draw this picture from a comic book or a fictional story like Jason Bourne.

Let’s go back 20 years to the beginning of my career and the beginning of the vast majority of special operations – the rigorous attention to detail. Look at military uniforms. Look at how we teach people to make their beds. When I walk in, and I have recruits, studs, soldiers, whether from Ranger school, sniper school, or special forces selection, you don’t care where they came from, how much money they make, or what color their skin is. They can either do it or they can't. You paid attention to the details or you didn't, because in this line of work, you can either do it or you can't. You can either pick your friend up and run him out of the building, or you can't. You're either strong enough, you're either fast enough, or you're dead.

Why so much attention to detail? What we have seen throughout history is that how you do anything is how you do everything. That's an easy slogan, right? You hear Gen. Jim Mattis go up at one of the military institutions and say, “The most important thing that you can do in the day is make the bed. And you make it perfect.” Yes, that sounds simple. He's not wrong, but he's not totally right about that being the most important thing. The way we make them make their bed has to be perfect. The way that they wear their uniform has to be perfect. The way that they wear their medals has to be perfect. This is an important attention to detail, because if I tell somebody to take a 240 Bravo machine gun and set it on magnetic azimuth of 240 degrees – I didn't say 241 and I didn't say 239. I told him to put that gun at 240. A mistake in that could cost lives. It could cost everybody's lives. And that's the idea of how you do anything is how you do everything.

That's not new. Gen. Mattis didn't come up with that. And if you go back to the Bible, you'll see scriptures that talk about how if you can be faithful in the small things, you can be faithful in the big things. And every industry has these small details that we have to pay attention to.

Military and fighting – how I throw a jab, and I return that jab back to my chest. Anybody box here? Is that where you put your hand up after you throw a jab? Definitely not. That's how you get knocked out. After you throw that jab, that jab comes back to the chin to protect my face, because immediately after I throw that punch, that guy is going to be trying to counter. That relentless attention to detail is paramount.

Now, I want to go back to my mom and back to a little kid who was born broken. I was born in 1979. And I had a bad heart murmur. The doctors told my parents, “This kid may not survive the first few weeks, and if he does, he’ll never be an athlete. He’s never going to be strong; he’s never going to be fast. He’s going to struggle his entire life. We recommend open-heart surgery.”

This isn’t 2025 infant surgery; it’s 1979 open-heart surgery on a tiny kid. My parents struggled to figure it out. They prayed and ultimately decided not to go that route. They let that baby struggle. Remember, this is the era of the camcorder. I can go back and watch the tapes of this small baby fighting to breathe. I began crawling early because my brother, who is 21 months older and like a good brother should be, was not gentle. So I learned how to be tough early. There's always this chip on my shoulder. A chip because I was small. A chip because I didn't understand why: Why is my friend faster than me? Why is my friend taller than me?  Why is my friend stronger than me?

Just like the best diamonds, it takes pressure to be formed. I didn't understand that, but I'm grateful. I'm writing my second book called “The Purpose of Pain.” My first book, “Scars and Stripes,” is about the scars that you carry. They're a testament to the things you've overcome and the challenges you've successfully faced. As for stripes in the military, there are two different types. You have one on this side of the sleeve and then your rank and then another one on this sleeve, which is how much time you spent in combat, how much time you've had in the military, and your rank. Obviously, all three of those tell a very specific story.

My really good friend and Chief of Staff, Afshin “Af” Aryana, a command sergeant major from the 7^th Special Forces Group, has served in the military for 21 years. He’s spent almost five years in combat. He has a beautiful wife, Courtney, and two amazing sons. However, over the last 22 years, he has spent five of them in active combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. When you look at his sleeve, it has line after line of his time that he spent in combat. He's really, really, really good at it. And similar to me, he had many struggles. In “The Purpose of Pain,” I discuss the beautiful thing that is very human in nature: How we adapt.

Iron sharpens iron; the chaff in the wind; the hotter the fire, the purer the gold; every single one of those expressions exists for a very clear reason that ultimately when we have to struggle and fight against something, a better product comes on the far end of it.

If I deadlift, I pick the weight up and do three, four, five, or six reps, and my body goes holy crap, that was heavy. Because it was so heavy, I have to use my legs, posterior chain, back, shoulders, and chest. Those have to be stronger to do the same thing again tomorrow, so the body changes it. This forces the body to change. The mind and the soul are really similar in that regard where you're supposed to face constant struggle, challenges and adversity for you to ultimately grow and for us to get better at things.

I was an MAA fighter for 17 years. And I fought for the world title not once but twice, and that's pretty awesome, but I was never called a world champion. I'm a two-time loser for the world championship. My dad, who was a talented athlete, asked me what do they call somebody who fights for a world title, but doesn't get the title You're the world champion if you win. If you lose, they actually don't call you anything. There's not a name for that. What if you do it twice, though? Is there something that they call you then? No, Dad, there's still nothing, just like a two-time loser for that.

I lost title fights to Jacare Souza (via unanimous decision in 2010) and Luke Rockhold (via unanimous decision in 2012). I would never go back in time and change anything. But going back and watching, both those fights went the distance and were razor-thin decisions. It's one of those where we're both standing there watching our blood drop from our face onto the canvas and we have no idea which hand is going to be raised – both of us in both of those fights, we're just holding our breath. And then you hear, in my case, the other guy's name. It's the worst. But is it?

I am so happy that I lost my last two fights of my career (to Kelvin Gastelum in 2016 and Yoel Romero in 2014). Had I won either of those fights, because I had a big name and was really marketable, as a soldier and war hero, it would have been easy for them to book me for more fights. And I don't know how long I would have fought. I have a lot of friends who fought way too long into their lives, and now they're struggling with a variety of issues from CTE and TPI to orthopedic issues. We saw with Muhammad Ali what happens when you get punched in the head too many times. I got punched in the head a lot of times. I also got blown up a bunch of times. Those two things should not go together. What's great for the brain? Let's have him get hit and kicked and choked and then occasionally just blown up. Does that sound like a great idea? No, it’s a bad idea.

In “The Purpose of Pain,” I’m not an expert on pain; I’ve just experienced a lot of it, as my wife has as well. We have some friends staying with us now. Five days ago, they called us at 11 p.m. Their son has been struggling with just sickness after sickness. We think he's getting asthma. He's getting weird skin rashes, too, so we think some of his organs might be failing. He's having constant bowel problems, too. Ultimately, we find out it's mold. They're freaking out as their 10-year-old son is fighting for his life. So what does a good friend do at 11 at night when you get this call? You tell them to pack their bags, come to our house, and we'll figure this out. There were lots of tears – out of frustration and a little bit of shame, because we should have known, we should have understood, we should have figured this out, we should have identified it earlier. They’re doing all the right things. And it was such a cool little snapshot about the importance of being faithful in the small things.

The mother is incredible. How many times had she called all these doctors and all these specialists, only to have a home inspector come and look at some random things? They thought it might be an allergy, so the home inspector was looking at the window to figure out if there were drafts. And he went to pull up the window, but it was molded and rotted when he did. The inspector was there for something else, but it was her being faithful in all these small things that led to this discovery of the problem.

When I was a small kid, I struggled to figure it out. I was raised in a home with a very clear line between right and wrong. My father was a narcotics officer. This is the war on drugs. There's this guy, Pablo Escobar. My dad stole a plane of cocaine from Pablo Escobar. That's my dad. Kind of cool. He goes to Costa Rica, gets this plane, and brings it back to California. This was probably a bad plan for my dad and his teammates, but they took little pallets of cocaine and sold it to local drug dealers, the distributors from central California who were going to run it up to San Francisco, down to Los Angeles and San Diego, and east into Colorado and Nevada. In one week, they arrested every single one of the distributors and regional sellers. It was awesome. According to my dad, they didn't lose a single gram of cocaine. I said, “Sure, Dad, got you. It's perfection, I'm sure.”

I lived this crazy life. I can remember we're in West Covina, California, for the California Narcotics Officers Association. It's 90/10, men to women, and the vast majority of the guys are kind of like bearded dudes that you wouldn't let near your children, but they're absolutely great humans; they just look really scary. We had just had dinner and went out to the car, a 1981 Chevy Suburban, 1MPL-507 was the license plate because I still remember it clear as day. We get in there, and I hear this scream. It was the first time that I had ever heard that pitch of a woman screaming for her life. And my dad, cool as a cucumber, I think I'm maybe 4 or 5, he literally turns to my mom, Paula, and tells her to stay with the kids. We sit in the car for what feels like an eternity. I see lights and hear sirens, and eventually, a whole bunch of uniformed dudes show up. My dad comes back, shaking a little bit, gets in the car, and we drive back to the hotel, and that was our night. It's just what you do. I don't even know what he did.

Fast forward a couple of months, and I'm at North County Christian School in Atascadero, California, with Laura Licari. She’s Italian. To all the mothers out there, I love all of you and everything you've ever done is great, but if you ever take a bowl and you put it on your daughter's head and you cut that hair, that's a bridge too far. Don't do it.

Laura, whom I have a crush on, comes to school, and one of the boys in the school makes fun of her haircut, saying she looks like a boy. I’m thinking, that’s not cool. So I go up to the top of the playscape, crack him in the face, push him off, and he falls and breaks his arm. I thought I was doing a great thing, which I still kind of stand by. I go into the principal's office, and the principal said, “Tim, there was no remorse; there was no regret; there was no apology.” So I got paddled with a ping-pong paddle. Do those hurt? No, they don't. You get hit with something proper, like a belt, and that hurts. When your dad tells you to go find a stick, and you come back with one of those big, thick ones, and he tells you to get a real one because he knows the actual surface area needs to be fast. When I'm getting paddled by the principal, I look back like, this is weak.

I was kicked out of North County Christian School as a first-grader. However, this starts to set a clear path for me regarding right and wrong, and being prepared, so that you would never rise to the occasion, but rather fall to your level of training.

In the military, like I said, I'm not going to tear this jacket off, and I have an “S” there. We were ready to go and see Ben Hall in Ukraine because we had spent thousands of hours training. Because of our attention and vigilance to constant training and constant discipline, when the phone rang, we were able to go and not rise to the occasion but fall to our level of training.

Was it safe to go into Afghanistan? Was it safe to go into Ukraine? Was it safe to go into Israel? When we really thought that was going to be an immediate regional conflict with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah all coming together, backed by Iran, probably a little bit by China and Russia, so initially what they wanted was a catastrophic response, but we didn't know. The only way we could be safe was with what we were in control of. And we were in control of ourselves. We were in control of our training. We were in control of our minds. We were in control of our equipment. So what were we in control of?

When you think about it, the millions of little decisions that we make in a day, starting with Gen. Mattis saying you should make your bed perfectly when you wake up. That's just the first of many decisions. So when I woke up this morning, I was talking to a couple of people out in the lobby. I did a little workout in my hotel room after drinking two large bottles of water. I didn't make my bed. It's not my bed. I'm not going to make my hotel bed. They pay somebody. It's an important job for them to do. I work out, go down, have some eggs, have some sausage, have some coffee, then I sit and review my notes. Just a few little things, because what is my mission today? My mission is to present to you something relevant and important to your industry. To do that, I had to do a little bit of research. I had to do my due diligence. I had to understand who you were, what your goals are, and what success looks like for you.

Success for me on this side of the stage involves a lot of preparation. I didn't come in here and wing it. I'm going to rise to the occasion, and I'm going to say something truly profound, and all of you are going to walk away with saying this is so good. That's the guy. He's a smart one. Don't mind his broken nose, his cauliflower ears, and his hairy hands, but hopefully, I give you something because I prepared for it. I spent some time trying to understand what you do. And something that was clear between what you do and what I do is that our rigorous attention to safety, to protocol, to discipline, to code, could be determining life or death.

We are the end result of these millions of little decisions. And I'll encourage you to take a moment to think about all the decisions that you make about your life, about your health, what books you read, how you spend your time, if you smoke, if you drink, how much you sleep, what your relationship looks like with your husband or your wife, because all those things will negatively or positively impact how you do anything. So, how you do anything is how you do everything.

I arrived in Salt Lake City last night. I got in the car and came to the hotel. The lobby here is nice and features two bars. One right when you walk in the lobby, and then if you go down to the left, there's this little restaurant and coffee shop that was not open, but the bar was.

I could go in there, and it's Mother's Day. I saw a couple of girls with rings on their fingers holding roses, clearly given to them by an airline or church, or maybe even by somebody in this industry. I can talk to one of them, but I know they're married. I know they got a flower and I know they got a ring, but those two over there don't. I could go talk to them. I say that how I do anything is how I do everything. If I'm drinking and hanging out with someone who is not my wife, and then the bar closes, we say, “Hey, we'll just go upstairs, open the mini bar, and have a couple of drinks.” We know where that leads to the destruction of a marriage.

One choice is to go and have a bite to eat, then go to bed so I can get up and work out. The other choice is going to the bar and striking up a conversation with a couple of people who are also traveling for work. One choice could have a disastrous and negative impact on everything in my life, including what I do for a living, and the other could have a positive influence on it.

You think that’s just one choice, but it’s not, because I already knew when I walked into the lobby last night after checking in that my alarm was set for 90 minutes before I was going to eat and then come to do the mic check here. I knew I had a certain amount of time. I also have a heart rate monitor called Myzone that has a community of friends. Had I not worked out this morning, they would have texted me and been like, “Hey, bro, just taking a day off, are you?”

However, I had already made several other choices that would make it easier for me to make the right one. It's easy to pull a cork. I've never smoked, but this is just an example. Smoking is easy when you're drinking. So if I don't want to smoke because I don't want to die of emphysema or lung cancer, maybe I don't pull a cork.

When you start paying attention to those small things, it positively affects everything else. Within special operations, monogamous relationships, unfortunately, are not common. When I first got to my team, I was with the person who is now my wife. And I'm not joking, my superior was like, “Man, go ahead and marry her and get your first divorce done, because I'm already on my third.”

I was the only guy in that Operational Detachment Alpha who didn't have a divorce. Twelve guys and 11 have at least one divorce, most of them having more than two. It's a hard life when you're overseas and you have money, you have power, you have authority, you're fit, so you have attraction, so you have to be vigilant. I'm using this as an example. Being able to shoot a sniper rifle at a mile takes the same type of discipline. It requires the same relentless pursuit of mastering something.

And while I think my wife and my marriage are more important than the fact that a 175 grain M118LR, which is denoted for the military sniper round, 7.62x51, or you civilians call it a three weight, travels at 2,900 feet per second. Then, knowing the bullet drop and wind adjustments, and shooting that bullet at a 600-meter target with a 6.2 mph wind is going to move that bullet through 3.6 minutes of angle. And that 3.5 minutes of angle equals one mil on my military radical. It's the same approach to anything you're doing in life that requires discipline. I'm not religious, but there should be passion and excitement about doing this thing that brings joy. I'm going to have a great time with you today, but I can’t wait to get home to my wife and kids. But then I look at other people who are struggling. They don't even want to come home; they're looking forward to their next trip. What choices have you made in your life where having to go to work and get away from your regular life is the right thing?

I love what I do. I love that – I was bragging on Sarah Verardo. I love her. If she called right now and said, “Hey, I need you to go to India or Pakistan tomorrow,” I would counter all joy because I know that's what I'm supposed to do, as do my wife and kids, but coming home would be the sweetest and most wonderful thing imaginable.

I love going to the range. I love it when I lie down behind a new rifle and try to understand the new ballistics. When the 6.5 Creedmoor first came out, I thought it was so cool and so fast. And if you're from Utah and if you've ever tried to shoot an elk with a 6.5 Creedmoor, that elk was like, ouch, and took off running because that’s probably not the best caliber. Go with that 7 millimeter. However, learning something new and going through the process of understanding it was really cool.

I met a fellow here who said he worked for a nuclear company, and I asked if I could get a Geiger counter. I don't know anything about them, but guess what, I'm going to be reading on the plane all the way home. And I'm going to be researching. It was like I have to learn something new, something I didn't think I was going to have to know or learn at 46 years old, but here we are.

You guys want to laugh at me for a second? I'm going to tell a story of me being 20. I'm not good at holding still, and I'm not good at stopping to move in anything. My first real job was as a firefighter/EMT. Then I went to the police academy. I wanted to attend the police academy first, but they wouldn't let you go until you're 21. However, I could be an EMT, and I could go to the fire academy at 18, but I was 16 at the time.

I figured out that if I could enroll in the summer school, because I'm a September baby, then I could start in May and would graduate and get my certificate the day I turned 18, so that's what I did. I started going to EMT and fire academy at 17, so I could have four years of public safety work before I started at the police academy at 21.

I was not long for being a firefighter, because they're supposed to do things in a very strict way. They have their standard operating procedures. For example, if a car drives off the side of a hill and it's all torn up, but I can see the person and they're injured.

The procedure is that all the nerds on the fire trucks pull out all the ropes and repel harnesses, and they're getting the Jaws of Life and all the hydraulic stuff out there. I thought, 'I'll take this crowbar and walk down this hill.' It made perfect sense to me. And I pop the door open, put a tourniquet on this woman's leg. I thought it was super heroic. That's the brain of an 18-year-old.

When Captain Gall was like, “Tim, you could have gotten hurt going down that hill. You could have added to the problem by not being able to help her, you getting hurt, and now we're rescuing two people.” I was like, “Yeah, but you didn't.” He said there are SOPs for a reason. A few months later, we're at a house fire. I'm on the nozzle. Behind me is Allen Linear, another firefighter.

The homeowner was a musician, so he put egg cartons on the wall, carpet and extra insulation to dampen the sound. This is really cool if you're a musician, but it's really bad if you're a firefighter because all that heat stays in there.

I'm on the nozzle and doing a pretty good job of keeping the fire off us, but I was using a lot of water, which was evaporating, and the temperature in the fire just radically rose. What was happening was that water was evaporating and turning to steam, condensing, and then coming back and burning Allen. The top of my helmet was starting to melt and pop. When we finally came out of the fire, I couldn't really see well because the front of the self-contained breathing apparatus had melted and the glass had shattered. There are two layers of glass with three layers of plastic. I shattered and melted my facemask. And my helmet looked like pop rocks on the top of it. Allen had bad burns around the back of his neck.

The entire time, he was trying to pull me out of the fire. And I was so stubborn saying no, I'll just keep going, because I can put this out. That was the second time I was written up. The third and final straw was when I realized I wouldn't make a great firefighter. I was at an apartment complex in Atascadero, California. My pager went off for a suicide situation, and the staging area was going to be at a location on the main road outside of the complex. I heard the address, and it’s about 10 doors from me. I walk down to the staging area, identify myself, and say I’m here to help. This young female police officer was clearly stressed because there was a guy inside the room who had threatened his mother with a knife. He's dealing with some mental health and drug problems, and the police officer didn't know what to do and was waiting for backup.

At this point in my life, I’d already turned professional as a fighter, so we have a lot of bad things happening here. One, I'm not where I'm supposed to be, I'm young, I'm stupid, and I'm egotistical and a narcissist. Of course, I said I'll go in there. I go in there and take the knife from the guy. We put him down, and everybody comes in. That was the third time I was written up.

A couple of years later, when I was 20, I’d started grad school and had just been accepted into the police academy, because I wanted to be Clarice Starling from “The Silence of the Lambs.” I wanted to hunt serial killers. We had a serial killer named Rex Krebs in San Luis Obispo, California, where I was going to school. I was working at bars, and girls would disappear. We found out later that Rex would kidnap them and kill them, but while I was working at the library or one of the downtown bars, I remember that at the end of the night, I could smell the fear on these women because they didn't want to walk home. I would fantasize when I would go to bed that I'd be walking one of these girls home, and this thing would climb out of the bushes, and I, a professional fighter and bouncer, would get him. That was the idiotic brain of a child, really.

At this time, I'm living a kind of peak life. I'm a few years ahead in school, and I have good jobs. And I have three women pregnant, and none of them is the woman that I'm living with. I think I have AIDS. I'm not exactly sure how it worked then, but what I was sure of is that I fought at a cage fight on Halloween night called Halloween Fury for the World Extreme Cage Fighting Championship. Afterward, I hung out with a bunch of ring girls. One of those ring girls later came to my gym and said she was trying to track down all her partners. And on Halloween, I was with her. She asked if I was sure. That kind of hurt. I thought I’d left a little bit more of an impression. I guess I didn’t. Then, she said she had HIV. I'm like, “Oh, great. OK.”

My grandfather, the patriarch of our family, a World War II and Depression Era survivor, is in bed dying of emphysema. And every breath that he takes has slightly less air than the breath prior. I have a lot going on, and I can't emotionally process what I'm supposed to be doing, what I'm supposed to be feeling, or where I’m supposed to go. So I go to Morro Bay, California. I take off all my clothes and set both of my pagers on top of my clothes. I walk out into the water, and I start swimming due west in the Pacific Ocean. The sun is not quite up yet. And I swim. We grew up swimming in the pool, so I'm a really fast and good swimmer. I swim a 30- to 35-minute mile in open water, and I’ve been swimming awhile, so I’m every bit of two to three miles out to sea, and now I’m in a fog. Morro Rock, located at the end of Morro Bay, has a foghorn. I can hear it, but every time it sounds like it is coming from a different direction. At this point, I'm just treading water because I'm in fog and trying to figure out which way back to shore.

If you've ever been in the Pacific Ocean, especially on the Central Coast, it's super cold, and I’m naked. I keep treading water, and I'm getting more confused. I can't hear the waves crashing on the shore. I can't hear the waves hitting the rock. And that foghorn is coming from multiple directions, because the fog does weird things.

The sun comes up, and I should be able to see directionally, but I’m still in a fog, so the entire area is starting to light up. The sweet embrace of hypothermia is coming, and I’m thinking this is finally death. At that time, a Coast Guard boat comes up, and the captain is sitting on the bow with his legs dangling because he didn’t want to run over me. This makes no sense because there was no way that somebody could have seen me get into the water. The beach goes down the back side of the dunes. This happened before sunrise, so even if someone was watching, how could they have seen me go into the water? The captain said somebody saw you, called it in, and we went looking for you. There’s just no way that could have happened. Even more unexplainable is how they were able to find me a couple of miles out? But they did.

The captain asked what was going on with me, and I told him that I was having a rough time. He asked me to tell him about it. I gave him the highlights. He’s said, “Man, that’s pretty bad. I was going to offer you to get out of the water, but with all things considered, maybe you should just stay down there.” Yeah, he said that. That wasn't even the meanest thing that he said. The next thing was worse. I said, “Sir, I appreciate your candor, but this water is cold.” He said, “Yeah, I can see that.”

He said, “So he's like, I'm going to throw down this rope ladder and you can climb up onto this boat, but once you climb up here, I want you to have more regard and respect for your life moving forward.”

And that was an easy decision at the time, because he wasn't wrong. I was cold, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay in the water, so I climbed up the side of the boat. And he took those Navy blankets and put them over my shoulders. And it felt like millions of hot-iron needles were jabbing me because it was 100% wool. But it was the best feeling I had ever felt, because I was alive.

You’d think that this would be some significant turning point in my life, like I’d have a course correction or path adjustments. It actually wasn't. It was a few months, on September 11th, when I had gone into work early to get on my computer, when I watched Americans look out of a window and then look inside of a burning building and decide if they're going to jump to their death or if they're going to burn alive. Many of us remember the people falling from the buildings, and a lot of people remember this woman in particular, who was wearing a polka-dot dress. Her last act of conscious thought was trying to hold down her dress as she was falling to her death because she didn't want to burn alive. She had gone into work early that day because she was a single mother and she wanted to be home in time to pick up her kids from school.

When I was watching television prior to that, I was deciding what pants I was going to wear to a party that I was going to attend that weekend. Then it hit me: The uselessness of somebody living in comfort and the crisis that is being comfortable.

This was the beginning. On that day, I walked down to the recruiter's office and tried to enlist. It took 18 months before I was finally able to get into the Army. It took that long before I was able to get a contract with the Special Forces, but that day was really the beginning.

My parents had laid out a roadmap, but I was too dumb, too stubborn to follow it. Now, something is crystal clear: Discipline, standards, and consistency are superpowers. It wasn't that something transformed on 9/11. I have still made many, many mistakes. According to the internet, I'm the worst Green Beret on the planet, or I'm the best sniper who has ever existed. Truthfully, I’m probably somewhere in between, still making plenty of mistakes. But I know for a fact that the more small right decisions that I make, the better and more prepared I am for when those opportunities for big decisions and big moments come.

In what you do, this is important. Discipline is important. Consistency is important. Making sure that you are the best version of yourself so that you can follow code and you can ultimately keep people like me safe. And none of that is possible without being faithful in the small things.

We have these special operations truths. And one of them in particular always rings true to me: You can never prepare for a crisis after a crisis occurs. These are special operations truths. You cannot prepare for something after it has already happened. So, what are we doing during our days? What does our exercise routine look like? What does our sleep look like? What do our relationships look like – relationships with our wives, with our boss, with our partners, with the inspectors? All those things ultimately will influence positive or negatively success or failure.

I’m 25, 26 years removed from that naked, cold kid swimming in the ocean, still making plenty of mistakes. But if there's one thing I've learned, it's that this little amount of consistent discipline when it comes to being faithful in the small things can really save something like a marriage. I'll be married 20 years this September. I get to wear my dress uniform when I go to the Pentagon. And it's cool because it shows the schools that you've attended and the deployments that you've had. And now that we've been out of war for four years, there are already people who don't have combat patches who are in the military. So, when I get to wear my sleeve that displays my time in combat, my awards from combat, and my combat patch, all those things are cool, but none of that is possible without standards, without consistency, and without discipline.

I really appreciate you guys having me today. One, for listening to me ramble on for an hour, and also for what you're going to be doing every single day moving forward. Hopefully, after this, to a degree, you're going to find small opportunities to make small decisions that will accumulate and collectively add up to make big differences later on. Do you have any questions about the shenanigans that has been my life? Yes, sir.

CHAIRMAN ROB TROUTT: I'm interested how you earned your Bronze Star. As an ex-Army soldier myself, I get hyped up about that. As I said earlier, I really missed the brotherhood I had in the military until I found this group. So I'm really interested about how you got your Bronze Star.

MR. KENNEDY: Do you guys know who Zarqawi was? He was a leader of the terrorists network in Iraq, and he’s a bad dude. American Sniper Chris Kyle was hunting the henchmen. Jocko Willink and the Navy SEALs were going after his lieutenants. U.S. Army Delta Force, Army Rangers, and United States Special Forces, the CIF (Army Commanders in Extremis Force), were part of a joint task force that was tasked not to hunt his henchmen, not to hunt his lieutenants, but to hunt him. The job and the deployment of this mission were to find Zarqawi and to kill him. And in early spring of 2006, the last thing that that man saw was an American Special Operations Operative with his foot on his chest as he slowly died from overpressure sickness from his lungs rupturing after we bombed him when we took out every single one of his hideouts that he could go in one single night. Twenty-five targets were hit throughout the night, target after target after target after target. And he just kept running from one to another like a cockroach in the darkness until he went to the last one, where we dropped two gigantic bombs on top of his compound. That deployment got me the Bronze Star.

I was the newest guy on the team. I did not deserve to be there. The men who were part of that operation are absolute giants of humans. I was lucky to be part of that task force. And I was super lucky to be part of the CIF, and each Special Forces group at the time had its own CIF. There’s a group of about 100 of us within each of the Special Forces groups that were regionally pre-positioned in conflict areas. It's real easy; don't hurt Americans and we'll just leave you be. We just want to be.

MR. GREG GOOSSENS: So what happened to the little kid with the heart murmur? He's obviously not standing up there.

MR. KENNEDY: Adversity happened to him. At my first wrestling tournament, I was pinned in a few seconds. At my first ju-jitsu tournament, tampons were being shoved up my nose by my dad because I got a bloody nose, and I was so embarrassed.

I wanted to be a collegiate swimmer, but when I was in high school, my dad very wisely told me, “Son, you have hairy hands, you walk like an ogre, and you talk like a gorilla, so you're not made for the pool; find a different sport.”

Wrestling became my sport, then boxing, then kickboxing, and ju-jitsu. And that chip on my shoulder was the constant adversity that drove me to push harder than everybody else. Like, I'm never going to have the legs to step out on a 12-minute mile on an Army ruck, so I have to do a shuffle, and if I'm going to have to do a shuffle, that means I have to be able to run with 60 pounds on my back for 12 miles. To pass, I'm going to have to run a 15-minute mile, so 12 minutes is going to be my pace. I would take that chip to everything that I could possibly do.

I'm at the California Mid-State Fair in Paso Robles, California, and Seth Koenig is next to me. Not many black guys live in Paso Robles, but Seth is my best friend. I didn't even know what the word meant, but the way they said it, when they said something to Seth, all that told me was I get to fight them. So that chip on my shoulder meant I got to beat that cowboy's ass. Fast forward a couple of months, I'm at the movie theater, and somebody says something slick to my little sister. I don't even know what he said, but I'm going to put him through a telephone booth. And that chip carried from Special Forces selection to Ranger school to sniper school to when you watch me fight on pay-per-view in main events.

Luke Rockhold looks like an Adonis chiseled out of stone. Fighting guys like Robbie Lawler and Michael Bisping, I literally would just beat the brakes off them with tenacity. I would try to drag them to the deepest depths of the ocean and drown them there. And that's where that little boy with the heart murmur was.

MEMBER: Along those lines, did you ever have to have surgery on your heart?

MR. KENNEDY: Nope, never had the surgery. My parents prayed about it. My parents went to our pastor about it. And by no means am I saying not to follow the medical recommendations, but my parents felt compelled. What they saw was a little baby who was angry that he couldn't breathe, that he was angry that he couldn't crawl, and they said that there's going to be enough fight in that to overcome anything. And I think that's just how humans are. My 10-year-old right now is reading a diary of a little girl who hid in an attic during World War II. It's a beautiful diary. And the most beautiful thing about our species is what happens to us in adversity and what happens to us in struggle. Do you see many recipients of the Medal of Honor during peacetime? No. Are there fewer men who would rise to the occasion during peace than there are in war? I don't think so.

We need adversity to rise and be refined. We need to be in the fires of hell for the thing within us to sometimes transform. That's what it took for me. I have beautiful daughters; how am I going to pay for these little girls? When I went to get them into military TRICARE, which is like the military insurance. I was in North Carolina. I walked in with their birth certificates, and they have different last names because their moms have different last names. And they're only a few days apart. I can see how this is confusing, so I'm not disparaging the woman who thought I was committing fraud, but when I walked in, she said, “Hey there, soldier, what's happening here is you're committing a crime.” I said, “No, ma'am. These are my daughters. And I'm on their birth certificate as you see, and that's all required.” She said, “I don’t know who these moms are.” She was insinuating some unkind things. I said, “OK, so how this works anatomically, you have one …” and then I saw this guy running from the back as I was being pretty profane, and he said he’d handle the situation.

So yeah, just getting my daughters registered for insurance was embarrassing, but it was me having to rise to the occasion of being a provider for my family. Otherwise, I would have continued to pick out the stupid Affliction shirts and patched jeans I was going to wear to the party to hook up with the other girl. You know, it was tragic.

Like you said, when you left the service, you had to have community and purpose, then you found it here. I know how destructive I am without community and without purpose. And with those two things comes discipline and consistency.

MEMBER: When will your second book be available?

MR. KENNEDY: Well, the publisher said it's supposed to be out this coming fall or spring. The manuscript is 90% complete. It’s not perfect. It’s about this nebulous idea about the benefits of pain and how transformative it can be. When my daughter was a little 5-year-old, I told her not to put her hand on that, because it was going to be hot. I don't know how many times I said that. Maybe 17,000? But what did she ultimately do? She put her hand on the hot thing and did what? Burned her hand. Then what didn't she do ever again? She never touched it again.

When I was 21, before I met my wife, I was with a woman, a few years older than me, and she was beautiful.  She was cheating on me with another dude her age who had more money; that was a different kind of pain, but I learned that lesson, too. There are a lot of lessons – emotionally, spiritually, and physically. I don't know how it is for you, but I can't learn lessons without pain. So that's the book. And I go through historical examples of it, why certain cultures like the Samurai and the Spartans culturally had pain as part of the rite of passage.

Talking about rites of passage within the military, I realized how important they are when my dad sewed my Ranger tab on my arm using white thread because I was a winter Ranger baby. That's a moment that changed me. It was cold and miserable, and it wouldn't have meant anything if it weren't those things.

Is marriage easy? Hell, no, right? I love my wife, but marriage is not easy. And I would not want a marriage that was. She's my best friend in the world. I think she's incredible. I can’t wait to get home to her. We currently have a family of four staying with us. You think we've got to have like an extra little bit of angst and anxiety and conflict in the house, just having an entire extra family staying with us? Guess who's also at our house? The in-laws, both of them. But I can’t wait to get home.

MEMBER: How mad was your dad when you knocked that kid off the playground set?

MR. KENNEDY: Growing up in the early '80s, as Gen-Xers, we got it good when we got it. I don't know the timing, because I was 5. Within that same period, he was happy because he knew Laura had been bullied many times, and his little boy had fought a bully. And the boy who said the mean words came from a rich family. He definitely felt confident in making fun of a little girl with a bad haircut who didn't have enough money because her parents were spending all their money to send their kid to a private school, which is admirable. Before I pushed the guy through a telephone booth at the movie theater in Atascadero, I was 7 or 8 years old, which makes my little sister 5 or 6 when the youth pastor at the same church in Atascadero asked if he could take Katie back to the classroom. Katie said no; my big brother, who was 10, said no, we’re going to stay with Katie. I had no idea what was going on, but if my big brother said it, I'm going to go for it. Even at 7, I would have 100% fought our youth pastor. He also got arrested the following year for being a pedophile.

My dad very much reinforced standing up for people. He said that if you're going to fight, you're going to fight for the right reasons, and you're going to finish every fight. Clearly, I took that to heart.

Thank you so much for your time. God bless. Stay consistent. Stay disciplined. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN TROUTT: I have one more question. When you finished jump school, how long did it take you to get your blood wings out?

MR. KENNEDY: Well, they still did them then. When you get your airborne wings, there are two prongs on the back of the airborne wings. You put them on the uniform, and you'd walk up to them, and once you put them on the uniform, you just jab them in until it hits the bone. And that's your choice if you're going to let them hang there for a little bit as the blood runs down your chest. I left them there for a little while because I was proud that they were there.

Thank you.