Producers’ Pick | Tim Kennedy: Scars and Stripes

With me right now officially is Tim Kennedy. Tim, welcome. Thank you, man. Thanks for having me. Congratulations on the book.

Yeah, launch day today. It's weird. But it's because it's about you. Yeah, that's a real weird feeling to have everything in black and white, especially because it's mostly about failure and struggles and having it right there for everybody to, you know, literally at every one of the darkest moments of my life is now at millions of people's fingertips.

And your patriotic behavior is also there and so is your heroic exploits. Quick, when you see the video. What seems to be nine thousand five hundred. Now we're supposed to go to seven fifteen thousand. That's thirty two miles long heading to our border. Am I wrong to say invasion? Man, it's been evasion for a long time. You know, the if you go down to the border and, you know, I live in Texas and I live in Austin, Texas.

Okay. And, you know, I was working along the border for the past seven months and I was living in a vault. It's one of one of the many places that I would stay when I was working at the border and talking to the people. People that live there talking to the border patrol guys that are there every single day. It has been like this. And it's ebb and flow, depending on the administration, because it's all executive level driven. When these mass migrations happen, these invasions, it is really driven by executive policy. And right now it is at the floodgates are open and there is nothing that you can do to stop it at the border physically because there's just so many.

And then you see the ripple effects. It's not just at the border. They're ruining the lives of those people at the border.

Yes. And then we find out these flights are landing in Westchester. They're landing in other places in upstate New York. And we're saying, what are they doing? They're getting off in the middle of the night.

They got a fresh set of clothes. They got a bag to go to. They're getting on buses and they're going throughout our society. What about these people must feel like suckers to go through it the right way? Yeah, I have a business partner and she's a legal immigrant and she went through the process and it took her a long time and she took every single step. You know, I have a couple of teammates that are going through the immigration process for their spouses. And then I go down there and I work at the border and it's so heartbreaking because we have a failed system. We have a broken system that they're just taking advantage of. Fixable though, isn't it? Nothing is so fixable and there's nothing that can't be fixed, especially when it's like a movement of a pen to fix it and the problem solved. Right.

And the thing is, what does it tell you when it's not? And what is it like being there just processing people, grabbing people, putting them in trucks, bring them to facilities? They're overcrowded, putting up tents where they just going to stand that attention until we get to them.

Yeah, I've seen this facility. I after two or three days, I couldn't up. I was stressed out.

I don't know how you do it every day. Yeah, the humanitarian crisis that's happening there. You know, we're all immigrants. Everybody here in the United States, unless you're on an Indian reservation, you like all of us generationally came here somehow. I'm Kennedy. I'm an Irish American, right?

I'm like three generations here. I mean, I mean, I've always been like here in New York. We can walk out to Lady Liberty and we can open the book and see the families that came here in the process. I mean, I was at Ellis Island.

They did a whole feature on it for what made America great. And you see the whole process. You see where they walk to the get off the chips, where they go and how doctors would look him over. They ask a few questions. There will be many courtrooms over there to decide. Is there anyone here to meet you? Where are you going to stay?

What are you going to bring to the country? Yeah, I was one of the questions. Are you going to work?

Yeah. Are you going to become a contributing member of society? Are you going to be individually responsible? And be an important citizen? If you go back to what it defines to be a citizen by Roosevelt, like I question every single one of these people crossing the border. I know they have the American dream in their heart, but are they going to do the work required? And, you know, I'm not going to disparage the immigrants because I've been living in Texas, like the vast majority of the people there are Mexican Americans.

They're great, wonderful people that share values. Yeah, you know, but what's happening at the border is an evasion. Nobody cares about the color of people's skin. Don't try to marginalize and say, Oh, you're black, you're white. Nobody cares.

Nobody cares. And then when people say Sweden or Haiti, it's not black or white. It's like, well, if you're from Sweden, you're from an isolated area, which pretty much you're not coming through the southern border, but you're going to wait on line forever.

I know people that married and you have the same situation. People from another country legally married on the up and up, living a middle class life. And it takes them forever.

So many fees, so many meetings, so many tough questions and the tests you got to go through. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're talking about the green card right now. You know, the she was told to file her taxes, but she couldn't file her taxes because she doesn't have a Social Security number. So she's like in this pending. I'm in trouble status for her immigration status.

And she's like, I am working. I am paying like, but there's there's no way that I can solve this because I'm missing steps and the steps aren't mine. It's a broken system and there's no way to circumvent the system, right? So I should just come here illegally. I know I have a friend from Serbia when played four years of college soccer, great player and wants to stay. He had a short amount of time to get out of college. He had a short amount of time to get a job, but then he had to apply. He wanted to go home and celebrate his graduation because I'm afraid I'm not going to get back.

And then he says he puts on the television. He says, what am I afraid of? But let's talk about you for a second. First off, Tim, you're brutally honest about yourself, right? You don't feel you're one of the few.

I'm perfect, but you will go out of your way to say you are not perfect. But on 9-11 things change. You felt you were selfish person prior to that.

What was life like before 9-11 to be Tim Kennedy? Oh, man. So I had a couple of women pregnant and within weeks, right? Two different women. Yeah, there's I thought I had AIDS. I was fighting professionally as a mixed martial arts fighter and had an after party with ring girls. And one of those girls shows up to my gym and she says, hey, I tested positive for HIV.

I'm trying to find all my partners like this is all at the exact same time. And then I watch Americans look out a window and try to decide if they're going to burn alive or jump to their death. And like you want to talk about that this resounding wake-up call of what a waste of a human that you are is watching fellow Americans have to make a decision like that when I'm debating which jeans I'm going to wear to a party. Like what like what a terrible piece of trash I was. And you decided to do something about it unlike most people.

Well, I started by no means was like this the movie like the trajectory change where I'm now a new person. Like I still made lots of mistakes. You know, even when I got to Special Forces, I think back to how arrogant I was even with my bosses and be like, no, no, I should be on this helicopter.

Not you, you know, like I'm the best of the brightest. So, so, Tim, you're a really good athlete, right? So you used to be able to accomplish anything athletically. And that's a lot of the special operations. A lot of success besides your mental strength is the fact a lot of athletic demands, correct? Yeah, the physical demands are extraordinary, but internally the mental aspect is really the selector like that is the Twitter.

Through Special Forces selection, they use physical events to find the character of a person and that's what they're really looking at. Are you a team player? And you said you got beat up by your teammates because you were being selfish. Yeah, we were Zarkawi bin Laden was the number one bad guy on the planet. The number two, the number one guy in Iraq was Zarkawi and he was in Iraq. And we were part of a task force that was hunting him. And all of us wanted this was the guy that hung Americans from bridges like the atrocities that that man did. Horrific. Like American sniper, like the story the same time he led the insurgency. That's right. And we had him in custody and let him go.

Yeah, bad, bad dude. And there was a specific night where we had a certain number of helicopters. One of the helicopters got shot up.

So a bunch of bolt holes, it got the manifest got scrubbed. So we had to reload crossload bodies. And I was the youngest and least experienced on the team. So they they removed me from the manifest as like, man, I'm the smartest, I'm the fastest, I'm the best, like I'm the one that should be on here. And my team started instead was like, you know, you should be preparing the trucks to be our QRF, our quick response force, you should be making sure the radios are good, the headspace and timing on the 50 cows good, you should make sure there's extra ammo and extra grenades.

Those are that's what you should be doing. But instead, you're whining, you're complaining about my decision about what should be happening in combat right now. And I was and I was just like, like, like, petulant little child whining at this point, I was 25.

Okay, you know, 24. And, and so they come back from the mission, you know, he's like, get your gloves, we're going to talk about this. And we go down to the tent, and I end up fighting the whole entire team, and the team just beats beats the socks off me.

And, you know, john, my boss, he leans down, he's like, I don't want to have to talk about this again. And, and even even after that, I was still like, Yeah, but took all 12 of you to beat me like there's still the arrogance of youth in there. And, and it took a long time for me to realize what it meant to be a contributing team member and how they are so much more important than me. And it was, it was pain and suffering like that that teaches you those lessons, you didn't get that from your parents. Oh, man, did I ever I did, but I'm stubborn, I'm dumb. So, you know, my mom and dad are incredible people and loving household and extraordinary circumstances growing up, you know, my dad stole a plane full of cocaine for Pablo Escobar.

He was an undercover narcotics officer, like we had a we had a red bat phone in the closet that I would, I would, I would, if it would ring would pick up and we'd have cover stories that would tell these drug dealers and these cartel guys to try to, you know, protect my dad and have a cover story for him that aligned with what he was saying. So we had like lines of what we tell them. So I grew up in this extraordinary circumstance. And there's plenty of failure. There's plenty of struggle. But there was never enough. But you know what, you're living a consequential life, but you're not done.

You can save another segment. Yes, sir. All right, Tim Kennedy's here. His book is now out.

It's called Scars and Stripes. He's got a slice of it. Much more to come when we return in the Brian Kilmeade show.

or wherever you get your podcasts. The fastest three hours in radio. You're with Brian Kilmeade. So Tim Kennedy's my guest here is one of the most diverse guests you'll ever have. His book is out today.

It is called Scars and Stripes. And you got to get it from his UFC to his Army Ranger days to what he's doing now. Now, how are you involved? And tell me about Save Our Allies. Save Our Allies was born out of Afghanistan during the fall of Afghanistan. One of our friends Chad Robes show his translator Aziz was going to get murdered. The Taliban Aziz had worked for special operations as a translator for multiple deployments. The Taliban knew who he was. So they as soon as they knew that Afghanistan was going to be abandoned by America. They were literally telling him, hey, we're going to come in and find you. They killed Aziz's friend.

Then they said they're going to like just do horrific things to Aziz's family and then ultimately kill Aziz. So initially it was to go and rescue him. And so my phone rang from Chad.

Hey, can you come help me get this guy? And I was like, yes. Then it was, hey, there's these few hundred young girl Christian orphans that are going to be murdered by the Taliban.

Can we get them out too? And then it was, hey, there's all these entrepreneurs and then all of these translators. And then all these like thousands of American citizens that we're leaving behind. And as that started to build, we started in place like the logistics to getting us into country. And one of our friends was friends with the prince of UAE. And that was going to be our launch pad. So that was the beginning of Save Our Allies was getting Aziz and then ultimately 17,000 people out of Afghanistan.

What an accomplishment. So, Tim, so you get 17,000 out of Afghanistan. That's right. So how does that play into Ukraine?

So the it's almost the same logistic process, but in reverse. So the same team that was on the ground, we had 12 people in Afghanistan. And one of those key people, codename Sea Spray. So instrumental in such a hero like this guy is brilliant beyond definition. And he beat Russia into Ukraine. So he was on the ground, like illegal border crossing through the snowy mountains. And the same thing that we did in Afghanistan to get people out, we started doing in Ukraine to get humanitarian aid in. So we started building networks and logistics to get things cross borderlines.

And ultimately, like we really focus on the last mile. There's lots of big, great organizations that are doing great things over there. But Save Our Allies are very few of those organizations are getting real like medical equipment, for example, to the very front line.

And that's what we're doing. And when our reporter teams, when our when our ENG teams got hit, what role did you play? So Save Our Allies, Sea Spray, specifically the operative, the special operations guy from Afghanistan was already in Ukraine. And, you know, God bless Benji Hall, what a tough guy to be able to stay alive. They put together a concept of an operation to find him, move him, I can't get into the details of how we are able to move him out of country, but ultimately get him to very, very high level military medical care. Because he needed medical equipment, he needed medical attention. He was dying. Like, he is so tough. And what a, it's so important, the work that journalists do, especially the front lines, when there's so much information out there, it's really difficult to tell what's truth, what's facts. It's not even American soldiers you're with.

No. And, you know, he being so far forward was isolated. And Save Our Allies was able to get to him, get him out, and then get him to medical care immediately. And now he's in Texas recovering.

And, man, I saw a video of him dancing. I know you give yourself, you're very hard on yourself through the book. But out of everything that you've done from the Army Rangers to the service to enlisting at 25, all this to the UFC fighting, what role does Save Our Allies play and what you're most proud of? It's a culmination of, you know, I've been in special operations for almost two decades. You know, I've been in South America, Africa, counter poaching, counter humor trafficking, counter drug, you know, obviously, counterterrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan.

And, you know, but I'm also a business owner, like logistics of supply chains. So all of that experience really and the group, this God given group of people that founded Save Our Allies all came in with very unique skill sets. And we were able to work together in a really collaborative way to be effective and efficient to get people out. So I think Save Our Allies is one of the most significant things I've ever done in my life. I fought for world titles, you know, part of the task force that killed the number two bad guy on the planet.

But that was pale in comparison to, you know, finding an American in Afghanistan, getting them on a bus, smuggling them onto a plane and then flying them out of Afghanistan, or bringing medical aid to the front lines to fight a communist invasion. That's crazy. You just love going on the edge.

It seems like you're most at home when the challenge is great. It's all included in Scars and Stripes. And we're just scraping the surface. Tim Kennedy, thanks so much. Congratulations on the book.

I know it's that easy to write about yourself and you did it. And the best is yet to come, I imagine. Nice.

I'm not going to stop. I would think to do a movie. Get Joe Rogan to commit to doing a movie for you. He's got the contacts. He does. All right. Thanks, man. Go get him, Tim.