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SCARS AND STRIPES by Tim Kennedy

SCARS AND STRIPES

An Unapologetically American Story of Fighting the Taliban, UFC Warriors, and Myself

by Tim Kennedy

Pub Date: June 7th, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982-19091-0
Publisher: Atria

A mixture of memoir and motivational text that celebrates the power of learning from mistakes—to say nothing of pounding people senseless.

If there’s a fight going on anywhere in the world, whether on the mean streets, in the ring, or in Tora Bora, look for Kennedy to be in the thick of it. “I’ve killed evil men on multiple continents, fought in main-event bouts in the UFC, served as a Green Beret, an EMT, a firefighter, and a cop,” he writes. “I’ve hunted Nazis, drug runners, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, human traffickers, rhino poachers, Al Qaeda, the Taliban…and I’m just warming up.” Writing with Palmisciano, the author recounts his adventures with perhaps unexpected ruefulness: He admits to messing up big time on many occasions, especially when it comes to dealing with the admonitions and demands of authority figures, and allows that there may be some truth in some of the bad things he’s been called. Owning one’s errors, Kennedy counsels, is part of what makes a hero a hero. At the end of the book, commemorating hitting the ripe old age of 42, he looks forward to “a whole new amazing year of failure and suffering.” In between, he delivers plenty of action. In Houston and other locales, he has taken on drug dealers, pimps, gunrunners, and kidnappers, who are often one and the same: “Assholes are assholes, and a person willing to deal in one form of human misery is likely willing to deal with all forms, so long as they can turn a profit.” In Iraq and Afghanistan, he found heroes and villains among both his fellow soldiers and the civilian population. In Chile and Argentina, he discovered unrepentant Nazis, the basis for the hit History Channel show Hunting Hitler. And so on, in bare-chested stories that often end with self-effacing debriefings on what went wrong as much as right.

One of many get-some exhortations by veterans of recent wars, but with plenty of merit.