During an appearance on the Jocko Podcast, former UFC fighter and Special Forces veteran Tim Kennedy opened up about a pivotal period in his life – one shaped by personal crisis and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Kennedy had just made a name for himself in MMA, winning an eight-man tournament in August 2001 that propelled him into the global top ten.
But just weeks later, everything shifted:

September 11th happened. Watching planes flying into buildings pissed me off pretty bad.

He admitted that, at the time, he was living recklessly and spiraling:

So at that time I was a pretty bad person.

I had three women pregnant and within the next couple of weeks, I also found out that I had possibly contracted the HIV virus.

Kennedy recounted a party after one of his fights:

One of the ring girls that was there test positive for HIV.
She tracked down all of her former partners.

I was one of the litany of them and she walks into the gyms like: “Hey, I’m HIV positive and you should go get tested.”

The testing back then was a lengthy process:

It wasn’t like you’re positive or negative.
It’s actually: “We’re gonna take some white blood cells counts over a few months to see if you are losing your immunity.

So that sucked.

It was this wake-up call that I was a piece of s*it.
I should be probably buried.

It would have served the planet better had I just not continued consuming oxygen.

Kennedy’s self-loathing stemmed from comparing his actions to the integrity of his family:

My dad’s an amazing human. My mom’s an amazing human. My sister and my brother.
Even to this day, I aspire to be what they are.

And then I was like, man, I’m really bad.

Motivated by both shame and a desire for redemption, he decided to serve.
He went to a military recruiter’s office, only to find thousands of others with the same idea after 9/11:

There’s 2,000 people in line ahead of me. Not like 1,000. Not like 100, which would have been a lot.
2,000 people in rural California were like: “Oh man, I got to go do something.”

That moment would eventually lead him to become a Green Beret.