Tall Tales & Lies

“The difference between a fairy tale and a war story is that a fairy tale starts out ‘Once upon a time’
and a war story starts out ‘This is no shit….’”

— Jim Morris, U.S. Army Special Forces, Vietnam, epigraph for his memoir War Story

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YOU don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly — Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is — and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

— Huckleberry Finn

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I’m not LYIN’; I’m tellin’ a STORY.

— Mitch Barrett, Kentucky storytelller

There is a drama roiling the online special operations podcast community, wherein several special operations veterans have gone hard after the very famous Green Beret/MMA fighter/“influencer” Tim Kennedy for allegedly exaggerating his record, fabricating incidents in his book, and claiming awards he does not have.

This is just the latest in a series of “takedowns” of special operations legends. There have been serious questions raised about the claim of Navy SEAL Rob O’Neill that he killed Osama bin Laden, about the authenticity of the “Lone Survivor” story, and about SEAL sniper Chris Kyle’s many yarns about his post-war “activities.” I won’t go into the details here — I’ll post links below that you can pursue if you’re interested.

As usual, what I find fascinating is the Continuity & Persistence of men stretching the blanket — and the backlash that can ensue. This kind of thing is a common phenomenon in Frontier Partisan history. You could go way back into the mists of time, but let’s just roll back to the 1880s and talk about Tom Horn…

While incarcerated for killing a 14-year-old settler’s kid in early 20th Century Wyoming — a crime he drunkenly bragged about to Marshal Joe LeFors and then recanted — Horn wrote a memoir of his adventurous life in Apacheria, titled Life of Tom Horn, Government Scout and Interpreter, Written by Himself.

There’s a lot of stretchers in there, as Huck Finn might say. Horn makes himself instrumental in the surrender of Geronimo to General Nelson Miles. That is, well… bullshit. Other elements are exaggerations of his role that make him appear more important and heroic than he was.

Larry Ball, Horn’s best and most careful biographer, says:

“It is a rousing story, it’s a fun read. But you need to take it as almost fiction in many ways. I researched the documents—especially military records—and did find that Tom Horn was at most of the battles he claimed he was in. But it’s pretty clear that he was not doing everything that he claimed he did.”

That is exactly what Kennedy’s current debunkers are saying: He really is a Green Beret and a sniper, who served in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan — but… he didn’t do many of the things he claims he did.

When I was an impressionable 13-year-old, there was a TV miniseries titled Mr. Horn, starring David Carradine as Tom Horn and Richard Widmark as Al Sieber. Oh, man, I thought that Tom Horn was the epitome of a badass frontier scout. I read the covers off of the movie tie-in novel.

 

Then I read — and re-read — Will Henry’s I, Tom Horn. Great novel. Henry’s conceit was that the novel was actually the manuscript of a much more complete and “truer” memoir of the scout, cowboy, and range detective.

Oh, how I loved that book.

Over many years, I’ve read most of the non-fiction and some of the fiction around Tom Horn. In my personal mythos, Horn was a dark hero. A lot of folks still see him that way. There’s a ranch rodeo in Wyoming each summer called Tom Horn Days, billed as:

Three days of action-packed events featuring concerts, pasture bronc riding, pasture team roping, muley roping, stray gathering, camping, vendors, Sunday morning cowboy church, area history presentations from local historians, and more. 

You don’t build an event around the memory of an alcoholic braggart and backshooter. So, Tom Horn remains what he needs to be for people, regardless of what serious scholars like Ball turn up. That, too, is an element of Continuity & Persistence. Once a hero image is established, some will cling to it, regardless of contrary evidence. Hell, I get it. I still want Tom Horn to be the man that Will Henry portrayed… but he wasn’t.

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Then again, you have to take a hard look at debunkers, too. Sometimes their motives are less than savory, and sometimes a misinterpretation of events — or an outright lie — gets established and then repeated as fact. Sometimes changing political and cultural contexts play a role. Such is the case with American scout Frederick Russell Burnham and his exploits during the Matabele War of 1893 and the Matabele Rebellion of 1896.

There are two incidents that came in for controversy long after the events. The first was the escape of Burnham, his brother-in-law Pete “Pearl” Ingram and a trooper named Gooding from the doomed Shangani Patrol. Burnham had grown up in the American West, and learned scouting in the wilds of Apacheria. He and his family had gone to Rhodesia as pioneers, looking for economic opportunity in the land opened up by Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa Company north of the Limpopo River. When war broke out between the BSA Co. and the Matabele (Ndebele), Burnham offered his services as a scout. He was part of a 37-man patrol sent out to capture Ndebele King Lobengula, who had gone on the run after hhis regiments were shredded by charging against Company laagers defended by Maxim machine guns.

The patrol ran into significant Ndebele forces, and their situation swiftly became dire. They were outnumbered and surrounded in the bush. Burnham, Ingram and Gooding were detailed by Shangani Patrol commander Maj. Allan Wilson to try to break through the Ndebele and seek reinforcements from the main Company column. The three men made it out, but there was no saving the Shangai Patrol, which was wiped out to the last man.

The tale is well laid out in this video from Redcoat History:

Years after the destruction of the Shangani Patrol, Burnham’s conduct was called into question. British historian David Snape writes:

There was a rumour resulting from a supposed deathbed confession of Gooding that he, Burnham, and Ingram had not been sent for help, but had, in fact, deserted. Since the three were the only survivors, one cannot be definite as to this confession’s veracity. [Historian Robert] Cary’s work is perhaps the most thorough examination of the Wilson Patrol, and he dismissed the accusation almost out of hand. Although Burnham was, as always, capable of exaggerating his part in events, there is no real reason not to believe that the three had been ordered by Wilson to find Forbes. Their accounts continued to be consistent over time, and there is no evidence to conclude that all three, especially Ingram and Burnham, who were courageous men and had repeatedly laid their lives on the line, would have deserted Wilson.”

Burnham biographer Steve Kemper underlines the rejection of this claim even more strongly, noting that the supposed Gooding confession was not reported on directly, but was rather third-hand hearsay, promulgated decades after the events. Captain so-and-so has it on good authority that a reliable fellow told his cousin… that kind of thing.

Nobody at the time made any such claim, and Burnham continued to be entrusted with special missions in two more wars.

Burnham’s most significant special operation in the 1896 Matabele Uprising was a targeted killing.

Like most native uprisings of the imperial era, the 1896 Matabele Rebellion had a spiritual component. The white Rhodesian settlers were convinced that “the M’limo” was fomenting and guiding the rebellion through mystical pronouncements and assurances that warriors were protected by magic that made the white-men’s bullets turn to water.

The Rhodesian authorities had a poor understanding of the movement and confused the name of the Malalanka harvest god, M’limo, with the priests who communicated with the god.

However, the perception that the religion was playing a major role in the rebellion was probably accurate.

A young native commissioner, Bonar Armstrong, had, through a Zulu informant, identified the shrine of the M’limo (actually a priest of M’limo named Jobani) in the jumbled Matopos hills. He proposed an operation to capture or kill the M’limo. His commander, General Carrington, approved the mission, on the condition that Burnham was attached to get Armstrong into hostile country — and back out.

It was an extremely high-risk operation, and Burnham’s wife recognized that she might be saying farewell to her husband for the final time.

The pair located the M’Limo cave, which was situated above an inhabited village. It must have been clear to the operators that there was no way to capture the priest and get him clear. Theirs was an assassination mission.

They approached the cave in stages, with Burnham bringing up their horses (critical for a getaway), concealing them in brush, then bringing Armstrong up. The scouts pulled clumps of grass to use as camouflage, and relied on a rippling breeze to disguise their passage. They entered the cave and positioned themselves so that the priest would be backlit as he entered the cave to make his magic.

Acknowledging that it was Armstrong’s intelligence work that had put them there, Burnham offered the young commissioner the shot. Perhaps feeling his nerves, never having killed before, Armstrong deferred to the veteran scout.

As the M’Limo entered the cave, Burnham shot him under the heart.

 

The two scouts made a successful getaway.

One BSA Company official, who never met Burnham but appears to have resented his prominence, opined that the mission was an elaborate hoax.

While the records of a court of inquiry have long been lost, historians discount that notion. The official’s position was based in part the fact that M’limo activity continued after the killing. But that is explained by the settlers’ misconstruing of the nature of the cult. There was no single M’limo to eliminate.

Later historians have thrown out the possibility that the scouts killed an innocent man, that Jobani was really a “friendly.” It would not be the first or last time that bad intel led to a mistaken killing. Burnham himself was convinced that he and Armstrong had eliminated a high-value target and dealt a severe if not mortal blow to the rebellion.

Burnham would go on to serve as a scout in the Anglo-Boer War.

The controversies over Burnham’s exploits have often been promulgated to further political and cultural agendas. As biographer Steve Kemper notes:

In the 1960s and 1970s, Burnham’s reputation was scorched in the firestorm of white Rhodesian nationalism and reactions to it. In those days of racial and political turmoil in Rhodesia, conservative whites sought inspiration from heroes with the right British bloodlines. On the other side, white liberals sympathetic to black nationalism were hunting for imperialist villains. Burnham, an outsider, was a convenient target for both.

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I’m not sure why British authors tend to make snarky remarks about FRB’s alleged tendency to self-promotion. They don’t really describe what they mean or give examples. Perhaps Kemper is right — it’s because he was an American interloper in an Englishman’s show, and he wrote a book about his adventures, titled Scouting On Two Continents. Not cricket, or whatever…

If you want a genuine self-promoting Frontier Partisan, look to William F. Cody. Buffalo Bill would have loved Instagram. He could have given the current generation of SpecOps influencers lessons in the art of leveraging real experience for a show-biz career. Cody was a real-deal scout and buffalo hunter of great capability and picturesque image — which made him a perfect vehicle for the promotional genius of pulpster Ned Buntline. He featured in dime novels, stage plays, and, of course, his own invention — Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.

In an almost surreal case of life-imitating-art-imitating-life, Cody wore his stage costume when he left the eastern stage and signed on as Chief of Scouts for the 5th Cavalry under Col. Wesley Merritt in the wake of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

American Heritage recounts Cody’s appearance at dawn on July 17, 1876, at Warbonnet Creek in northwest Nebraska:

He showed up for work that morning wearing a red silk shirt with puffy sleeves, decorated with silver buttons. His trousers were black velvet, with a silver braid crisscrossing the thighs. He sported an extra-wide leather belt with a large silver buckle, and an oversized beaver-felt hat with a floppy brim. A colleague said he looked more like a fiesta-bound Mexican vaquero than a battle-bound U.S. Army scout.

He might have looked excessively fancy, but he got the job done when a Cheyenne war captain named Yellow Hair charged him. Cody shot him down, then stripped Yellow Hair for trophies of war — war bonnet, shield, bridle, whip, lance, and other weapons including an 1858 Remington — and sent them along with the scalp to his friend Moses Kerngood, who displayed them in a cigar store window in Rochester, New York.

The Battle of Warbonnet Creek was just a minor skirmish. Yellow Hair was its only casualty. But Cody made the most of this “first scalp for Custer!” He would reenact the scene over and over on stage and in his Wild West Show.

Cody was often derided, then and now, as a phony — but he wasn’t. Not entirely, anyway. He really was a skilled plainsman, an expert scout, a crack shot. He was handsome and athletic, and a man among men. But he hesitated not a bit to amp it all up past 11, and sell it as entertainment. He was Hollywood before there was a Hollywood.

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Is it really such a bad thing to stretch the blanket a bit? I mean, yarnin’ and hoorahing the greenhorns is a grand old frontier tradition, right? Surely we can accept that one of those “this is no shit…” stories is gonna be, well… a Story.

I guess it’s hard to discern where the line is between harmless blanket-stretching and offensive, out-of-bounds behavior that brings down the hammer of opprobrium of your peers. Hard to discern the line in advance — but you know when someone’s crossed it. And it seems pretty clear that claiming versions of actions done by others and claiming qualifications and/or valor awards you didn’t actually receive are big problems for people in the SpecOps community. I saw that play out up close and personal a few years ago, with a law enforcement official who, let’s say, strongly hinted at Special Forces status he didn’t have. Not good. And I’ve seen real damage done when a grifter used a compelling military story that was probably a mix of truth and … something else… to take advantage of people’s good will, good faith and desire to help.

Why do people do it? Why exaggerate when your actual accomplishments and actions are good enough? Hard to know. The historical consensus around Tom Horn is that he was a pathological liar — fueled by a tendency to binge drink and start shooting off his mouth as soon as the whiskey went in it. We can’t discount ol’ John Barleycorn’s role in this sort of thing. Fish double in size in the bar room, right?

Buffalo Bill made no bones about being a showman. I don’t really see Frederick Russell Burnham as an exaggerating self-promotor. In the important ways, his tales of his exploits check out. But it’s fair to say that some elements of Scouting On Two Continents are “narrativized” in a way that give FRB’s peripatetic life an “arc.”

I can’t tell you why some of today’s operators feel compelled to amp up their stories when the truth should be sufficient.

Rob O’Neill was unquestionably a badass Tier One operator — but did he really put down bin Laden? That story has been challenged. Everybody wanted to be the guy that pulled the trigger on UBL, just like everybody wanted to be the man who brought in Geronimo. Some serious people have picked apart the story and… well, you can decide for yourself (see below).

Chris Kyle was a real-deal, effective SEAL sniper — but, no, he didn’t shoot looters during Hurricane Katrina or smoke carjackers with a hall pass from DoD, and he didn’t deck Jesse Ventura in a bar in Coronado, California. Ventura won a defamation suit hands down on that one. And Tim Kennedy is having a hard time talking himself out from under the intense fire he’s taking right now from fellow SpecOps veterans.

What gives? Why does this keep happening? Does it matter?

Some people claim it’s “the grift” — the need to gain attention in order to monetize a “brand.” That may be part of it, but I don’t think it’s the whole thing, or the most important. Maybe there’s a need to hold on to a piece of identity that never feels fully realized in a culture of strivers where “good enough” isn’t good enough. Maybe it’s just that some folks get a taste of fame and have to have more of it. And, like any drug, you need a progressively heavier hit to get the high. Maybe it starts with small embellishments, and everything just gets out of hand…

Or maybe all that is too complicated. As a “been there and done that” friend who has the standing to have a strong opinion told me:

“In the parlance of the SpecOps community at large, it is simply because they are fucked up and at some point in their ‘fuckedupidness’ they come to believe they won’t be caught, won’t be held accountable, and if nothing else they will simply continue to lie/distract/blame others because that’s what they do.”

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The study of frontier history has been my lifelong passion. It started with Story — I found the tales of men venturing into the wilderness and contending with nature and man intoxicating. This history is inextricably intwined with folklore — in fact, the telling of tall tales is an integral part of the historical folk culture. Excavating truth out of this mix is challenging — and humbling. Things you think you know turn out to be untrue, or at least different from what you had believed; things you thought were just stories turn out to be more strongly rooted than they seemed.

Truth matters. Accountability is important. When warriors call out their peers, it means something is amiss. Perhaps that is best done quietly, “in house” — but that’s never really been the way these things roll. It needs to be done. At the same time, we should recognize that the impulse to narrativize and make a story a little better than the facts allow is a very human one, and one that has had a very long run across Frontier Partisan history. Maybe that recognition can be a caution flag for ourselves — and an impetus toward understanding of others.

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The controversies…

The Anti-Hero Podcast Ep 101: Tim Kennedy: The Book Of Lies. Interesting to note that the video was restricted after it went viral.

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Here’s a blast from the past…