The Team House - The Special Forces Officer Behind Operation Pineapple | Scott Mann | Ep. 182

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

In more than two decades serving the Special Ops Community, including 18 years as a Green Beret, Lt. Col. Mann led pivotal stability missions in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Mann is the author of Leading Through Chaos and the New York Times bestseller Operation Pineapple Express, which details the story of the dangerous rescue mission of several hundred of our allies in Afghanistan. He is also the founder of Task Force Pineapple, a nonprofit organization that provides safe passage of our Afghan allies away from unstable environments and supports them in relocating and resettling to the U.S. In a similar vein, he is the founder of The Heroes Journey, a non-profit which provides warriors, first responders, and their families an outlet to share their stories as a way to heal and transition home from service. Lt. Col. Mann has advocated on behalf of our troops and Afghan allies in front of Congress and on national media outlets, including CNN, Fox, and ABC. In addition to his speaking, Lt. Col. Mann channels his captivating storytelling as a playwright and actor in Last Out, his recent play-brought-to-film illustrating the unforeseen costs of war on our veterans — available on Amazon Prime. Today's Sponsor:  SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection)  https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #specialforces #operationpineappleexpressBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, The Team House, with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, folks, welcome to The Team House. This is episode 182. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. We're here tonight with Scott Mann. Scott is the author of Operation Pineapple and Game Changers. He is a retired Special Forces officer, served largely in Afghanistan, also down in Central and South America. And he was also part of the civilian effort to help Afghan allies escape from Kabul last year. And that's what Operation Pineapple is about. He is also the headliner of the play Last Out, which Dave and I both got to see when they toured through Manhattan recently,

which is an incredible, incredible play. We're going to talk about it in a little bit. I mean, Scott Mann's done a lot. He's an interesting guy. And we're really excited to have you here on the show tonight, Scott. So thank you. Hey, thanks, Jack. Hey, Dave.

Great to see you again, Scott. So, yeah, man. I guess, you know, I'll start off with you where we start off with all of our guests. I'd really like to hear about kind of your origin story and how you grew up and sort of what the path was that took you to towards special forces? You know, it started for me as a kid, really, about 14 years old, Jack. I grew up in a little logging town in Mount out of Arkansas.

We didn't even have a stoplight. It was a small town. And when I was 14, I met a Green Beret who came into town to visit his dad. And the Green Beret's name was Mark. He walked into Harold Soda Shop wearing his uniform. And the minute I saw this guy, like I just knew it was what I was. I wanted to do what I wanted to be. And I didn't even know what it was.

But he sat down with me and I was a run of a kid, really. I was a very, very small kid and kind of a bullied a good bit. And this guy just, he sat down with me and he started telling me about special forces, the Green Berets and how they worked by with and through indigenous people and help them stand up on their own. And man, it was like I was in a trance. I just sat there with my jaw on the ground listening to this guy talking me about this little team that would go into places and immerse themselves in the language and the culture and

the environment. And I just knew that's what I knew that's what I wanted to do. And I went home that day. I told my dad that that was what I was going to do. And it never, it never changed. From that point on for the rest of my life, all I wanted to do was try out for SF. That's, it sounds like a Norman Rockwell sort of origin story in the soda shop running into a guy in uniform wearing a green beret. It's amazing. Up until the point where I think I recycled every school in the Army, like five, Pathwayty. So they go to know, I could paint that one.

Yeah, that kind of gets left out of like the Captain America movies, the part where you recycle Ranger's School. Yeah. Yeah, I think I could have PCS to the gulag, man. That's okay. What was, um, Vons platoon? I had an extended stay in Vons platoon also, Scott. so oh yeah i was there through christmas exodus so yeah yeah i i recycled ranger school twice i

recycled the cue course twice um you know it was it was hard man i mean like of course it was hard but but i had um a very very challenging time getting through the pipeline and um but it never wavered you know even even even in those moments where um it was like i'll get out of the army before i before i you know give up on this and and i think the coolest thing man was after going through almost 18 years as an SF guy and about 23 years in the Army, you know, I was able to look all three of my boys in the eye at my graduate, at my retirement and tell them that it was, it was actually better than that 14 year old kid had dreamed.

And that's the truth. It really was. And it was because of the NCOs and war officers that I had the opportunity to serve around. I just, I wouldn't trade it for anything, man. It was incredible. Well, that adversity is a character building experience, too. So. Yeah.

And I think, Scott, that it's really important. It's a really important message sometimes that, that people hear that, you know, things happen at these schools. People get hurt. Like, you know,

you mess up. Things happen. And, and that's really the testament of spirit is that the people who lead those schools bitter or, or they're just like, I'm done, I'm out or whatever.

You know, that's, that's not going to get you up the mountain when, you know, when you've got an 80 pound ruck on your back. You're so right, Dave. And I will tell you, looking back on it, when I think about like the dark, the kind of the darkest, hardest times I had in combat and other other elements of my professional life as an SF guy, it was really learning how to pick myself back up in those moments when I recycled and I had to start over. And, you know, I can remember one time, I'm not kidding you, We were in the gulag and I was under detail in the worm pit.

And I was pulling weeds as my graduating class marched onto the parade field to rehearse their graduation. And I can remember like that was one of the lowest points in my life, man. And I just, I wanted to just crawl off in the woods. But just finding somehow the ability to keep pulling one weed after the other and not and not withdraw, not pull back and just keep doing my task. And eventually I was on that parade field. I learned that taught me more about combat and adversity and dealing with with loss and all those things in a lot of ways than the course did yeah yeah and it's it's funny because I think you know we've talked about it with other people before but I think we talked about it

specifically with Mike Edwards about RRD selection right that that you know a lot of people you know and for a lot of younger people who are thinking about doing these courses they're like oh I don't know if I can make it it's like that's not that's that's just getting that's just getting to your job like you don't worry like you train up for it and stuff like that but no no day in selection is harder than than a mild day in combat right right yeah and it's good you know I think a lot of young people I've had the opportunity to talk to a lot of young people about going into special ops and and I tell you I don't know how you guys feel about it but anytime a young person hits me up. I pretty much drop everything and talk to him because I remember how impactful

it was when Mark talked to me. And that got mentored me all the way to retirement, man. Like he stayed in my life all the way through when I retired. And it's a real thing, isn't it? I mean, I think working with our youth as they decide whether to do this or not. And I think how we engage young people on that is really important, particularly after we leave the special operations world, finding ways to pay that forward to people that are coming into the pipeline. Yeah. Yeah, that's super cool. So you came in, did you come in enlisted or you came in as an officer? No, I was commissioned as an officer to make it even more sporty.

I was commissioned as a quartermaster officer. Wow. Yeah, and not by, not, that's not what I wanted. That's the branch I got. And, you know, it was not very good at it. And, and, but fortunate enough to still get through Ranger School and, and a couple other schools as the quartermaster down and went to Panama and then tried out for selection. and made it and never looked back. And so what year was it that you graduated the Q course and wound up on a team?

It was 96, but I didn't end up on a team immediately. I actually was because I already spoke Spanish to some degree from having been stationed in Panama. And I wanted seventh group desperately. So I went ahead and took the DLP, the language proficiency test and did well enough to get seventh group. But, you know, I was not proficient by any means. And it just so happened that Ecuador and Peru in 1996, 97 had a border skirmish. And so a guy named Colonel Pat Higgins down in, in seventh group, was in the mill

group. And he recommended a plan for special forces officers to go in on either side of the border with an Ecuadorian and Peruvian company great officer and then with 50 local sodables in that area and be like peacekeepers. So my first, I mean, literally like the day I graduated, the next day I was on a C-27, heading to the MEP or to the Sanapa Valley to be a peacekeeper. down in Peru for six months. So it was a while before I even got to a team.

So this kind of was living the dream, though. I mean, it was exactly what Mark had told you at the soda shop. It was, man. And I'll never forget, like we landed, our base camp was on this little mountaintop like something out of mash. The only way in was this little C-27, which is like a Fisher Prize. It's like a Fisher Prize version of the C-130. And, you know, we landed there.

And I started walking down the steps of the plane. and this guy was there to meet me, this SFNCO, and I'll never forget, his uniform was like hanging off of him. He maybe weighed like 115 soaking wet. It's like 5-2, had this big flop hat, you know, that was like bigger than the rest of his body. And he stuck his hand out and he said, hey, sir, my name's Dick Large, how you like me so far?

And I was like, holy crap, this is unbelievable. And, and, you know, that was my, that was my welcome to my first SF deployment and an amazing NCO, but it was, man. It was exactly like I had hoped that it would be, you know, kind of thrown out into the, into the mission and able to kind of make an impact at a junior, as a junior officer level right out of the gate. I mean, it was, it was really crazy. And so this program sounds super fascinating and plays into what we'll talk about in a bit,

about village stability operations, that you're an American officer down there with a Peruvian and Ecuadorian. I mean, it's, I take it. The game plan was that you're going to put these people together in order to do. diffuse the conflict. Yeah, it's a great question, Jack. And what I, what I always thought was super cool about it was, first of all, it was a bottom up mission, right? So Peru and Ecuador got into this border skirmish. And they had done that several times. And it could have gone full-fledged, were it not for Colonel Higgins, who intervened from the mill group and said, look, I'd like to

nominate a way to approach this, put a couple of SF guys, one on each side of the border with these, with these Ecuadorian and Peruvian officers and 50 local soldiers from whatever countryside were on, and just put them there. And they approved it because they had no plan. They had no solution. And it worked. It stabilized the situation long enough to put in place lasting peacekeeping measures and eventually, you know, de-escalate the whole situation.

But what was critical about that, Jack, and I look back on it now, you know, if you think about how when we got hit on 9-11, you know, that's exactly what Colonel Mulholland and fifth group did, was they nominated an approach to basically working with the Northern Alliance and the posthum tribes in the south it was bottom up if you look at just cause when we went in there in 1989 and the panamanian defense forces scattered out into the hinterlands and they were going to mount a very large operation to clean house you had local third of the seventh sfncos who were living in panama that said hey we got a way to get these guys in without firing a shot and they nominated a conop where they they called it operation ma bell and they flew out to local quartels

where these Panamanian defense forces were by the hundreds, got on a pay phone and called them in to surrender. And every one of them surrendered without firing a shot. And you don't care about those missions. But I had the opportunity to see a lot of those firsthand in Latin America and meet the NCOs and officers that put them in play. And they were all bottom up. They were all very focused on local activity.

And that really had a strong impact on me for the rest of my life, for sure. And then the next, you did. eventually take a team and now we're talking about mid heading into the late 1990s. What was that like for you? It was mostly working the Andean Ridge. You know, the drug, the drug war was really raging in Colombia and, you know, peripheral countries down there. Pablo Escobar had been taken out. And so there was a real, you know, sucking chest wound in that area as the, the FARC started to move into the narco trafficking business. And you had a real, it was really ugly. So the bulk of my team time was spent down in the Indian Ridge area,

working by, with and through partner forces like the commandos, the Lanceros, Fences Speciales, and even Columbia National Police on drug interdiction and to some degree counterinsurgency, but mostly counter narcotic, and spending a lot of time doing partner work and with some just iconic SFNCOs and warrants in the process. As you look back on that time, I mean, I mean, I take it playing Columbia played into this and everything else.

And now, you know, FARC becoming defunct and ostensibly some measure of peace breaking out in Colombia. I mean, if you were to like AAR, the Special Forces mission down there or overall playing Columbia, how do you reflect back on all of that in retrospect? Pretty favorably, man. I look at that. In fact, I think I wrote an article when Village Stability Operations was in pretty high gear. I think I wrote it for the Small Wars Journal. but one of the things I suggested, and I think several other people did this as well, was, look, go take a look at Columbia.

You know, if you want to, if you want to look at partnership in Afghanistan, you know, go look at what we've done in Colombia over decades. I mean, I can remember in the 90s, you couldn't even really leave the quartel without seriously incurring some scunnion from the FARC or the ELN. And then you fast forward to like 2004, 2005, and even today, the Colombian Special Operations Forces are amazing. their special ops aviation fly at night. I think they actually did end up even doing advisory work in Afghanistan and bringing Afghan officers over to Columbia to kind of take a look at it. But honestly, what I would say, Jack, is I look at, that was, you know, that was a pretty modern country, a first world country.

And it took, you know, 30, 40, 50 years of persistent foreign internal defense to develop not just a security capability, but a participatory development capability, a dispute resolution, levels of governance that were acceptable, both and formal and informal civil society. Like, it took a long time, man, multi-decade approach to fit patient, persistent, that transcended different political regimes here in the United States. I think that there's a lot to learn about working with partner forces and partner countries from what's been done in Colombia, the Philippines, and other places like that where it was really old school. One of the stories in the press back in those days was that Columbia was this, I remember it being described as America's next to Vietnam, that it was the next quagmire that we were going to dip into.

And that never happened because of this approach. I think so. And I think the way that we really stayed focused on the elite forces, you know, the special operations forces carried a big, a big load. I felt like there was a lot of good interagency cooperation as well. and that was really important. I mean, we had our problems just like everything else. But honestly, I believe it was a very targeted, focused, persistent approach that was incremental. You know, you just move the ball five yards down the field at a time.

Every team that went down there was okay with that. And then you hand that organizational relationship off to the next team and you keep moving. And it was, in my assessment, one of the better models for what's possible for partner engagement that I've seen in the SF community. The Philippines would probably be another one. No, I agree. And I would love to read that book, by the way. Somebody needs to write that one. Yeah.

You know, I wish that there was more written on what our seventh group teams did, particularly in the 80s and 90s. Yeah, because it was, it just, even like Operation Ma Bell, I mean, you'll see it some places. But to me, the fact. the fact that I was able to take my kids on spring break a few years ago down in an SUV and drive all over rural Panama. Because, frankly, that bulk of that country was left intact, you know, after just cause, because most of the PDF came in peaceably without a lot of shots being fired,

rather than ravaging the countryside in a counterinsurgency campaign that would have probably been likely to take out the remnants of the PDF. it was all bottom up, human engagement, local context. And yeah, man, I'm a big fan of that, particularly in the world we're in right now. Because whether it's like a, you know, whether it's a violent extremist organization like ISIS or a near peer threat like Russia, almost at the Soviet Union, I think we're going to be looking at partner engagement for a long time. I need to track some folks down from, I can't remember. I think I don't think it was Columbia. I think it was in Bolivia, actually, that the Coast Guard was down there doing riverine operations. Yes. Yes. Chemire, Chimerae, Bolivia, but absolutely. And the Marines did a lot of riverine ops in those places. It was, yeah, there was a lot of that. And, you know, again, I think that we're going to see like this full, no, there's nothing new under the sun. I think we are going to see a circle back to a really high demand for foreign internal defense. I mean, you see these security force advisory brigades are starting to take this on.

But partner work is not going away. And that's probably why I'm so worried about how things, and I know I'm getting in front of my headlights here, but what happened in Afghanistan, it really worries me because we're developing a nasty reputation for partner abandonment, starting with the Montan yards all the way up to now. And it's not good when you have to rely on surrogate work like that.

Yeah. So shooting forward a little bit, whereabouts were you in your military career when 9-11 happened? I was a senior captain. I had already finished my detachment command time, and I was at Bragg and seven special forces group commanding a support service company, you know, service support company that each headquarter support company, I think is what they called it. But it was one of those in every one of the SF battalions and was not far from giving that up when we got hit. You know, I remember what was profound about that for me and just in fact that, one, all these SF guys staring at the TV. watching those towers fall.

And I could feel the, you know, kind of the vengeance just rolling off those dudes. But my, my Ranger buddy, Cliff Patterson, was killed in the Pentagon when that attack happened. And it became very personal for me very, very quickly. And, you know, really set me off on kind of a direction where I personally kind of moved away from that by-with and through thing and was more focused on retribution and walking the enemy down. when I finally got in 2004 over to Afghanistan, that started a long time in that country for me. That really became my focus until we did VSA.

I remember you had this in your play last out. There's this really profound line that sticks with me where one of this was Brian playing a special forces officer. He says our motto is no longer to free the oppressed. It's to punish the guilty. Punish the guilty. Was that from your experience? It was.

a lot of lines in that play, you know, found their way in from different people who quoted them and said different things. It's not an autobiographical play. There are autobiographical moments, but a lot of them were things that I heard or saw and certainly punish the guilty. You know, that was really a mantra. I feel like Jack, for not just, I mean, not just the special operations community, kind of our military writ large when we went over there. I mean, it was, it was really kind of a punish the guilty approach cloaked in coin. Right. You know, right.

It was, that's just how we felt. I mean, and looking back on it, my God, I mean, if you think about what happened that day and what we, what our lived experience was when that happened. I mean, it's, it's not hard to fathom that that was our mindset as a nation and that certainly as a military. But it didn't serve us well after a couple of years. And so I tried to represent that in the play that that, and it was true for me, speaking personally from me as an SF officer, I got, I got way too immersed.

in that direct action, surgical strike approach as a way to, as a way to solve the problem, you know, at a trit, an insurgent, which of course was ludicrous. I want to get a little bit deeper into that in your journey going from, you know, one approach to the next. I got to give a quick shout out to one of the sponsors for our show, which is sapgear, sapgear.com. want to take a moment. They sell a whole bunch of different items, a lot of escape and evasion items, things that definitely pertain to our audience of special operations community, wristbands, necklaces that have all these sorts of escape and evasion tools built into them, handcuff keys, shims, things like that. And all the gadgets are always cool, all the

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So that's sapgear.com. If you use the promo code team, you will get 15% off your first order. So again, sapgear.com, the promo code is team to get 15% off your first order. So, Scott, back to you. If you could elaborate a little bit, tell us what that journey was like for you from the sort of punish the guilty direct action approach that took you eventually to village stability operations? Well, I mean, there were teams already doing it the right way. And I think all the teams that were over there were doing some version of by with and through, whether that was with Afghan militia forces in the early days.

When I rolled in 0405 as battalion three for first to seventh, we got there at a time when there was this really odd transition going on, Jack, between the Afghan militia forces, what they called the AMF, which were really the residual forces from the Northern Alliance and the other Pashtun tribes that had resisted the Taliban and had, you know, stood up with us when we invaded. And we were still working with them largely throughout the country. Most of the, most of the country was what was called a Jasewa, Joint Special Ops operational area. And you just didn't have a huge conventional footprint, but it was happening. It was starting to get bigger and big.

bigger, this conventional footprint. So it was like this confluence of residual UW bumping up against residual UW trying to pivot into FID and then this large coin footprint coming into the country, you know, camping out on the same basis that the Soviets had used, which should have been our first FN indicator. But it was a real just odd time. And so the Afghan National Army was in its infancy and we put the Afghan National Army into play in regional command south and west in a pretty big way. And so that was my first experience in Afghanistan was really moving the Afghan National Army, which at the time was not good at all. And that was a really, really interesting time. Think about an army that had really didn't exist until after we invaded. A lot of people

have thrown their hands up with the Afghan collapse saying, well, the army didn't do what it was supposed to do. And I'm like, the army was 19 years old. You show me a 19 year old that does what it's supposed to do under duress. Right. You know, I mean, and, and the aren't, this army was no different. Like it, it was very nascent. But then, you know, I found myself doing a couple of tours focused on targeting, walking the enemy down. And it was in 2007 on my plane ride back, Jack, on a C-17, where we had, we had taken out a lot of Taliban in that rotation. And it was very evident to me. I talked to our S2, J2 before I left and he was like, you know, and there's more Taliban in the rural areas than when we started. Yeah. And it was very, very evident that the,

the rural insurgency of the Taliban was in full swing. And whatever momentum we had, we had lost. And they were starting to march out of the mountains down into the urban areas. And this welcome down approach was not working. And, you know, it wasn't long after that that we signaled our exit under President Obama that there would be a, you know, a timeline for departure. So, So it really hit me hard, you know, that wow, we are, we're at a point now where we could, we could actually get pushed out of the country and not have any, any capacity in place to stand on its own. And, and that was when I heard Seth Jones, Dr. Seth Jones from Rand, come down to Socom and he was talking about how we had just got it wrong in Afghanistan.

We had tried this top down approach where we were trying to, you know, inject a square peg into a round hole. We were trying to put like a liberal democracy and a modern 21st century army into what is primarily a status society of tribes and clans and qualms with a little bit of contract society. And he said it needs to be the other way.

If you look at the Musahiban dynasty from 1917 to the 1970s, it was primarily wherever the pavement ended. You had a bottom-up approach to governance, to security, and to development. And this is what was in place until the Soviets invaded. And if we were going to have any chance in creating an antibody to the rural insurgent, it was going to be bottom up.

And man, it was like Mark in the soda shop. He had me at hello. And I connected with him pretty quick. And we started hatching this, this approach for bottom up. Yeah. So tell us more about that. How did you guys develop this VSO concept? and I take it, you must have gotten some buy-in from, you know, the Special Forces Command

and the higher-ups into this program and this idea. Yeah, I mean, it was very incremental. And there were a lot of really, really solid people involved in it. I was fortunate enough to kind of see it for literally from its conception. You know, Carlos Perez and a seventh group officer was involved very early on as well. And really, the way it went, I mean, the VSO moniker will always and should be always attributed to General Scott Miller. I mean, that really was his, you know, that, that title and that vision of it, the VSP that came from General Miller. I can talk about that more in a second,

but what happened before that, though, was at Socom, General Reeder was getting ready to go back over. He was a newly annoyed in one star and they were going to put a, you know, a special ops command of what they were calling White Soff at that time under one flag officer in Kabul. And I'd worked under General Reader for years. We had a good relationship. And when I met Seth, I asked general reader if he would meet with Seth. And I don't think he was real thrilled about meeting with an academic from Rand. But when he sat down and heard him out, he was like, not only did he like it, he asked Seth to come over for six months, which Seth did. And we put in place a pilot program. They called Community Defense Initiative at the time. And it was basically six teams out in six

rural areas working with local forces. And it was very much a pilot project, kind of a science project. and it wasn't until, you know, Reader was clear he wasn't going to take it any further than that. It wasn't until General Miller replaced him, and I'd work for both of these guys. So, you know, I picked up the program. I'd already started working it with Seth under Reader. And when he left, I continued it under Miller. And we really scaled it up. And it evolved into this program known as village stability operations.

But really, if I'm being candid, and then I'll let you guys jump in. but it really is. There's nothing new under the sun. It was remote area fit. That's what it was. It was the CIDG program from Vietnam in just about every way. And I had a lot of really great mentors from that program who helped me think that through. But that's really what it was in its essence.

I mean, we gave it a new name and new branding maybe, but it really was remote area fit. Scott, for some of our viewers who may not be so up on the acronyms, Can you, first off, we're talking about FID, we're talking about foreign internal defense, which is helping a country protect itself from threat actors. But can you tell us what VSO is and how it looks different than what we were doing in Afghanistan at that time? Yeah, there's a lot of confusion around this. And I think it's important that we always try to clarify that, particularly because we're probably going to end up back in that country doing this again. I would almost guarantee it. But when I think about, so that acronym, as you said, foreign internal defense.

So the way to think about it with special forces is special forces, they specialize in unconventional warfare, which is basically working by with and through indigenous people to overthrow a sitting government or a hostile regime. Just flip it. The other side of that is foreign internal defense, where you're working with the government to put down insurgents or lawlessness or terrorism. And that's, and it's really kind of a whole of nation approach. It's not just security, but it's development, it's governance, it's law enforcement. And it really is designed kind of to run out of the embassy. That's why it works so well in Central and South America because you had like this interagency hub.

Whereas with Afghanistan, you didn't really have that, did you? You had this massive NATO-led contingent. And then you had this little bitty interagency thing that you said Mother May I all the time. But still, you know, it was, it was an attempt. to kind of change the center of gravity in Afghanistan for where governance, security, and development emanated. We had this mindset, Dave, that everything was top down. It started with Kabul and it rolled down to the outlying villages. The problem with that is that's just not the way civil society has ever operated in Afghanistan.

It's always operated the other way. It is primarily what they call a status society, which is basically, basically ancestral. It's clan dominated. It's honor, shame, vengeance. It's tribal. And it is pretty autonomous. And the way that the government always operated was they had kind of a, an understanding with these outlying villages and tribes that they handled their own affairs, but that the government would have some minimal connection with them across security lines and taxes. But that was about it. And it was it was kind of a coexistence and it was accepted. And that was really what VSO was. How could we help local communities restore their own autonomous capability to secure themselves,

to conduct participatory development where they basically handled their own economic development at a micro level, and where they handled their own governance, which is primarily dispute resolution over resources, land, that kind of thing. And all of those had been destroyed in the Soviet occupation. Most of those civil society, it wasn't just Kabul that was decimated. local civil society was decimated. So by moving into these villages, Dave, and living there, we allowed ourselves the opportunity to not just train security forces, but to identify sources of instability, systemic problems in food insecurity, grazing practices, bring in the right people to help reestablish that along development and governance dispute resolution lines.

And you're talking, you know, long term foreign internal defense. This is capacity building across all lines of effort. And we were predict. at that time 50 to 75 years of consistent foreign internal defense, which is why we stood up the Afghan special forces, you know, that were in there working alongside us with 15 person detachments and the commandos who could do the quick strike capability as well. So, you know, it was well on its way. We gave it a good two years and we saw a lot of success and then we bailed on it. And why did we bail on it? And let me take a stab at this and you can tell me if this is right or wrong. But the nice thing about killing the bad guys or killing the enemy is it that's easy to

brief, right? This month we killed X number more than we killed last month. That's, that's a sexy brief. How do you brief the success of a village stability operation? About a 50 or 75 year timeline, right? Yeah. No, and I got told by several, and I'll leave their names out of it, but I got told by several senior officers, don't you ever say that in the brief. And I'm like, look, it's the truth. We've got to say this because if we don't, well, what happened happened, where we think that, you know, it got overloved, it got conventionalized. But to your point, Dave, absolutely.

It just, you know, how do you brief an improvement to, you know, dispute resolution and grazing practices in May 1? Like, I mean, it just, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't, it didn't, And every commander was on a six-month or one-year expectation to win the war on their watch. I mean, I don't know how many times I heard outgoing commanders briefed that the Taliban were fractured. Right. Seriously. Yeah.

You know, over and over again. And the fact of the matter, not only were they not fractured, you know, but they were growing in capability. But there was this 2010 to 2012 window where we saw a demonstrable improvement in not just the local, Afghan capability to stand up for themselves in a lot of these villages. But we also saw improvements in, again, regulating their own affairs at a civil society level and then some connections with the government. But here was the problem. We were on a timeline and General Petraeus and others really started seeing Afghan local police, which was a thing that President Karzai and certain members of the command, special ops command, started to really harp on. And this was not VSO. Afghan local police was a kind of an extension of VSO in the sense that it was a way to put uniforms and formality to these local security forces and to hold them accountable to the government.

And this was exactly what happened with the CIDG program. It is exactly how it fell apart. They took a very, very effective program that was designed to defend communities. and that was that was locally relevant and acceptable. And then they tried to overlove it and turn it into like an organism of the state. And it failed miserably. Same thing happened with AOP. They started, we started recruiting, you know, because Petraeus and others, I think, saw it as a way out,

is a way to cover the exit in these rural areas while we worked a retrograde and focused on the urban areas. And the reality was that kind of worked for a while. But we stopped, you know, really working with elders and the legitimate governance authorities in these communities. And we started just recruiting large numbers of Afghans to fight as ALP. They weren't accountable to the local informal civil society leaders. And it became, frankly, it became a militia that we couldn't control. I'd like to ask a little bit about what VSO looked like from like a boots on the ground perspective. I mean, first off, how did the, how did the team guys respond?

to this program. I mean, was there a resistance to it? Because, I mean, there's much ink has been written about the drift towards direct action. But beyond that, I mean, you are asking a lot of the men in a sense. It is the special ops mission, the special forces mission. But I mean,

living in a village off the local economy, I mean, that's a difficult life. And I talk about this a lot in the play. You know, there's this one line where Ricky says to Danny Patton, the team stars. And he's like, Danny, How much longer are we going to come back to this crap hole village, man?

You know, my, my, my ass smells like goat. My farts have sand in them, you know, and he's like, dude, you got to take a shower. He's like, when's the last time you saw a shower? You know, and it's this, it's this back and forth between these two guys about living in this village. And but it was, it was a big ask. And don't get me wrong either. I mean, there were a lot of problems with DSO. It was not a silver bullet by any stretch.

But what it did represent was an approach to, the capacity building and stability that was in line with Afghan civil society. I mean, it was the one time where we really tried to understand what local actually looked like. And that was historically relevant. And that's where I say that had we stayed with it over decades, it could have been the right solution, as long as we maintained a CT force in the country and a strike force. But what it looked like when we first started it, Jack, to your question, I mean, it's a really good question.

There was a lot of pushback, man. I mean, there were a lot of teams that were not happy about this or there were members of the teams that were not happy about it. It was mostly the younger guys who had grown up in the Afghan fight, and it was certainly far different from what they were used to, where you were rolling out of your firebase, taking down a target at night, rolling back to your firebase, and this was about really going old school.

And there was, you know, some pushback, some resistance to it. But at the end of the day, man, the special forces teams that executed this across all the groups and to some degree other special ops units and even conventional forces, overall did a really, really good job in a very, very austere, tough environment. But it looked,

you know, there were different degrees, but the ones that stick in my mind was like this guy, Mulla Mike. Yeah, yeah. That's what the locals actually called him. You know, he was a farm boy from South Georgia and he and his team, they lived in an old abandoned building right there

in the middle of the green zone, and they would patrol five, six times a day. He would stop and talk to every farmer that they came across. And they were engaging at local levels. They participated in discussions around dispute resolutions, mostly just listening. They brought, you know, they did model farms where they looked at different agricultural practices.

It was impressive. And he had so much local context that eventually people started standing up because they saw his willingness to, A, go to the rooftop and fight back, but also he really cared about what was happening at a local level. And he dug into it and he tried to help him figure it out. And over time, that paid off. Was there like a re-educated? I know that all of the younger SF guys, they had all been through the Q-course,

so they had all done the unconventional warfare stuff and the, you know, but direct action is much sexier than FID, right? And for the very first part of the war, it was a direct action war. So you had a crop of young SF guys who came in and only knew direct action, wanted to be the door kicker. Was there a re-education period? The two different cultures that is in your play. You talk about it. Yeah, we do.

We do. And there's a guy named Ed Crude. He's still on active duty right now. He was involved in the Afghan evacuation in a really amazing way. was very, very involved in VSO, one of the finest SF officers I've ever met. And Ed, he actually has written a paper. You guys should check it out. It's called the SF identity crisis. But he wrote it when he was doing graduate work at Duke. But it's really amazing. I did read this paper. Yeah. Yeah. And he really captures what you guys are talking about, which is this, this underlying kind of rift in

the SF community over DA versus the buy with and through approach. And it's a very real thing. And I don't know how it ends. I don't know where it ends up, but it's there. And it was very pervasive during the VSO era for sure. But what I would tell you was the way that we kind of came at this, Ed made a suggestion about seven or eight months into VSO, because we were throwing, not only were we throwing SF teams into this that hadn't really done it. You were throwing seal teams into seal platoons into this. You were throwing conventional forces into this.

And nobody really had the level of local. contextual understanding of civil society in Afghanistan that they needed to go into these places and do the Laurentian work that was required. I mean, if you read about T.E. Lawrence, the reason that he was so good and so adept at what the Badoo thought and felt, and the reason he was able to write those 27 articles was not as his time as a military intelligence officer, but his time as a geologist, the work that he had done as a geologist working at a profound local level. So what we did was we put together this thing called academic week. And Ed Crute suggested it, but basically, and Scott Miller really endorsed it. But any teams that were, they were getting ready to start their pre-mission training, Dave,

they would have to come to this academic week for a week and they would go through. And I ran them, but we would have experts on post-tune tribal dynamics, participatory development by Dr. Kent Con Idris, who actually wrote a book on that, if you can believe it. dispute resolution classes, low tech agriculture. And all of these, we had people from the state department coming to USAID, and they would all, OTI, they would all come together and go through this for a week, these different round robin classes, then go do their pre-mission training for six weeks or six months.

That's fantastic. And so it really was a good turnaround to get people in the right mindset of what they were walking into. Yeah. No, that's fantastic. It's a great way to adapt to the situation. You mentioned, you mentioned a few. the reasons why VSO was eventually, you know, went defunct. Kind of where did you stand at that point as it kind of fell apart?

It was hard on me. It took a toll on me because I had really assured a lot of people that this thing was going to go the long haul. And when in 2012, I was already back at Socom running the academic weeks, but I was going back and forth, you know, and I had a lot of, and all of a sudden we started pulling teams out of these villages. And as you can imagine, retribution was swift and it was ugly. Right. And I was getting calls on my phone call from, or my phone, my cell phone from elders begging me to help them somehow. And several of them were killed. And, you know, that all happened

at about the time that Jim Gant was going through what he was going through. I had been selected for a command that was not an SF battalion. And I just looked at it, had long talk with my dad and my wife and I just thought, you know, I'm done, man. I, this is, I'm not good with where this is going. I felt like a lot of the careerism that was, was surrounding these decisions and the way it was going down. I didn't want anything to do with it. So I, I retired with prejudice. I turned down the command and, and, and, and left the Army in 2013. If I could ask a sort of philosophical or maybe even Zen like question, it strikes me that America's cultural style lends itself towards direct action.

We like our high-tech weapons. We like laser-guided missiles, all this kind of cool tech. It seems that our culture doesn't lend itself towards counterinsurgency, towards village stability operations. I mean, your book really spoke to be on multiple levels,

but it does strike me, I have to think or suspect that this type of local approach, it really does require special people. It requires even unique singular people, like T.E. Lawrence, like Jim Gant, who is, he's about as colorful and his singular person as you can possibly imagine. And people like you who have this sort of mix of special ops and intellectual and academic knowledge that you're willing to combine the two. I do you think, you know, setting aside the singular individuals, can America ever really grasp this way of not just fighting, but I mean, what's called what it is, it's nation building? I prefer to think, it's a great question. I prefer to think of it as capacity building, you know, just because I think, I think if

you really stop and think about it, you know, you are, it is a capacity that you're putting in place and it's an antibody that you're, that you're leaving. And we do actually have, Jack, a lot of precedent in our country for doing this well. The problem is it's just not sexy. And it doesn't, like, as Dave said, it doesn't brief well. And we've kind of, you know, I don't know what you guys think, but I do feel like during the 20-year war, we did evolve into kind of a myopic focus on this attraction to direct action and surgical strike. I mean, like the tactical thing got really big. It still is.

I mean, there's people that just follow that stuff and are enamored with it and the public's drawn to it. And look, I get that. But I do believe, honestly, that if you look at how, for example, the special forces, community assesses its people, how we, you know, the way that we train the Robin Sage event that we run, I think that honestly, it's what we were designed to do. I mean, if you look at the partisan work we did in World War II, work with the Montagnards in Vietnam, you know, I think it's very much within our capability. And I think here's the, but you ask a really key question is, is can we tell the story? You know, I look at what happened with VSO and I put a lot of blame on me, man. I did

not, you know, because I was in a good spot to run the seams on that mission. And if I failed to tell that story at a strategic level, I did not get it across to general officers and admirals and others that needed to understand that this was a long game. This was a multi-decade endeavor. And, you know, those of us who were deeply involved in this, we did not tell the story well enough that that narrative landed at the feet of policymakers and decision makers. And at the end of the day, no one really knew or cared that this long-term program had been in place and that it was going to have a significant effect on retribution. And I think the same thing you could make the argument happened in the Afghanistan collapse overall, right? I mean, the Afghan special operators

were carrying 98% of the load. They were actually very effective against the Taliban. And had we just maintained a foreign internal defense relationship with them along with the CT capability, You know, I firmly believe that it could have been a very, very different outcome. But yet there was no recognition or appreciation at all for capacity building of that nature. It was literally just closed the book. And so that's really why I wrote the play, man. I wrote the play because I wanted civilians and policymakers and decision makers to at an emotional level feel what it means to be the last out, to not be the first in.

There's plenty of movies on that, but the ones that go day after day, month after you're living in these local areas doing this work, I want people to feel that at an emotional level to understand that it's not only is it a very viable thing to do. It's a very essential thing, and it comes at a great cost to the people to do it. Because it's like you're not just fighting,

you're opening yourself up and becoming more like the local people. I mean, you write a lot about the importance of having empathy in your book and coming to empathize with a local, population. Yeah, for sure. And you know, the special forces community, like their their soft brothers endured horrific KIAs and wounded in action. And a large chunk of it was during the village stability program. Why? Because they were literally encroaching on the area where the insurgent swims, which was the local population. And as a result of that, the insurgents came out of with all four feet. And, you know, it comes at great cost. I mean, this kind of work, whether

it's community policing in East LA or whether it's community engagement in, you know, eastern Afghanistan or Somaliland. The bottom line is to do this kind of work, it requires you, you have to make a human connection with these folks. It's not just about suitcases full of cash and cloak and dagger. It's about making real human connections, but also having the game to, you know, to sling lead and do what you have to do when it becomes surgically coercive. And that's, I say that the modern day Green Beret to do this kind of work needs to be a combination of John Wick, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Verizon guy, or the Sprint guy, whatever he's called. Like, you know, relationship-based connectors who just happened to be lethal. And I think it's needed more than ever.

What do you need things to happen in terms of our policy makers when, because we did this in Vietnam. We did it again now. There's a great book that could actually be written. It was written comparing the British in Malaya to the Americans Vietnam called Learning How to Eat Soup with a Knife. Yeah. And they could reprise that now with our experience in Afghanistan because we basically repeated everything that we did in Vietnam. We just took a lot longer to do it. But what do you think needs to happen at a policy level when these, you know, the next time we get,

engaged in a war like this? Well, the first thing is we need some frigging accountability and lessons learned over what happened for starters, you know, and this is where I don't get a lot of Christmas cards from Fort Bragg these days because I just believe that right now there has been no institutional learning from what's happened. There's been no accountability and there's been no learning. You know, we literally, we literally wholesale abandoned our partner, force, our partner force, even men who served in our regiment from special forces, we abandoned them.

We left them to die and be hunted and killed. And, you know, it is hilarious to me that the special forces regiment still has a podcast publicly out there called the indigenous approach. That we could, that our, that our regiment could put that out there right now after what happened. Yeah, you can blame that on policymakers all day long. But the fact of the matter is, we abandoned our allies, our commandos, our special forces, our KCA in ways that it's going to affect our national security for years in terms of how we're able to partner. And the fact that we're still claiming in any way to have an, you know, an indigenous approach

that you'd want to listen to on a podcast, to me, it's just striking. And I, you know, I just don't understand it. I don't understand why we're not hot washing the hell out of this and trying to figure out what we need to be doing to reclaim some level of credibility in the world on partnering. Because everything that I've heard my brothers and sisters in the active beauty community in SF talking about, they are embarrassed by it. They're getting out of the service because of it. It's a real thing.

And the soft for life community is is terribly up and arms over it. So, you know, I think for starters, there needs to be like some serious institutional accountability and crystallized learning over this thing instead of just turning the page and pretending like it didn't happen. And until that happens, I don't know that anything's going to change, Dave, because it's such a moral injury on our community. It's such a violation of what we were taught to not leave a partner like that. I don't know how we ever move forward.

And I don't know how we won't again do this kind of systemic abandon. Now, when you say, when you say at the special forces level, I mean, it was a lot of special forces soldiers and special forces veterans who actually made the moves to get them out. Just like in Vietnam, it was the veterans, not the government, who moved to get out the nuns, the mong, and the mottn yards. 100%. Yeah.

So. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. Let me be clear. Yeah. I'm talking about S.F. senior leadership.

Okay. And I talk about that explicitly in my epilogue. You know, I'm talking about SF senior leadership. I'm talking about soft senior leadership and, and policy makers, you know, at the DOD, DOS level. You know, I haven't seen any accountability or crystallized learning that's come out of this at all. But, but as far as like the regiment itself and the NCOs and. the junior officers who risked their careers. I mean, they were the, they were the reason the ones that got out did.

Yeah, you mentioned that in, uh, in your book that like some of the active duty soldiers put send all on blast to people that they probably shouldn't have, but they were so frustrated with the situation. Before, before we jump into the book, because just trying to more or less, uh, keeping a chronological timeline. For you, yeah. Um, you, you retired with extreme prejudice. I think was what you said.

How did post-retirement life go forward you? And how did that lead into the creation of your play last out? Yeah. No, the retire with, it was basically when you turned down a command three times, you retire with prejudice. In other words, or you're not going to get promoted. And so there was nowhere for me to go as a result of that decision. And it was okay because it was time for me to go.

And so I left them. military had a really really tough transition out of the army and i think a lot of it had to do kind of with with with the conditions that i left under and seeing what happened with v so and the retribution that happened that was almost a foreshadowing of what was coming in 2021 um and it really affected me i i i became severely depressed and and nearly you know it was and was having suicidal ideations about 18 months after my retirement and was pretty lost, if I'm being honest. I didn't know where I was supposed to go and was fortunate enough to locate a couple of mentors, civilian mentors.

And one of them was a former pro football player named Bo Isson. He and his brother, Tony Yison, had played in the NFL. Tony was a quarterback for the Patriots. Bo was a free safety. Both played in the 80s. And Bo had blown his knee out multiple times and ended up becoming. becoming an actor, a playwright, and a professional storyteller. And I met this guy at an event.

And I just thought, man, as I was watching him tell his story from the stage, and he was talking about, you know, hard things and trauma and loss. But yet he held the audience, like the audience wouldn't even breathing as he was talking. And I just thought, man, that's what I want to do. And he talked about taking this TNT that was inside him and turning it into something positive. So I started training and working with Bo as a storyteller, Jack, and ultimately, you know, started a leadership company called Rooftop Leadership, where I really worked on the human connection skills that I'd learned as a Green Beret

and teaching that storytelling, active listening, nonverbal skill set to entrepreneurs and corporate leaders. And on the nonprofit side, started a nonprofit called The Heroes Journey, where we started teaching storytelling to veterans as a way to heal themselves, as a way to connect, reconnect with their purpose, and frankly, to, you know, to own rooms. when they went in there and bridge those civil military gaps, which ultimately led to the play. I had been given a project. I was taking some acting classes to become a better speaker.

And one of our projects was a little five-minute, one-person show about a silly band. You had to use a totem. And it was a silly band that my son, Braden, had given me in the war. And I just told the story as the silly band and, you know, going through attacks by the enemy and being told to, you know, be taken off by superior officers and how, you know, my, my, my, my, master didn't do that and brought him home. And it was just this, you know, kind of a funny little one.

But it really resonated with the people in the audience because it gave like the home front perspective. And I think just kind of a look through the eyes of kind of a guy that was working the local fight in Afghanistan. And a lot of people were like, you know, you should make that a play. So I started working on it. And, you know, six years later, 16 cities in a tour in 2019 and 250 PTSD interventions in lobbies. and 75 gold star families and a film on Amazon price. It's been this journey, this iteration. It's come full circle.

And now we're getting ready to kick it off with the Gary Sinise Foundation as a tour in 2023 to help heal from the Afghan collapse. Yeah, Dave and I both had the opportunity to come and see your play. Like two years ago, like when the show was in its infancy. Yes. And you guys need to come see it now, Dave, because it has totally evolved. The ending is completely different.

new actors and some old actors like Brian are still in there, but it is, you know, it's still the same protagonist, Master Sergeant Danny Patton, but it's a whole new twist on the play. It addresses the Afghan abandonment. And honestly, guys, I think that, you know, I believe we're on the front end of a mental health tsunami with our post-9-11 population. I think we're on something, something that is coming our way. and this moral injury from Afghanistan has really amplified it. And I told you this.

So after the play, we went to the bar and we had a chance to talk with you. And I'm pretty sure I told you this. But I wasn't looking forward to seeing your play because, I mean, I was going to go. I support veteran efforts and whatever they do. But generally, I think when veterans put something to paper a lot of times, it's very on the nose. right it's very on the nose and uh and sometimes it's indulgent you know indulging the you know and your play was great you know it was i was very surprised i was riveted it was great it was it was great storytelling it you know it led the audience it didn't like preach yeah yeah i i remember

I had a real fear that it was going to be very dark. I mean, this isn't a huge spoiler, but the first scene of Last Out is the protagonist dying in Afghanistan. And, you know, spoiler alert, that's the first scene of the play. I mean, and then through that, you see him, you know, you learn about this protagonist and his whole journey through special forces, through his entire life, through deployments. And it's not just a dark play.

play about somebody's life, all the good times, the bad times, the funny times, the goofy times. And I thought what your play captured, which I had never ever seen before, not in a book, not in a movie, not in a documentary, was that journey that I think so many young men had joining special forces, getting on a team, going on these deployments, coming back. I mean, it was like all there encapsulated in two hours. and I'd never seen anyone capture that with so much cultural awareness that you managed to pack in there. I appreciate it, Jack. It means a lot, man.

And the fact that you guys came, and I hope you'll come see the new version of it. Oh, absolutely. What I will tell you is that the way what I, and then, you know, we just kept that thing going on the road. And here's what I've seen on it is that honestly, there's a couple of things that usually happen. You've got this, there's a study out recently from Better Together that says that, three out of five veterans feel like strangers in their own country. 70% of Americans say they want to help veterans move on past the long war, but they don't interact with them.

And almost all of the veterans and civilian surveyed said we need less parades and ceremonies and more community engagement and more storytelling. And so, you know, as a way to bring civil society back together, you know, we put them in this room and in that room, you have veterans, you have military family members, you have civilians that have never heard the crack of around. and they're all sitting together. And they go for this ride with Danny Patton, as he experiences, as you said, in the very beginning, he's mortally wounded and he needs to let go so that he can ascend to Valhalla.

And this whole play is about letting go. Right. At the end of the day, for the veteran, for the veteran, the military family member, and even the civilian, we're all holding on to something. Right. That is that we need to let go of, you know, that we need to ascend. And that's really at the heart of the play. But what we've started referring to it more lately is it's also our emotional breaching tool. You know, the play, it's the talk back afterwards and the conversations that happened like we had in the bar.

And the conversations were the husband and wife on the way home who have both buried a lot over 30 years. And they finally talk about something that happened in the play because the story gave them permission to do that. And, you know, I've seen this so many times, guys. And, you know, believe it or not, I didn't write the play for veterans. I didn't. I wrote the play for civilians because to me, this goes back to the questions you guys were asking. How do we prevent this from happening again? How do we get policymakers to understand?

I think they have to feel it. Right. I think you can give them all the PowerPoint briefings in the world and books. But until they feel what it's like to hold your buddy. in his final moments or to say goodbye to an Afghan elder knowing that you're never going to see him again. Right. Knowing that somebody's going to kill him.

But, you know, and that you're going to have to carry that the rest of your life. Like until you actually feel that in a room with the people who did it, it's just something that happened over there and you don't have to think about it. But when we're done with this play, man, you've gone for the ride and you can never unsee it. And, you know, veterans in the process. get the opportunity to see their life on the stage in a completely safe environment and make their own meaning out of it and heal and validate in the presence of their fellow neighbors. And I'm like, hell, yeah, because you deserve that.

And you deserve to know that what you did mattered and we love you. And we're never going to stop telling your story. You know, like that's the other side of it. But it's really the civilian impact that I'm after. Yeah. And I want to caveat. I want to like add to. all of that for people listening is even though it's written for civilians it is not there's no like

thank you for my service there's no shame on you there's no woe with me it's very real it's very real very wrong it's just it's just accompanying somebody along their journey and taking whatever you want from that there there there are no preachable moments in it or or anything like that it's it's just a good story it does what a good story should do which is you know it should be for people. Yeah. And we, you know, we don't even really use props. We have like seven wooden blocks in the wall of honor. And it's even more metaphysical now because the play basically takes place in Danny's mind in the minutes that it takes him to succumb to his wounds on the battlefield. Like it's so it's the whole thing. The whole play takes place really in just a couple of

minutes. It's just the synapses in his mind firing for the last time. And, you know, it's an opportunity for every person because storytelling by definition is a sense making tool. That's what it's for. Story exists for humans and it has for 70,000 years to make meaning out of their lived experience and the lived experience of others so that they don't have to get scuffed up like the other person did. And that's why we've accelerated in many ways as a civil society is we're story animals. And that's all this is. It does follow the structure and the expectations of good storytelling. And there's no preconceived agenda.

It's not pro-war, anti-war, democratic, Republican. it's all about reconnecting around the hard subject of war and shared perspectives, right? I mean, that's really at the end of the day. That's what we need more of, I think. Yeah, I don't know what you guys were pumping into the air of the sawdust or baby pattern of the end, but it got me. Yeah, wait until you see the new ending. The play was or is it still available for people to view online?

It is. Yeah, we put it up. We went ahead and raised about a quarter of, million dollars on our own, Jack, as a nonprofit, and we filmed it with a veteran crew. But it's the original cast members. It's on Amazon Prime, Voodoo, Google TV, and Apple TV. And all the proceeds, 100% of the proceeds, go back into the hero's journey. So for some reason, you can't get to the play.

Or even if you do, and you want to see it on Amazon, it's pretty cool to watch on video as well. Well, we'll put a link down the description of this video for folks who are watching this on YouTube so then go check it out. Now, when you, when you, so this was two, two and a half years ago that we saw it. Did you go into a hiatus where you continued to run it? Like what brought it back and brought it back in a new fashion? That's funny. I was done, man. I was, I have a, you know, a rooftop leadership business and, and, you know, we run our storytelling workshop for veterans.

So I'm stay pretty busy. and, you know, I'm an empty nester now, man. I can chase my wife around the house like, you know, uninterrupted. And kind of at that point in my life, and all of that was right about the time that the Afghanistan collapse happened. And we had put the play up on film at that point. And I was content to just let it go. 53 years old, you know, it's getting challenging to play like a team sergeant who's fit for combat and all that good stuff. But I, what happened was,

when the Afghanistan collapse occurred through a couple of connections, Gary Seney saw the film. And he contacted me. And we started talking about it. And, you know, Gary had done a similar thing, Dave, with a play called Tracers in 1982. He talks about it in this book, Grateful Americans. Great book.

Grateful American. And in that, he talked about how he saw this play Tracers that was about the Vietnam War written and performed by Vietnam Veterans. and he brought it up to this new little theater in Chicago that he and a actor named John Malkovich and a few others were starting called Steppenwolf and they put it up there and it had a really profound impact on local veterans and the community at a time

when people were trying to make meaning out of the Vietnam experience. And when I read that, I was knee-deep in putting the play up and I was like, man, this has been done. If only I could get this in front of Gary, he would get this. And I tried for years to try to get it in front of him. And as you can imagine, he's a very hard guy to reach when you're doing a grassroots effort like that. And so I never, never got it in front of him. But it was so funny that when I quit worrying about it and we retired the play, I get a phone call from him. And he's like, hey, this thing is a post 9-11 tracers.

We talked about the fact that we were on the front end of a mental health crisis for our post-9-11 veterans as a result of Afghanistan and a few other things. And I just said, you know, I think we could do a lot of good with this play. And he said, how about if I produce it? So we made the decision right then and there. And this was not more than eight months ago. And we're kicking it off in Steppenwolf. We're going to be in D.C. first, January 6 through 8th. And then Steppenwolf, January 20 through 21.

And then we're going on the road on another national tour. But it will be as part of the Gary Sinise Foundation. That's fantastic. I know he does a lot for veterans. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. He's such a good dude.

And he does so much for not just veterans, but military family members and first responders. and, you know, he has just given us complete autonomy to bring the play back. And I'm telling you, even if you've seen the play, it is a completely different play. I did a rewrite in August. It has things from the Afghan abandonment. We have new cast members. The operators that were on the periphery of Danny have whole new roles and interactions with each other. And then the ending is brand new.

So there's a lot about the play. Every city we go to, we do storytelling workshops. We do PTSD interventions with our counselor, suicide prevention. We honor families of the fallen and gold stars. It's just a whole weekend of community engagement and really just celebrating the veterans in that area, the active duty in that area, the military families and our gold stars and just telling them that we love them. And that what they did mattered and that it still matters and that we're always going to tell their story for them. And that's for me the coolest thing is to be able to go in there and let them autobiographically locate themselves in that story.

in the presence of their neighbors and their kids and, um, and validate them, man, because they deserve it. Let's, uh, let's talk about the withdrawal.

Um, because that, that for anybody who worked and, you know, first off for anybody who fought there, the withdrawal, the way it happened hurt. I think all of us thought we should withdraw in some way or most of us did.

But, the way it happened hurt for people who fought. For those of us who were tanned in hand with the indigenous it was particularly brutal because like you said it's like

leaving your friends, your family, your brothers in arms behind. What happened for you in like the days leading up to it? Because the book, so Operation Pineapple, it's

it's an amazing book and and i highly highly suggest uh people read it one it's it's a great read it's like a thriller that that uh that happens in journal entries in a way um each chapter is basically a day uh and is a page to three pages um but it also in addition to the work that you guys did, it really paints the picture of what was going on outside of the Kabul airport, which I don't think we did not get a sense of that in our media. Right. We didn't. We didn't.

And thank you for the kind of words. It was a book I never intended to write. Frankly, really didn't want to write even after it all happened. But I decided when I did decide to write it, I had really, the whole thing affected me. just like it did you and so many others, just really negatively. And maybe it was the lack of sleep and just the stress that came from it at an age that, you know, I'm not really used to doing that. It really took me down.

And by November, my wife and several of my best buddies kind of had to do an intervention on me. And not like, hey, you've got to stop doing what you're doing. But we got to find a way to do something a bit healthier here because we don't want to see you go back to where you were in your transition. when you got out. And what I decided, Dave, was my days of, you know, managing Afghan cases and being a task force commander were long gone. And so I divested the, we stood pineapple down. I divested the pineapple manifest of thousands to, to another nonprofit that was frankly

much better suited than me to handle it. And what I got back to was my storytelling. You know, I'm a storyteller. And I committed myself to writing the book. And we did a ton of research on. this thing. We interviewed, I just can't tell you how many, not just pineapple passengers and flock, but also people in the government. We had guys in Pineapple who actually wrote the report for SINCOM on the ISIS K explosion. I interviewed State Department. These were all people that

frankly were risking their careers to do the right thing. And all of them were willing to talk to me. Some of them we changed their names. But it was a brutally researched book. I mean, we researched like crazy hours and hours and hours at Zoom interviews because I like you said I wanted to tell the story around two basic questions what does a promise mean to you and how far would you go to honor it that's it that's all I cared about and then I asked that question to the relevant parties but it's really told through the lens of the Afghans the at-risk Afghans who risked everything and their partners who tried to help them and that's it and what they were going through was insane.

And it's captured very well in this. Yeah, it's unimaginable. No. I mean, getting to the gates was dangerous than just being at the gates. Women were giving birth at the gate. Like, people were getting trampled.

Yeah. It was insane. Yeah. So can you sort of tell us how, what was the genesis of Operation pineapple. How did it go from you trying to help a single Afghan into this expansive operation? I mean, it started with a lot of reluctance. I didn't want to get involved in any of this again.

You know, I had pretty much moved on with my life. I had retired in 2013. I was in a place of restoration, in a place of healing, and it really felt good to be there. And so to get sucked back into all of this again, didn't feel very good. And I didn't want to do that. And really when Nizam, my friend who was an Afghan commander, was in duress and it looked like he was going to get captured and killed by the Taliban, that's when I got involved at that point, Dave. And again, by getting involved, I thought, I'll just help him get his SIV visa or I'll try to get somebody at Army Special Ops Command to pay attention to the fact that we have a guy on our regimental books who is hiding in his. uncle's house like Anne Frank with the Taliban texting him. But this was also a guy who had been shot through the face defending American SF who had been shot three times in the chest plate by

ISIS K. He had worked VSO side by side with me and other guys like Mullah Mike. And he was highly respected. And he had gone to our Q course. I mean, he was an 18 Bravo weapon sergeant. And to leave this guy alone and not get him out of there. I just, it just, it was starting to have an effect on me that I just couldn't live with that. And so it was when he said to me right after the collapse and cobble, he said, sir, everybody's gone. You know, my, my, my teammates are gone. My generals were gone. He goes, I'm, I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to die alone. You know, and man, they just floored me. Just it hit me right between the running lights. And I realized that, uh, we were going to have to try to do something. So I got together with a couple of retired guys. including Congressman Mike Walsh's staffer and just we just started working it. And we just, you know, did what a lot of other veteran groups did. We worked the phones, the relationships. And we managed to help him move through the city and get through the wire and onto an airplane. And then the transition, and the reason that Pineapple is that he was given a code word to say at the gate to get let in.

And because he didn't have, you know, he didn't have any credentials or paperwork or anything. And we ended up talking to a diplomat who just had. happened to be a former SF guy. You can believe that. And, you know, we told him the story in like three minutes of Nizam. And he said, tell him to say pineapple, right? And so we're screaming, dude, say pineapple, you know, because they're about to toss him out. And Nizam's never the type to make a wave or anything.

So he just walks over to the bearded special operator. And he says, excuse me, sir, I'm the pineapple. And they like, they like let him in. And but that became like the hilarious meme for us. And we, that's what we called. ourselves was task force pineapple, but the pineapple express really evolved into that, that open sewage trench and a four foot hole in the fence that was manned by some guys from the 82nd Airborne, the white devils, who we got in touch with and we basically put in

place an underground railroad. And we moved hundreds of Afghans through that sewage canal up to the hole in the fence where they would do challenging password, show the pineapple on their phone and get pulled through and taken across the airfield in the high left. over to C-17 and shipped out. And that became our mechanism, you know. And it worked for somewhere between 750 and 1,000 at-risk Afghans in their families. You know, when you say that you, you know, Nazan made his way to the airfield and then, you know, got in, even that was a story in and of itself.

I mean, it's crazy what he went through. It's crazy what everybody else went through. and the stories are riveting. And it's interesting, I've lost my train of thought, because you talk about the sewage trench they had to go in through. And even that, the reason they could do that is because it was so filthy with human waste and everything,

the Taliban wouldn't mess with them. They wouldn't get in it. And for the first couple of days that, you know, before the bomb went off, we were able to use that thing pretty effectively. And I have to say, say, man, like, look, I would love to sit here and tell you guys that I came up with this mechanism, but it was really an SF guy named Zach who had gotten out and had become an inner city

school teacher in Syracuse. And I had never met him, but he had done VSO in 2011. He was an amazing, amazing young man. And he came in through LinkedIn, if you can believe that, into pineapple. And but you know guys how you you you meet these people in our in our world and you just know immediately there's something special about them like they're just you just immediately you know this is the person that you want like in charge and he came he he's made we were getting some people out but it was almost a stalemate and he said to us he's like you know we just finished studying Harriet Tubman in in my class and you know it's it's one of my favorite subjects to teach and he's like what if we what if we what What if we constructed an underground railroad? And I just listened to him talking. I thought, you know what, Zach, you run with that, pal. You tell us how to do that and we'll do it. And he really did.

He put this thing together. He designed the approach and how it would work. He connected with the 82nd guys. And he put it together. And it worked, you know. And this happened a lot. I think with not just our volunteer groups, but a lot of volunteer groups, was this singular focus on helping our partners and nothing else.

I went back through our signal chat room, guys, days after it all ended. And there were literally thousands of entries, as you can imagine, from 150, you know, volunteers in there and all of that chaos. You know, the word Biden was only mentioned one time and the word Trump was never mentioned in all of that. And the reason was, as you know, there was no time. It was all about doing what was right, doing what needed. happen and I just thought man what if what if we operated like that as a nation even for a day

yeah that's uh you know you included a lot of those signal chats in here and it's just what's so great about that is you actually see when people lose track of their like they lose they lost they lose track of their people or their people disappear or their people get frustrated because they can't get close and turn around and you just feel like people's anxiety and frustration and, and the depths of their worry and sorrow. I still feel it. I still talk to some of our guys.

And, you know, man, there was so much suffering at that airport. And, you know, those people were, were 110% committed to doing whatever they had to do to get out. And there was such a measure of trust, Dave, between these shepherds and their partners. And I remember one of my friends, Steve, and I think I talk about this in the book, but he was helping a young man and his family

move through these checkpoints. And they were almost to the point where they could get to the fence. And they got stuck at a checkpoint, and they started beating his family. And Steve was on the phone with him, and he kept saying to him, Steve, they're beating my family.

What do I do? do, please tell me what to do. You know, and Steve, you know, I've known him for years, man. I mean, this guy is he's such a decent soul and he's been through so much in his life. He just, he said he just laid down on the floor and he just, he just beat the floor as hard as he could and was biting his finger because he couldn't say anything, you know, and he needed, he needed this guy to keep pressing. And, you know, how can we do that, man?

How can we do that to our veteran population? How can we ask them to take that on? You know, I'll never understand it as long as I live. And it has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do. I'll just never understand how we could lay that at the feet of a generation of war fighters who served us so faithfully for 20 years and asked them to do that. I'll just never understand it as long as I live. When you said that there were people from the 82nd there and you were talking to Marines, was there a general at the airport?

Yes. there were a couple of flag officers. There's Admiral Vasley, Basley, who was a Navy SEAL, and then there was General Donahue, who was in charge of, you know, the overall kind of the ground force, Neo. But you guys weren't doing a lot of coordination.

You were calling the guard post, right? You were calling people right there at the gates a lot of people. So they're different levels. So, you know, one is the one thing is, we had people in pineapple that were very well placed. One of our guys, Matt Coburn, was the last Seagisota commander in Afghanistan. So he knew Donahue.

He knew Vaisley. And he was calling them directly. And he was talking to them. And frankly, you know, to Matt's credit, he had Afghan commandos and special forces loaded on buses, manifested,

ready to drive through with engines running. They would not open the gate. They would not open the gate. while simultaneously allowing thousands, if not tens of thousands of CIA paramilitary and their families through. You know, and that's not a ding on the agency. I mean, good on them. They got their people out. But it really made no sense.

I mean, even if you look at the national security memo, Dave, that came out on 14 August, the day before the withdrawal, they listed all of the priorities for EVAC and the paramilitary force was on there. Any State Department employees, even if they had just started the day prior, were on that for a priority evacuation. You know who wasn't on there? Afghan commandos, Afghan special forces, all of the Afghan special operations and the NMR,

the National Mine Reduction Group, who actually prevented insider threats against seals and green berets, were not on the list. They were not considered. They were not submitted. And again, this is where I'm asking,

where's the accountability on that? How is a force that works by with and through partners? How could we not have our partners on that list? as a priority for X-Vil or at least some kind of X-Fill plan. There wasn't a special forces team on the ground. And there hadn't been for quite some time. The last SF teams had left the country.

Why did we not have at least a couple of SF teams on the ground, you know, doing that bottom up by with and through preparation for long-term resistance, right? I mean, it's just we have to get to the bottom of this because it is a level of systemic abandonment it goes all the way back to the mountain yards. And I know we've kind of pivoted here, but it's just it's so, there are so many veterans from the soft community that are asking this question over and over again.

And we got to answer. It's one of the things that shocked me were the actual U.S. citizens that couldn't, that were outside the gate and couldn't get in. It's true. There were a lot. And we had some, and we were working with pineapple,

I included one of them in the book. There were actually more than that. You know, some of the cases that we had were crazy. I mean, I had a special advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. Call my cell phone and ask, hey,

can you help us get our Afghan out? You know, and I'm like, what are we on right now that you're calling a 52-year-old storyteller, you know, to get your guy out when you've got Delta sitting in a hangar, just turn them loose, let them do what they know, you know they want to do.

You know, but it just, it was that kind of stuff was happening like crazy. Guys were getting phone calls from, you know, the service chiefs for God's sakes. And fundamentally broken system. That's the, exactly. Like, you're a civilian, like, random, just spontaneously stood up organization. and you are taking over the role of a governmental agency. Oh, yeah. And then like getting questions, you know, as this thing drew out, we would get quite because

we're trying to, now we're trying to like get them safe houses and we're trying to get a medical care because they can't go back to their home address because their homes have been compromised. Right. When they raided the Ministry of Defense, right? And so these poor guys and their families have nowhere to go that they're, they can't even go home, you know. and it's winter.

And so we're asking questions. We're trying to get these different congressional involved. And they're asking us questions like, well, can you show us the vetting procedures? And I'm like, dude, I have a Mac laptop and a cell phone. Like, what part of this do you not understand? You know, how in God's name would I know what their vetting is? I mean, I know I served with them. Right.

And I know he's legit. But, you know, all of that crap. is with the Department of Defense. Why are you not asking them? You know? And it just, the way this thing was redistributed onto the shoulders of our veteran population

and the moral injury that has been incurred. I mean, we just lost another 20th grade guy to suicide, man, as a direct result of what happened in Afghanistan. And I just, it's unfathomable to me. And the fact that we're not talking about it, and frankly,

I'll just say it because, you know, I don't really care anymore. why did someone not throw their stars on the table? Like at least one officer, senior officer at the flag officer level, could they not throw their stars on the table as a result of this? It just, again, all the guys I interviewed are asking that question and no one seems to want to answer it. And the administration's response was just to ignore it. Of course.

But, you know, the other side of that thing, too, man, I want to be really clear here. like this is they're there they're both both sides are equally underwhelming you know i mean if you look at the if you look at the doha agreement under trump it that was basically what they executed what the biden administration execute just wrongheaded not listening to the guys on the ground um it just it just frankly as as jack said from the time we started this thing at an administration level under multiple administrations, woefully underwhelming in their ability to understand or even try to understand the nature of the fight we were in.

And to look at foreign internal defense and capacity building, you know, for what needed to happen. It was just, I don't know, it was just, it was a comedy of errors, really. And we've really seen that through the Bush administration, the Obama administration, the Trump administration. Like, we've seen it all throughout. it like it is the same music with a different dancer each time it seems like

I think so and I mean look I you know I I talk about this in game changers I mean I had a ton of personal responsibility for things that went wrong in that war you know to include a myopic focus on walking the enemy down for way too long because of you know losing a friend and but there was a lot of other things that I got wrong in that war a lot of things that all of us got wrong but but to me it's like okay got it A, we need to step back from this thing and look at what happened. Because if we don't start to make some kind of fundamental approach to getting our head around this abandonment and more importantly, how we can keep it from happening again, it's going to happen again. And I don't know how many more mulligans we get on this.

No, seriously, I don't know how many more mulligans we get on this. You know, what if there's another ISIS attack, which very good chance there will be with the way they're reconstituting. and AQ in Afghanistan on the homeland, you know, three to five years from now, you know damn well when that happens, all the Budweiser commercials and the country music songs are going to kick off. And it's going to be our kids that are going to saddle up on these C-17s. They're going to go back into Afghanistan for payback. Except this time, man, they're not going to be facing or like linking up with Northern Alliance,

you know, and posthune tribes to the South that are ready to get their gun on. They're going to be facing, you know, command, pissed off former commandos. Afghan SF who have been on the run and hunted for three or four years and maybe co-opted at that point. You know, it's just a whole different thing. And again, I just, I can't understand it. You know, I can't understand why we're not at least working with the resistance in some way. While we're not providing humanitarian aid, humanitarian corridor to a 20-year partner. You mean all the military gear that we left behind for the Taliban wasn't considered humanitarian aid.

Yeah. It's just there's so much there, man. And it's again, it's kind of both sides of the aisle because yeah, the absence of just formal leadership of somebody is standing up. Right. And really being heard and it just, at least in our community, we just are our, our, our battle cries, nobody's coming. Right.

Were there any, um, people in the, in the, in like Congress, left or right, but were there any people who stood up for you guys? Any veterans? Any civilians? Anybody who stood up? Yeah, I mean, and I don't want to omit anybody, but I can tell you from my standpoint, Mike McCall, Mike Waltz, Dan Crenshaw, Tom Cotton, you know, a lot of, you know, vets that were in Congress, but also I think Senator Shaheen, there were several.

that did and openly. And, you know, there were a lot of junior officers and NCOs across the active duty formation that took immense risks. And there were some civilians, even in the Biden administration, who were appointees who took risk. One of them was in pineapple. You know, so I don't want to give the impression that there weren't leaders stepping up because there were, but for the most part, it wasn't. And it was just crickets. And it was just crickets. And, And a lot of these formal institutional leaders at the diplomatic, military, and policy level, what they did was they called their buddies who were retired and gave them the names and numbers of the guys they needed to get out. And then they just went back to work.

With the guys who are on active duty, the people, the guys and girls who are on active duty, what did they do that put them at risk or put their jobs at risk? Like, what's, yeah, what was the level of risk there? Well, I mean, there were guys like Jeff Darcia and others in the groups. And I talk about some of them in the book who set up operation centers in their day rooms and in their, you know, the class in the battalion classroom. Some of them took leave and, you know, just worked and didn't sleep. They just stayed at the unit. I think every single SF group did some version of that.

and, you know, with or without the tacit approval of probably the highest level of the battalion commander, group commander may have known about it. I don't know. But, but like these guys were actively working inside the volunteer groups. Some of them were standing up their own volunteer groups, but a lot of them were part of pineapple and other groups. So, you know, if you think about it, the level of just, and maybe not as much risk in that regard, but there were guys at the airfield, particularly the dudes that we worked with in the 8th, 82nd. And some of the other folks that were on the diplomatic front, they basically worked

right alongside us as a coexisting mechanism to move Afghans in duress from the crowd through the corridor into the fence and then, you know, get them on an airplane. And they were doing that on their own, man. They made those decisions to do that on their own and incurred a lot of risk to themselves too. The 82nd guys were going outside that hole in the fence and had the first sergeant not stopped to smoke a cigarette before they ran out to make one more pull of pineapples. A lot of those 82nd guys would have been there when that ISIS K bomb went off. They were just on the other side of the blast wall when it went off only because Jesse Kennedy decided to smoke a cigarette before they jumped in their trucks to do one more pull. So the level of risk that those folks incurred

all of the folks, really, H. Kaya, both physically and in some cases for their career was immeasured. Yeah. Yeah, really, people really stood up. I thought the story about, I can't remember his name, but the red sunglasses. Captain Red sunglasses. Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell that story?

Because that's a great story. Yeah. I mean, the part of the Pineapple Express that was, you know, the active duty component from the 82nd was Captain John Fulta. and his first sergeant, Jesse Kennedy. And both of them were just amazing human beings who were, you know, responsible for a part of the perimeter, but it was kind of a security in depth. So they had the latitude to follow commanders' intent,

which is if you have the opportunity and you can still maintain security to help Afghans at risk, you know, go for it. And that's what they did. And so they became the conductors who would pull in the folks on the Underground Railroad, through the hole in the fence. And towards the end, the security situation was getting really bad. We knew there was an ISIS bomber in the midst somewhere. And so most of the final period of darkness, that's when we would run the express.

The person would drop down in the sewage canal. They would move through it. And then when they saw a green chem light at the designated place, that was the 82nd guy, they would hold up the pineapple on their phone. They would read off the info on the baseball cards, make sure it matched and then pull them in. But the last period of darkness, we lost the whole period of darkness because of the security threat. And so we were now looking at a daylight pull. And we knew that the final day for the Neo was at hand.

Plus there was this ISIS bomber that was making it really, really challenging that kept getting reports on. So Captain Volta advised us. He's like, we're going to do a daylight pull. We hadn't done that at this point. And he said, so, you know, the near recognition signal or far recognition signal will be i'll be in uh red sunglasses and and somebody asked well how will we know and he goes trust me you'll know and uh they just happened to be just these gaudy oakly red sunglasses that he had in his backpack and he put them on and it just if you go back and read through the chat room now you can

hear all the guys talking about yeah the dude's got red sunglasses on and they just started calling him captain red sunglasses uh there's even a picture of him in the book posing with some afghans they pulled out. But yeah, it worked and it was it was ingenious and it allowed the Afghans enough for us to pass bona fides that were easily understood and very simple and a chaotic time that that made the difference in hundreds more getting pulled out. It's an incredible story. And once again, I want to recommend anybody who wants a good story and some real situational awareness about this is a month a month worth of time really a little over a month i suppose but it's it's riveting do we have any questions for scott yeah want to pull those up yeah so operation pineapple is the book that is uh scott's

other book is game changers uh this is a really about vs o and this is really like a manual isn't it scott about yeah yeah yeah how you guys get this there's there's two versions of it um jack actually there's a right here, game changers. It's called the Abridged Citizens Edition. So if you want to find it the shorter read about how VSO works, and then there's the larger version that you're handling that I really wrote for special operators, security force assistance brigades and law enforcement. And it is more of an application. All right. Robert C. Thank you very much. Much has been written about the collapse of the conventional ANA, where do you think we went wrong with the conventional A&A and what main reason

caused the collapse of Anasoc specifically? So with the conventional ANA, I believe, and I started working with them very early on, like I said in 0405. We tried to create a partner force in our own image, and that was a real mistake because that was not sustainable. You know, if you look at how our our military operates, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, uh, overwhelming firepower. It's, it's superior training, but it's also a lot of high technology, a high end equipment that, that requires contractor oversight. It's a lot of intel dependent, you know, exploitation of targets where you have to have intelligence surveillance, reconnaissance platforms in the air. All of that stuff is super high maintenance, super high tech. And you're talking about, you know,

privates in the A&A that could read, you know, that were 14 and 15 years. years old. And and and and and and and a standing army that was only at the time when, you know, when we stood it up, it was it was non-existent. And it and it's at its maturity, it was 19 years old. And then, you know, you look at these guys walking around, um, dressed like us. Uh, and we've just built them in our own image, which okay, fine, then you damn sure better make sure that you keep the contract support in place, you know, and, and, uh, I interviewed on my podcast, General Sammy Sadat, who was fighting in Helmand and was very, very highly regarded and still is Afghan Special Operations General who did not run. He's in the movie Retrograde,

if you want to see a wonderful movie and what he did until the bitter end. But Sammy told me, he said they were fighting in Helmand. The Americans were long gone out of the local area, SF teams were gone. And this was like in June, I think, and his Airbus walked into his office and said, General, we can't fly today. And he was like, why not? He gives all the contractors are gone. Yeah. They left.

They're out of the country. And so to answer your question, I mean, we literally pulled all of the contractors out of Afghanistan without warning in June of 2021. And there was no way that those platforms could fly. They couldn't do medevac. I don't know many units in the U.S. military that are going to run operations nowadays without a medevac. But that's what they were doing.

And so, you know, it was, it was building it in our own image and then not, not, and then pulling the plug on the operating mechanisms, the support mechanisms that needed to keep it functioning after we were gone. And as far as the Afghan National Army Special Ops, they fought until the bitter end. They were fighting long after the government collapsed. Many of them are still fighting right now. They're in the resistance. They're fighting back.

But the command collapse. about the same time that Kabul did, but General Sadat, General Al-Azai, they wanted to keep fighting, and they approached the U.S. flag officers and had a plan for Kabul, and they wouldn't hear it. It's amazing. Another really interesting story is one of the gentlemen who actually made it to the states and realized that there was nothing in the states for him, and he went back to Afghanistan to fight. Yeah, Kazam. I changed his name, but he was, he was an interpreter to Captain Will Liles, who lost both legs, an SF guy doing VSO up at Cobra Base, Fort, I can't firebase ties, I believe, in a Rusgon province. And his interpreter, Kazim, helped save his life. And then the tables were turned where Kazim had since evolved into a pretty elite operator for the NDS working regionally in Nimrose province. and was there when the Nimra's NDS headquarters was overrun, and was the guy that blew the ammo bunker and did the final retrograde out of there,

and then fought his way across Afghanistan all the way to Kabul. And when he finally saw that there was no way, that there was no resistance in place to speak of, he decided to go ahead and get out of there with his brother, made it to the states and was living the high life in North Carolina with a sponsor, and just he couldn't do it. He just, he said to Will on the phone, he said, you know, all I've ever known in my entire life is killing Taliban. And he's like, I don't even like the taste of food, you know.

And, and, uh, the next day he was done. And he, and Will got a message that he was back in Afghanistan. And he's still there, still there fighting. It's incredible. Brad, thank you very much. Senior play in Santa Barbara. Really like the 20 year team sergeant, S.F. I said only people who haven't seen enough war thirst for it.

Yeah, well said. And, you know, one of the greatest honors of my life in terms of storytelling is the opportunity to play a team sergeant in this play, you know, to do a play and a story about an SFNCO, a senior NCO and share his story. I will tell you that I interviewed a lot of team sergeants, even though I worked with a lot of them anyway. I interviewed dozens and dozens of team sergeants for this role. and I still do because I find their perspective to be fascinating. And I really want them to inform my character, not just in what I say, but in my physicality. So I appreciate you saying that.

And I really hope that I do embody what you just said, because Danny Patton in this play, while he longs to get back to the fight, it's because it's out of love for the people that he protects to include his Afghan partners and his Afghan families. And I think a lot of people don't understand that. Robert, thanks again. How did VSO handle corruption in local security forces, being that militia ALP abuse corruption, were central drivers of the rural insurgency?

That's a great point. You know, I think once we want, really once we regulated or conventionalized ALP, I think we lost the ability to control that. You know, it was kind of a, it's just kind of a catch-22, right? because you want to pay these forces to some degree. And you know, you want to have some level of accountability to the central government. It is desirable. But I think we missed the mark on that. I think once we started paying these guys,

you know, I think we lost the ability to really regulate any kind of graft or corruption or patronage. It just got out of hand. And then once we pulled the team, it was still manageable. But then when you pulled the teams out of the villages, that was when it all fell apart. That was when all the regulatory and responsible oversight, which you need to have when you do this kind of work, it fell away because there was no way that you could do these episodic visits from a firebase to a village and think that you're going to somehow maintain responsible oversight of things like pay and logistics and even behavior of how the, you know, how the AOP operated when you weren't there.

Right. And so I would say that the real, where it came off the rails was when we moved teams out of the villages and took away their ability for persistent oversight. Ahmed Akhtab, Akhab, thank you very much. Thank you for your service. Lieutenant Colonel. Sad that politically motivated and artificial deadlines doomed what could have been a successful strategy. Do you see the similarities with the abandonment of the Kurds in Syria? Mary Christian. Yes. Yes, I do. Thank you for those words. And I absolutely do. I think, in fact, if you look at our history of working with partners, it is abysmal. You can walk it all the way back to the mungs, the montignyards. I mean, even the, you know, the Shah's regime in Iran, the Kurds in Syria, the Iraqi police and military, the Afghans. I mean, and really, we abandoned Afghanistan twice. You know, there was an abandonment that happened, you know,

when the Soviets came in as well. So I think there's a lot of similarities there. And this goes back to what we were talking about, Dave, where if we don't find a way, I think it's going to have to come from Congress. It's the only thing I can figure, some kind of congressional inquiry or oversight that really pursues accountability and crystallized,

and mandates crystallized learning to come out of this. because and one for a national security so that it doesn't happen again. But two, the moral injury that has been heaped upon our veteran population, our flag officers in my assessment are not responding to that. And there's a lot of studies on moral injury that show that one of the biggest things that needs to happen is leader involvement, acknowledgement of what happened, and then measures in place so that the people that have experienced that moral injury know it won't happen again.

And if you look at the recruits, and retention numbers right now. I think it's a reflection of the fact that the bulk of your recruits nowadays come from military families and military family members are saying to their kids, I wouldn't join if I'm Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think twice about this. Yeah. I think another challenge is we never knew what victory looked like. Like we, in my opinion, we won, we won with as soon as we defeated AQ, right? won. Then we decided just hang out. And there was like if you have a sport, you have like you know when you win. If you set a goal, you know when you achieve that goal. We had no goals. Yeah. No, I think that's right, man. And, you know, it ebbed and flowed, didn't it? With each administration. And I do believe that there was a legitimate requirement for remote foreign internal defense, you know, and I do believe that there was a

legitimate requirement for long-term CT support in that country. And honestly, if you think about it, we were, the Afghan special operators were really magnificent. They really were. The special mission wing was magnificent. So you had, you know, you had a force that was really taking the fight to the enemy. And I think had we kept some measure of VSO in place, particularly with Afghan special forces in the lead, we could have maintained a presence in the rural areas.

So it's, I think there, I think there was and still is a need for capacity building in that country. And I think there's going to be, you know, because here's the thing, Dave, you know, if you think about how ISIS K, AQ, how do they operate? They're doing exactly what they're doing in Afghanistan right now. They go into at-risk undergoverned areas. They set up shop so that they can plan, train, project, and attack from these same-savement areas. and the best antibody to that is a local presence of some kind. And that's what we were moving towards. And I think that Al-Qaeda's not going to go away.

ISIS-K is not going to go away. So we're going to have to operate against them. And I don't think we should bail on this local approach. I think it is very doable. But we're going to have to get our policymakers and our senior officers, you know, up to speed on on what this looks like and i think the s f regimen's going to have to get over this you know this identity crisis and figure out what we're doing right um and amad thank you very much again uh can you please see more about what you call the incoming mental health tsunami

and causes and why many veterans feel like strangers in their own country um that's a great question you know um there's a range of studies that show that um The post-9-11 population is really affected by, well, I mean, look, we already had a suicide rate of 22 a day, but now they're saying that the Veterans Administration actually did not count overdoses. So it could be as much as 44 a day. I think the number of active duty and post-9-11 veteran suicides is something like 37,000, right? And those are really, a lot of them are battlefield casualties, aren't they? I mean, there are a lot of things that carried over from the battlefield.

And this was really all going on before the Afghan abandonment. So if you take 44 a day and then a latest study that came in about how veterans are reacting to the Afghan withdrawal, 775,000 Afghan war veterans, 73% of them say they are betrayed and 67% feel humiliated. So you take those numbers and you apply them against what we were already looking at with mental health, suicide, depression, alcoholism, and this moral injury of abandoning allies and the guilt that goes with that, a lot of these guys are trying to keep them alive. They're still on the phone with them. Yeah, I do. think we're on the front end of a of a tsunami of mental health that is going to start man and we've already seen just in our little community like three suicides that are directly attributed

to the afghan withdrawal uh within a year you know and and so i i just and traveling with the play and doing these talkbacks already what people are what the veterans are saying in the rooms man they are hot you know they are hot and and i i look at our flag officers, there's nothing coming out of them about this. There's no engagement. There's no outreach. I've even heard flag officers say that, you know, that we should get over this betrayal thing because it makes us look like victims. And I just, the tone deaf level that comes with that is, is amazing to me. But I do think that we're going to start seeing a range of mental health issues largely infused by a moral injury if we don't start engaging like now.

Scott, we talked about this with Cape, but can you, a lot of viewers probably haven't heard that term moral injury. I think it's a relatively new term. Can, or at least, you know, kind of being spread now. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and what it means? I had never really heard much about it until after the Afghanistan thing happened. and our volunteer community, the pineapple folks, and then others, we formed this thing called Moral Compass.

And it's like a 22 organization, federation of volunteers, operation, Sacred Promise, Flandersfields, and others. There's volunteer groups that were in this thing from the beginning. And we started to notice that there were just a lot of issues with people in our our groups that were experiencing high degrees of guilt, depression. They had cashed in their kids 401 or college savings funds. Like, you know, they were really experienced. And, you know, the guys they were trying to keep alive were murdered.

And then they'd get a videotape of it sent to them courtesy of the Taliban that did it, you know, because they'd see the number in their phone. And, you know, we started digging into this. We're like, what's going on here? And so we, I personally started researching. I heard this term moral injury being talked about a lot with the Afghanistan withdrawal. And it turns out that a moral injury, it's not, it doesn't even have a formal diagnosis in the mental health community yet. It is more of a syndrome.

But it's gaining a lot of traction. And it's really, it's really a violation of one's values, of one's core values, in a way that it injures the soul. You know, and the problem with it is that. Like when you couple that, it's not the same as post-traumatic stress. It's not the same as a TBI, obviously. But what it is, it is a compromise of one's values and damage to the soul. And so it can really accelerate. It can accentuate the impacts of already pre-existing trauma or stress or anxiety.

And the levels of guilt that come with it are just astronomical. And so there's a lot of concern that this moral injury that's been, you know, heaped on the shoulders of so many of our veterans and active duty members right now that it's going to take them out. You know, it's going to take them out because there's, you know, the way that you recover from a moral injury is it requires leaders to get involved with that. Like I said, it requires some demonstrable action that it's being addressed, you know, I think something like, two-thirds of Afghan war veterans say that their mental health would improve if they could see their partners resettled, you know, there's just, there's a lot there that's going to require leader involvement and leader engagement to address this thing. And I think it's real. I really do. I think it's, I think it is, it is an injury that's as palpable and real as a broken leg.

And I see it every day in so many of these volunteers in the way that it's, it's taken them down. And like you say, it's the same way that TBI and post-traumatic stress are sort of aggregators, where, you know, where it starts bleeding together where they can't tell them apart sometimes. I think they're related. You know, I'm also not a doctor, but I think moral injuries happen when a person either has to participate in or witness something they fundamentally disagree with or, as you say, grinds against their core values. And when that happens, I think that leads directly into what we call post-traumatic stress. Yeah. It is a participatory thing. And then there's, you know, it's, it could, it could come in the variety of where you've done it yourself or where you were put in the position where it happened. And that violation occurred by, by leaders that you trusted. Right.

And in this case, that's really at the heart of this is that this violation occurred in such a way that, you know, we were all. raised and trained and held to a certain standard that you do not abandon a partner on the battlefield. That's just you just don't do that. Right. And you were held accountable for that, you know, like that was, that was an expect, that was an expectation, uh, to operate in the field that we operated in. And then to bear witness to your own government, your own, even your own mentors, as in my

case, you know, men that I revered, right, um, turning the page on this thing. As if it didn't happen. that's tough you know you just how do you I don't even know what to do with that you know and and the level of disillusionment that comes from that and potentially um harmful outcomes as you said Dave when that gets combined with these other things and there is a trauma to it certainly yeah with some of the things that happened you know there was a level of trauma with that particularly if it resulted in in allies getting killed or wounded as it did a lot in this situation. But we've got us, you know, right now, I mean, I'm asking you guys, do you see

any senior leaders talking about this? No. Or identifying this in the public space. I mean, the only thing. Yeah, the only thing I've heard senior leaders saying is you guys are acting like victims. Get over it. You know, and it's, it's just, it's, it's, it's just unbelievable that, that that's the, or there's just nothing said at all. Or was it was it, was it the secretary of the army who said the reason why the army is having recruiting issues is because of negative media reports. That's right. It's like the media didn't create this, this debacle in Kabul.

No. For its many failings, this one, I don't think you can lay at the laps of the media. No, no, for sure. And I think there was even a comment about we needed to get the veterans more involved in recruiting. And, you know, right now veterans are very involved in recruiting. And it's basically, you know, I had an SF team sergeant say to me, you know, if I had known then what I know now about how we would treat our partners,

I would never have walked down to the recruiting station the day after 9-11 and come an SF. That's brutal. You know, and he said, my son, as far as I'm concerned, will never serve in the Army. Right. And this was a guy who is iconic in fifth group, man. I mean, this dude is as good as I've ever seen. And he was in tears because the guy that he had been helping had just been assassinated. and he had the tape on his phone.

Jesus. And, you know, he just, he was just, he was just broken. Just broken, you know. And, and one of the guys in our play, you know, Chris Fetzel, you'll, if you come see, the guy got a big beard, was blown up in a rock, buried alive, dug himself out, you know, just a grunt, grunt, and was such a proud service member and did so much veteran work. And he almost didn't do the play. And I asked him why.

And he said, I really don't want anybody. to know I was in the Army. Yeah, you have all these guys who are feeling shame when they shouldn't. Because they didn't do anything that was shameful. I mean, serving your country isn't shameful. Yeah. The other reason we're doing the play. The other reason we're doing the play.

Yeah. One last question. Thank you again. Ahmed. One last question. What do you think the future holds for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in the post-Afghanistan world? It's a great question.

Unfortunately, I think we've left with some. very bad lessons that that direct action or surgical strike alone is all that you need to deal with violent extremist groups. And I think that is a very, very flawed approach. I think that it serves a purpose. It is very useful. But I think that the local approach to building capacity and an antibody to violent extremists in their deepest sanctuary is the only way to create a lasting countermeasure to violent extremism. I'm not sure counterinsurgency is a is a viable thing. I think large scale conventional footprints in in societies, civil societies that are mostly status. It's a square peg and a round hole.

It doesn't work. Yeah. I think we get back to a more agile focused foreign internal defense approach with special operators and maybe a very small handful of conventional forces as a hammer and build as much partner capability in the partner special ops world as we can for both strike and capacity building. Not just strike, but we need to build a host nation capacity building capability where they can go into their own villages, work with the police, work with the local army, work with the irregular forces, and behave responsible and model what it looks like to be a warrior for your community. a catalyst. And I think it's very doable. I think it's very, very doable. We can do that. But we've got to, that lesson has not been, you know, it's, it's not been appreciated at any level within the soft community or certainly the policymaker community. I have to be honest that I

don't have high hopes because we repeated all the exact same mistakes in Afghanistan that we made in Vietnam. And not we as soldiers, but as a country, as an administration. Yeah, and the next war is not going to be fought by the three of us. It's going to be a new generation of young people who have never seen any of this. Never. And you know, you're so right, Jack, and that's what, again, I talk about this in my epilogue. I lay out the scenario how this goes down.

Like, I've already pretty much got my next post-9-11 testimony ready to go. And it's so predictable. It's just disgusting how predictable. what is yeah um we had i just noticed we can't catch all the comments that where people don't donate but i saw something to go by from shadow sniffy hey mr scott it's becca's child becca becca wow that's really cryptic well uh i'll figure it out as as soon as we get off here scott i really appreciate you joining us on the show uh tonight uh you know to kind of wrap things up uh what's next

for you? Are you going on tour with Last Out? You told you said several times I need to see the new version of the play. Where can people go and see it? Yeah. So the first thing I would say is, you know, any of the stuff that we talked about tonight, if you're interested at Scottman.com, I got my whole body of work to include my nonprofit stuff is there. The play, the website is last outplay.com. And we're going to be posting our tour stops there. But I will say our next two tour stops, Jack. And I would love for you to make it down if you could is January 6th. six through eighth in D.C. at Catholic University in D.C. It's like a preview.

It's a very small playhouse where we're doing it. And then we're in Steppenwolf in Chicago, January 20 and 21. And that's going to be really, really cool. That's going to be a big show. It's kicking off the national tour like 400 seats. And then we'll be going to Alabama, Arizona, just a whole host of places. And we're going to have the tour stops up, hopefully within the next week or so on lastoutplay.com. if you can't make the play, please check it out on Amazon. Again, the name of the play is Last

Out. It's awesome. And again, the book is Game Changers and Operation Pineapple are the two books. And you'll find links down in the description to Last Out and everything else we've talked about here tonight. Scott, I mean, really thank you for joining us on a late evening on Friday, talk about all this stuff, really important conversation, I think. And No, it's just been really great. I hope we can have you on again sometime. Next Friday, a pre-recorded episode is going to be with Shawnee Delaney, who's a DIA Huminter. So that'll be out. And then in first show in January, we'll be doing a New Year's Roundup. So that's what's coming up in the next two weeks. I hope everyone out there has a Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah, Happy Festivis, tomorrow night's Christmas Eve. So thank you again, everyone. Again, thanks, man. Really appreciate it. Really appreciate it.

Thanks, Jack. Appreciate you guys. All right. And we'll see you next week with...