The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 344: Scott Mann—It's a Wonderful Life with Body Armor

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Former U.S. Army Green Beret, Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann Ret., is a NYT bestselling author, warrior, and storyteller. Scott discusses his efforts to help save the lives of Afghan special forces and nationals left behind in the wake of the United States' botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, his book Operation Pineapple Express that he wrote about those efforts, and the play he wrote to honor those who fought and died. The man: https://scottmann.com The book: https://operationpineappleexpress.com The play: https://lastoutplay.com The film: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Out-Scott-Mann/dp/B09X94Q5CS  

Hello, friends, and welcome to episode number 34 of the way I heard it. This one is called It's a Wonderful Life with Body Armor. As always, a terrific quote from another terrific guest, Scott Mann. Chuck, you want to take a crack at his curriculum, Vietay? And I'm asking that, assuming you're going to say no, because it would take 10 minutes to explain all the incredible things this cat has done. He's done a lot of things. I'm going to go with no.

All right, then I'll do it. First and foremost, he was approached by a green beret when he was 14 years old, a soldier named Mark. And Mark had an impression on young Scott man, so much so that he went off to become a green beret himself. And he spent years, multiple tours, many, many visits to Afghanistan. He saw some things. He did some things. He was shot at many, many times, and he shot back. And in his own words, he put a lot of people in the ground.

And he struggled with that mightily over the years. 9-11, as you might imagine, was a very difficult time for Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. He got out, I think, in 2013, and then all hell broke loose a couple years ago during what, I'll just say it, appears to be one of the most botched military retreats in the history of the military. not since I thought it was successful. I thought it was the unprecedented success. No. No. No.

Getting out of Afghanistan, the debacle at Abbey Gate, the human tragedy that happened, it still upsets a lot of people. Chuck, you'll recall in the immediate wake of that. Who did we have on this podcast? You're the producer, dude. It's your turn. I didn't realize there was going to be a quiz. Who did we have on the podcast? I don't remember.

In the immediate wake of that. In the immediate wake it was Travis Mills. Travis Mills came on. Was it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Our friend Travis, who was one of the first people to come out of Afghanistan,

having lost four limbs and still live to tell the tale and went on to do great things. And then we talked to Gary Sinise, who has some very strong feelings on this as well. But look, this is an amazing conversation, and I really hope you'll listen to all of it and then share it, because Scott Mann has written a number of books, one of which is called Operation Pineapple Express, which is the true story of the incredible bottom-up solution that he and a bunch of like-minded soldiers and politicians, all sorts of people came together to have. help get Afghan loyalists to our cause out of there. And the stakes were life and death and the number of people that Scott saved and other organizations who'll be fast to say like Operation Pineapple Express. It's just incredible. And if that's all there was to this interview, it would be more than enough. But tell him what he does next, Chuck. Well, he writes a play. It's fictional, but it's based on a lot of people that he knows, and it's part autobiographical as well. And he talks about

just everything that happened in Afghanistan, everything that happens in a Green Beret's life from the time he gets in boot camp, you know, becomes the Special Forces, gets the Green Beret. And it's the story of a soldier who just has an amazing life. And it tells the story not only of what it was like for him, but for his family. It's a beautiful piece of theater. And not only did he write it, but he stars in it. And Gary Sinise produced this play across the country, and it's still happening now. And you can see it on Amazon as well, which we did. So it's staggering, all right? I mean, never before in the history of the world has a green beret taken it upon himself to become a playwright and an actor, and then produce a really terrific play that not only works, look, any great piece of theater is going

to stimulate conversation. This thing is stimulating a level of healing and connectivity that you have to see to believe. The impact on the audience night after night after night is incredible. And the healing that goes on in the wake of this production, it's unlike anything I've ever seen. So yeah, there's a lot to talk about with Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. And happily, he knows a lot of words. And he groups him together. really, really well. So sit back and get a load of a patriot who somehow turned into a playwright, who cast himself in the lead role of his own life, and in so doing, is changing the lives of countless others who were struggling as he did with suicide. It's just a hell of a thing, man. It's a

wonderful life with body armor. Chuck, you wanted to say one more thing. Go ahead and say it. Make it interesting, though, I beg you. Well, I think he is the embodiment of a quote that appears in his book from Sun Zoo, which is that it is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. Because one of the things about Operation Pineapple Express is that he helped rescue like over 500 people, I believe, from Afghanistan. And he did it all with a cell phone from Tampa Bay for the most part. He never had to travel back to the country where he'd been many times before. But he did it all in that way. And he did it fundamentally for the same reason I quoted Robert Service, if we can bring it back to me for a moment.

In the beginning of my book. It's been a while. Because this is all about promises. A promise made is a debt unpaid. I haven't met anybody who believes that with the certainty that Scott Mann does. I think you'll agree as we dig in to episode number 344. it's a wonderful life with body armor. Oh, right after this.

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So is that an operator, a beard that's in the works, Scott, or is it just you just no longer give it that? Right now, no, but it will be. be an operator beer by the 22nd. I hate beards so much. And we decided to do it for this last run of the play. And because that's how I had one over there, that's what most of the guys have. And they would always razz me about it in the tallback. They're like, dude, what's with no beard? So I finally agreed to do it, but I hate them so bad. I hate them so bad. So I trim it down after every performance and then grow it back out by the time we hit the next one. So I've seen so many special forces guys with these full-on operating beards operating in places where the temperature

rarely dips into the double digits. What the hell, man? It's so hot. I remember one time I replaced this guy in Kandahar province and we were meeting with the elders after, and he was a really good green beret. I mean, everybody loved him. And so we were sitting with the elders and we were talking about the handoff. And one of the elders, a really old man, he said, you know, has Mr. Steve gone? And I said, Yes, sir, he's gone back to the States, but we're here now, you know, and we're going to build on what he did. And he just paused and he looked off in the distance and he said, I miss his beard. He had a good beard, did Steve, huh? Damn, I've never had anyone say that about it.

Not I'm going to miss that guy. Not I'm going to miss his empathy. Not I'm going to miss his dedication. The exception, now, Matt, that guy, old Steve, could grow a hell of a beard. Got to give it to him. You can't make this shit up, man. And you don't have to. Yeah.

You've already mentioned your play. And just so the listener understands, this conversation's happening because my friend Gary Seneese called and said, hey, Scott Mann is doing a play and it's special. And you should fly to Phoenix right now and watch it. Gary, of course, has no real understanding of how incredibly busy a B-List celebrity can be here in 2020. So I couldn't make it to Phoenix, but I watched it on Amazon. And then I read Operation Pineapple Express. And then I leaped through game changers.

And then I had a look at Mission America, where was it American mission? It was Mission America, right? Mission America. Right. Anyhow, I don't know what the hell to ask you first because I'm literally bursting with so many questions just on a personal level.

I mean, you retired back in 2012, 2012, 2013. you went through an extraordinary gauntlet of personal sort of, I don't know if they were challenges, but you called it snakes in the brain, you know? Yeah. You got pulled back into the world, into the life that you had tried to leave. So I guess maybe the sensible place to start,

since you mentioned the green berets, what makes them special? Why you? Why not Delta? Why not seals? How'd you wind up? with that beard and that hat I'm looking at right now. Yeah, thanks, Mike.

I think it starts this way with a lot of operators, but I met a Green Beret when I was 14 years old. I grew up in a little logging town in Mount Outta, Arkansas, and we didn't even have a stoplight, man. My graduating class was 36 people. You know, my dad was a Forest Ranger, and we moved around just logging town to log in town, and I met a Green Beret when I was 14.

He was home on leave. His name was Mark Harrell. And this guy, I'm telling you, he was the coolest dude I ever met in my life. And just the way he carried himself, the way he just kind of oozed this confidence. And I was a runt. You know, I pretty much bullied most of my childhood and just always on the outside looking in. And this guy sat down and he talked to me.

He talked to me about special forces. He talked to me about the green berets. And he explained to me how green berets are so different than, you know, Navy SEALs. And, you know, while we don't have as good a hair, like they, we are really, good at working by with and through indigenous people, you know, and like Navy Seals, Delta, Rangers, those guys are the best in the world at taking down target surgically, usually on their own. You know, Mark was saying to me, Green Berets, they do that, but their approach is by with and through. They help people stand up on their own from the inside out. And that just really

resonated with me. It landed with me in such a way that at 14, man, I became obsessed with it and it never changed for me. Did it occur to you then or now that Mark was practicing precisely what he was preaching. I mean, by, with, and through. There he is in Mount Ida, Arkansas, talking to one of 35 graduates from the class of whatever it was, really, like, truly meeting you where you are.

Absolutely. And it occurred to me when I was on that 30-mile road march to complete selection. I was like, you son of a bitch. But he did. I mean, he understood. And what was cool about it, Mike, was that he,

he understood that I was in a place where if he just connected with me, there was a damn good chance 10 years down the road, I was going to do it. And, you know, I never forgot that. Like, I talk to kids all the time, all the time about going into special ops and I'll stop whatever I'm doing. Most of the things it's hard for me to put down what I'm doing and immediately tend to a situation. But if a young man or woman comes up to me or calls me or contacts me and says, I'm very interested in special ops. Could you talk to me? I'm going to talk to them because I still remember what an impact it had on me. And Mark mentored me all the way until I retired. He bought a green beret in 1986 for me when I went to visit him at his home in Fort Bragg on my senior trip.

Because when I say I didn't have a life, brother, I had no life except, you know, and he bought me this green beret and he made me promise I wouldn't wear it until I earned it. And I wore it. You know, that's the bray I wore. And he mentored me all the way up through retirement. And that never left me the impact of the way that he saw through all that stuff when I was just a kid. I think that's the way we get a lot of our recruits, honestly. If you talk to Seals Rangers, typically they met someone at an early age who just moved mountains for him. What's the difference between not having a life and not having a purpose? That's a great question.

I mean, I was fully obsessed with the idea and the life of a special forces of a Green Beret. I talked to so many of them. and my dad helped guide me to that. He's like, well, son, if you're going to do this, like you need to find out as much as you can about it so that you have the perspective that you need going in. And it turns out our sheriff in that little town was a Green Beret in Vietnam,

and he connected me to other old school Green Berets. And so all of my mentors were Vietnam era of green berets. And I tend to think that's a really good thing and something I'm very proud of. And it gave me purpose when otherwise I was living the life of a pretty bullied kid. I mean, I struggled. I struggled with my size.

I struggled with my ability to fit in. I struggled with my identity. But I could always fall back and always put a rucksack on my back. And my little scrawny ass could carry that rucksack around that town. And people thought I was crazy. I had the nickname Rambo and for all the wrong reasons. But it gave me such a sense of purpose that even in those dark times when I doubted myself and I doubted what I was capable of, I knew that Mark believed in me.

And I knew that these green berets I talked to said I could do it. and it gave me comfort, man. It gave me. And that verse is like just ambling along through life with no idea of what drives you or what's in your heart. There's a big difference in that. And I'm so grateful that I was able to find purpose at 14 because I know a lot of people don't. Yeah, but you know, like playing the long game is really what Mark was doing, right? He was planting a seed. And he knew that if anything were to grow, it wasn't going to happen that day or the next day or that week or even that month. or even that year, right? So this wasn't on my mental checklist of things to ask you about, but really, since we're on it, the business of recruiting is really just another way to say the business of persuasion. And people do, you know, the same thing sometimes for different reasons and sometimes different things for the same reason. It's hard to really know.

You know, I'm careful on this podcast and in life because, you know, advice is so easy to give and you never really know who's going to take it. But I just wonder what your thoughts are on the difference between, you know, the Army's general recruiting message, you know, be all you can be, or the navies, hey, let's go on an adventure, or the Marines, probably not for you, or Delta, or the Seals, or the special ops in general, and Green Berets in particular, back to the by with and through. How do you parse all of that from a recruiting standpoint? It is tough because if you look at, first of all, I mean, just step back and look at recruiting and retention in the military today. I mean, it's not good. It's not going well. Now, I personally believe, and it is a bit anecdotal, but I talk to a lot of iconic veterans that a big reason that the recruiting and retention is so low right now is there's a loss of trust. There's a loss of trust between the leaders and the lead. And more specifically, if you look at it, at the number of, in an all volunteer force of this country, the number of military members who

come from military families is staggering. Like, it is a large, large number. And this has been going on for generations where it is in my family as well, where you pass the torch to your offspring or to your nieces and nephews. And there are bona fides that are passed that, like, this is a good life for you. This is an honorable life for you. And you should, do this because you will figure things out about yourself and you will do things that are bigger than yourself and it's worth it's even worth the pain it's worth the loss of your friends it's worth the impact on your family like my three boys they grew up with the war that's all they knew and they saw things and experienced things they saw their teachers get notified at school that their husband

was not coming home like it is a generational thing it is a legacy thing that we take big pride in it a lot of it has to do with storytelling it has to do with trust it has to do with, like Mark did with me, he told me stories that allowed me to locate myself in those stories as a 14-year-old scrawny kid and see a future for myself, see my future self in that narrative in a way that it was a lived experience. That is quintessential recruiting. Was he in uniform when you met him? He was. He absolutely was. And that had a good first impact. But it was honestly when he sat down with me. Just me. Nobody else. It wasn't like a presentation. He just sat down with me and he connected one-on-one and he listened and he told stories that allowed

me to locate myself in those stories. And I guess where I'm going with that is, you know, there is a legacy dynamic to recruiting and trust that happens in organizations that are high-performing, particularly the U.S. military. And I believe that we have lost, particularly since the departure in Afghanistan and the way that went down, if you were to map the drop in recruiting and retention with the departure from Afghanistan, they would map very closely. And I think that when you think about recruiting and retention, trust has to be at the epicenter of that and narratives that allow the recruited individual to see themselves in a different light

down the road in the future in a way that they believe it. And right now, I'm not sure that's happening. No. Well, you know, when the Abbey Gate thing, happened. You know, I was watching it live, and I remember talking to you, Chuck, and just saying, you know, this is going to be one of those things where whatever it is we think we're looking at is going to be exponentially worse than what we're actually seeing. And I had no way to prove that. It was just a hunch. But when I read your book, it reminded me of so many things, Scott,

but on the top of the list was just the sheer spectacle of that goat rode. and just how bad it was. And what a real mob. I'm not even sure mob is the right word, but it was like, on the one hand, you look at it, and it was very Hindenburg. Like I shook my head at one point and said the humanity. And then I shook my head at another point

and said the inhumanity. Watching infants held high in the air in 107 degree heat, watching people get, you know, they beat the wife to coerce the husband, been, and you're trying to get these guys through. So, I mean, tell me about Pineapple Express, just maybe through Nazim's eyes, you know, and how that happened. I apologize for asking such a crappy, open-ended question, but it's just difficult to get your head around the

totality of that hot mess. It is, and I appreciate you asking the question, and I appreciate the fact that you and Chuck read the book and dove into it, and that you even dove into it. And that you even dove into game changers because I do think that if you this is one of the things that I've often said about Afghanistan and you know you've always done this in your work Mike is like look if you want to make an impact in the world you got to go local you have to be at a local level you have to understand local context you can't do it from the top down it doesn't work and particularly if it's a complex type situation where you're trying to stabilize a country like Afghanistan and I think why abbey gate and the whole h kaya the whole evacuation was

so disturbing and so difficult. And even just now going through August, two years later, has been so difficult for our population. And I think while you're seeing 88,000 calls to the VA hotline, like the most in history, is because for those of us who fought in Afghanistan, it wasn't one time, it wasn't two times. It was three, four, five, eight, nine, ten times that you gave your entire youth. You gave your 20s and your 30s to this endeavor where these leaders that we put on a pedestal told us, everything is by. with and through. Shona bashoa, shoulder to shoulder with your Afghan partners. This is what this is about. It's about building capacity so that they can stand on their own. And not only did we

buy into that, we bled for that. We were there on 9-11 when it happened. And my best friend was killed in the Pentagon. Like, it was something that we said to ourselves never again. And we gave our youth and our friends for that, you know. And then to witness just the cavalier disconnected way in which we left. And there's really three categories to it, and then I'll throw it back to you, but one was our Afghan partners. These were people who fought to the last bullet in most cases, commandos, special forces, interpreters.

I'm alive because of several of them right now. So there was that category going through that with their families. Then you had the young men and women, the last generation of post-9-11 warriors, you know, who weren't even alive when the towers fell, for the most part, standing post for 10 days straight, watching these suffocating babies, listening to fathers plead for their little girl who's been trampled, holding up certificates, just saying, please, I fought with you, let me in. And they don't know how to do that. They don't know who's who.

And then finally, you've got the old crusty bastards like me who fought over there multiple times and who are getting the phone calls from old friends because the government won't pick up the phone. And them saying, look, I'm not afraid to die. I just didn't think I was going to die alone. And what do you do with that? You know, the war had been over for 10 years for me. That's the line that killed me.

Yeah. I wrote that one down myself. I'm not afraid to die. I just didn't think I'd be dying alone. So again, for context, you've been out nearly a decade. You're in Florida at this point. And you start getting texts from this guy who you had worked with and loved, right? I mean, a true brother in arms.

So I guess we need to really understand how this came together. we need to understand who this kid is, this Nazam, right? I mean, because he's central to all of it. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical.

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He's special. And you know what's interesting is, you know, I want to be clear. There were so many veteran volunteer groups that stepped up and did what pineapple did. Pineapple was not unique in any sense of the word except maybe that we told the story. But there were just thousands of veterans both solo and in these informal groups doing this. work around the world from Iraq, from Ukraine, because they had these types of relationships, Mike. I mean, they had these types of relationships with the Nizams. But, you know, what's personal is universal. I mean, Nazam, for me, was very special. I met him in 2010. He always referred to himself as the

backpack man because he was always traveling around. He never really had a home of his own. When he was four months old, you know, his father was killed in Tukar province as a freedom fighter by the Soviets on their way out the door. And then his village was. bombed while he was sleeping at four months old. His village was bombed. His house took a direct hit. And in the rubble, you know, his mom was digging through that frantically and she found Nizam without a scratch. Like, dude's hard to kill at an early age. And then when he was, his stepfather, she was married into a forced marriage after that because her husband was killed. And Nizam slept in the barn, man, until he was 11 years old because the stepfather wouldn't let him in the house.

And he asked his auntie, he said, well, I ever have a home of my own? And she said, of course, you have your backpack, man. That's where your home is. And so at 11 years old, he ran away and he lived in the village of Talaquan, worked for his food. And then when the attacks on 9-11 happened, he actually watched it on a black and white television at the bazaar. And he noticed the Taliban were celebrating,

but they were also very nervous. And then, you know, shortly after that, NATO soldiers showed up, Taliban were gone. But what he was most impressed with, Mike, was these uniformed Afghan soldiers walking around his village with Green Berets on who had been trained by U.S. green berets and there really hadn't been a uniformed Afghan military in his lifetime. He'd never seen it. The villagers had never seen it. I mean, there was not a true army of the people since

like 78. And so this was extremely exciting to him as a 17 year old kid. And they showed this recruiting film like three, he watched it three times. It was kind of a Mark Herald moment. And he watched it. And then he walked into the recruiter's office wearing high-heeled shoes so that he could pass the height requirements. He was only like five foot tall and, you know, a buck-o-five. And so So the recruiter was so, he was laughing his ass off and he was like, yeah, man, let's do a waiver. Put him in within like six months. He was a commando. He was the first to graduate from Afghan Special Forces.

I spoke at his graduation and then worked with him down in Kandahar several months after that. This dude was loved by all the SF guys. He took a bullet through the face warning the green berets behind him that there was an ambush, you know. And the only request he had to Captain Mulla Mike was, just don't let the Afghans fix my teeth, you know. just let an American dentist fix my teeth and I'll be back out. And he got new choppers from an American dentist and within six weeks he was back out there fighting again. You know, this is the kind of guy.

He took three in the chest too. Three in the chest by ISIS doing unilateral operations. Even after, you know, our administration had pulled us off and I had retired in 2013 and I started noticing that he was experiencing severe post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury symptoms and around 2018, 2019, you know, we started talking to him about getting out and he did and he medically retired and was in the process of an SIV. He had been in for a year when everything started to fall apart and I started to get the play by play from him, district by district that everything was falling apart. And that's how I got involved. I didn't want to get involved in that

damn country again. I had no interest in getting in that. I was disgusted when I left in 2013 with where it was going. And the only reason I did is the same reason so many other veteran volunteers did because these were our friends. And nobody else was coming. A promise made is a debt unpaid. That promise made, man. Right? It's implicit.

It's implicit. But like my dad says, you know, in that kind of work, my dad was a firefighter, it's implicit. I have your back. That's not casual. Scott, if I can jump in for a second here, you've dropped two acronyms so far. Oh, no. Which stands for the airport, right? Harzied Karzai International Airport.

I'm at Karzai International Airport, H-Kai. Oh, sorry, special immigration visa. Look for a career army officer. Two acronyms in 20 minutes. It's not bad. It's not bad at all. My 12-step program is working out. Well, I mean, and you corrected them ASAP in a PDQ fashion that I think the CIA and the FBI.

Maybe even the EPA would both applaud. It could be wrong. It's so funny. That's why one of the reasons I wrote Mission America was because I, you know, it is so difficult for us to transition in some ways. And we have our own language just like everybody else. And you listen in to transitioning guys coming out and you're like, oh, dear Lord, stop. Like, I was in the Army and I can't understand what you're saying. Well, Mission America, I do want to talk about in a minute because that really hit home for me

because you talk a lot about sort of the reverse boot camp idea, right? And how to do things that can dramatically improve the way in which our men and women re-assimilate back in the civilized life, as it were. And I've had some experience working with different organizations to do different things, which of course will get us to storytelling, which will get us to your play. But let's just stay here a minute in Afghanistan because I want people to understand what this kid had to do in order to gain the full trust of the green berets and the entire military complex. I mean, it's hard enough for a kid from Mount Idaho, Arkansas.

to get into the Green Berets. How did this guy do it? And you know, the thing is, he actually went to the U.S. Special Forces course. You know, this guy was so trusted that he was nominated to attend the Green Beret Q course in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and he went, and he graduated.

He did everything. He was a certified U.S. 18 Bravo weapon sergeant and was awarded the Green Beret, was awarded the Special Forces tab, went back to Afghanistan and kept fighting. And how did he do it? Well, I personally believe, it goes back to this whole thing about the backpack man and what his aunt told him.

She said, you go wherever your backpack goes, and he had never had a family, and he found family in special forces. He found a brotherhood that he had been looking for his whole life. The kid was born for struggle. Like so many of our operators, they come from broken homes. They come from pre-service trauma, and they're looking to, they're just looking for something, man, just to make an impact to just prove that they matter. And Nazam found that. He found that in this thing called special ops, and he demonstrated it every day. That dude went on every patrol that went out of the wire. He never took a break. And his nickname was Space Monkey because he never stopped. Like the guy just went and went and went and went. And, you know, his reputation preceded him.

It really did. And it still does. And when he got in trouble, you know, guys were willing to move heaven and earth to try to get him out of there, even though most of us thought we were talking to a dead man walking, honestly. Not to point out the screamingly obvious, but surely you're aware of the parallels, you know, a runty kid with a backpack walking around town who suddenly sees a green beret in uniform who takes the time to talk to him and plants a seed. I mean, really, Scott, you know, cross out the names. You could be talking about yourself here. I think in some ways I did see a lot of myself in the Zom. although he was far more courageous than I ever was and far more committed.

But I did. In some ways, I saw him as a son and still do. And I think that was true for a lot of us because if you think about it, Mike, by the time this happened in 2021, those of us who were in the military when 9-11 went down, we had retired or we were close to retirement. And these individuals that were still continuing the fight, you know, we now had kids that were in the military, the war that we couldn't finish. And these Afghan partners were carrying, honestly, the special ops community, this is why I hate the narrative that's been advanced that Afghans didn't fight. They were doing 95% of the fighting, really from 2014 on when Operation Enduring Freedom ended. The special ops community of the Afghan National Army was carrying the load and would have

continued to carry the load. And I said this to Congress for as long as we would have maintained tacit support and done advisory assistance to them, they would have continued to fight effectively and keep the Taliban at bay to build whole space for building capacity. And that was the other reason that I think all of us got so upset was that we had fought and bled for 20 years to put an intelligence capability and a ground partner force in place that was not there when the attacks of 9-11 happened. And we had built this over decades and it was pretty damn good. And now to just walk away from it. This is the part that still baffles me. Like, I communicate with the leader of the National Resistance Front on a regular basis because no one else will talk to the dude. I communicate

with commandos and special forces guys who are in country who are reporting what they're seeing because no one else will take their reports. And I don't want to do that. I have no interest in doing that. But like the rest of the guys and girls that are doing the volunteer work, we're just not going to hang up the phone, you know, because not only are these friendships, but this is a national national security thing. This is a, you mark my words, Afghanistan is returning to a pre-9-11 capability as a strategic safe haven, and we're going to feel it. It's going to come back, and I don't think we will have learned a damn thing. It's just galling. Not to put too fine a point on it, but back to by with and through. This was the distinction that I think our listeners really

need to take to heart. Unlike Delta, unlike Rangers, unlike the seals. You guys go in with hearts and minds at stake. You are fully embedded in these villages, in these tribes, where long-simmering hatreds exist. You had a comment once that I love talking about the way Afghan people will come together when an outsider comes in.

It's really unlike anything that's in our DNA. It's me against my brother. Then it's me and my brother against my cousin. Then it's me and my brother and my cousin against whoever comes in. Right? So the green berets go in and they have to somehow unwind that and gain the trust. So I'm just pointing all this out so you can spike the ball and people can understand that Nizam, we turned our back on him.

All that pipe that you guys laid, all of that. that wet work that went into this on a fundamental level, that could have been lasting had we managed it differently. But we literally turned our back on people like Nizam. And, you know, I hate for it to sound political, but it just has to be said. We out and out betrayed a trust that has got to make the business of feeling okay about your sacrifices and all of your work difficult. Very. Yeah, it does. And when we get to the play, that's one of the reasons that we're doing it is because we do need to remind ourselves that that 20-year investment of capacity building. As T.E. Lawrence said, nothing is written, right? There's still a chapter that hasn't been written on this, and I believe that. Now, getting back to the point that you made about how this went down and the importance of local engagement, I personally, I served under, I think, three administrations in the Afghanistan, war and frankly found all four of them to be extremely underwhelming in terms of their command and understanding as administrations about what made Afghanistan tick while we were there,

what we were trying to do. None of them took the time, really, to get the level of depth that they should have had to at least, you know, represent the work that was being done bottom up by thousands and thousands of NATO service members. Now, in particular, one of the things that we learned, and I don't want to like, you know, thump my chest at Green Berets. Green Berets, in my opinion, the first 10 years of the war, we were in there seeking vengeance just like everybody else. Yes, we worked by with and through, but it was also to get after the enemy, walk them down and a trip them. And it was really around 2009 that we looked around, Mike, and we realized that there were more Taliban in the rural areas of Afghanistan than when we started in 2002. This was a rural insurgency, right? This is where the Taliban and more importantly, Al-Qaeda, and violent extremist organizations were using at-risk outlying rural areas to prepare, to train, to plan, and to launch attacks like 9-11. And that whether we want to be focused on things at home or not, the enemy has a vote. And when you are dealing with violent extremist organizations that can project globally,

then rural safe havens are where you have to focus. And what we found was the only thing that really was an antibody to that were local communities that could stand up on their own and responsible Afghan special operators that could be at their shoulder. We started doing that in 2010 with village stability operations and we were well on our way to building a long-term capacity to do that, to build that antibody that would have required minimal U.S. assistance. I mean, hell, we've been doing this in Colombia and Latin America and the Philippines for decades.

does work. It's not as sexy as kicking doors in and doing a lot of that stuff. And you need that to disrupt. But the long game is to build community capacity with responsible host nation special operators at their shoulder. That's your antibody to violent extremism. And we punted on all of it. We took 20 years of building that and we just handed it over to the Russians, the Chinese, and the Taliban. You know, it makes me. Why? Okay. That's good. Yeah. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why would we do that? There's two schools of thought. One could be that there's like this advanced, you know, policy calculus that Afghanistan was a failed endeavor and that we were better to just hand it over to Taliban 2.0 and cut our losses and get out of there.

You could make that argument. But I don't buy that because I never saw that level of coherence in any of our administrations ever or in our senior military officers, if I'm being frank. Like, I don't think they got it either. There was this desire to try to win the war on each person's watch. And that, to me, speaks of hubris. It speaks of a preferred Western way of war and wanting to project top down how we want it to be, square peg and a round hole, as I talk about in game changers, rather than getting local, rolling up our sleeves, and really understanding that, frankly, Afghanistan,

you know, people talk about how primitive Afghanistan was. look at Afghanistan in the late 60s and 70s. It was not. If you could look at Kabul, women were wearing mini skirts, there were nightclubs, there were restaurants. Now, granted, the rural areas were still very rural and very conservative. But the reality is Afghanistan has a propensity for a balance of traditional and modern governance. We tried to understand none of that. We did not make any attempts to understand posthum tribal dynamics, including special forces, until 2009. So it was our own hubris, I believe, that led to this and continues to feed it. And it will be our hubris, frankly, that will propel us into a reaction to a catastrophic attack in the West that will look very similar to what we saw in 2002.

But, you know, we still have troops in Germany. We still have troops all over Europe in South Korea. Why pull them out of Afghanistan? Why don't we have some presence there to at least help the people stand on their own? I just don't think that narrative ever resonated with the, you know, at the policy levels. Nation building seemed to permeate all of the language. And in reality, what we were doing was capacity building, was building an organic capacity of Afghans to stand on their own with minimal oversight. And everybody's like, well, we were there 20 years. Okay, fine. How long had they had an army? Right? How many 20-year-olds have you mentored in your life that you go, okay, yep, you're good. You should take it from here, right? You know, not many, right?

Not many. And when you talk about a collective capacity to deal with Pakistan, to deal with multiple violent extremist organizations, you think 20 years is enough for a unilateral capacity in governance, development, and security? I mean, that's bullshit. And like any politician or policymaker or general should be able to step back and go, we broke it, we bought it, and we need to stay with this until that capacity is in place and do it responsibly.

You know, we could have lowered the footprint, the signature dramatically. We didn't need 18-year-old kids from the first infantry division riding around looking like robocop. And I'm not, this is not disparaging on them. They did a great job. They did what they were sent to do. However, putting them into the fray in a, a rural insurgency, we should have learned that lesson in Vietnam. We just dusted off the cover

on coin counterinsurgency from Vietnam in many cases and put that into play. And that was not what was needed there, right? And I made mistakes on that. I made tons of mistakes. But my point, Mike and Chuck is that we had 20 years to learn, to observe, to adjust. And the worst thing that we could have done was to pull out, you know, hook, line, and sinker and just leave them to their own devices. That I will never understand. Do do do do do do do do. Dumb. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely

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A-ha! We're not going into a high school where there's a discipline problem. We're going into a place called the graveyard of empires. I mean, right? It's not a giant mystery. You can go back decades and centuries. But it's still hard to get your head around. I'm trying to think of a modern corollary that people,

it would be as if the green berets were sent to Chicago to negotiate some kind of detente between Black Lives Matter and the proud boys. Okay? We just have to get these two little disparate groups together and then unite them to think differently about beliefs and feelings that have been inculcated on a generational level going back. God knows how long. Right. It's only the hardest thing to do in the world, right? Yeah.

And when you compare that, Scott, to the simplicity of going in and knocking heads and mopping up and getting a little vengeance. Riff on that for a second. because you kind of glossed over it, but the truth is, man, I mean, everybody I know in every branch, but especially in all the SFs, they went over there to settle a score, many times a personal one. I mean, how much of that was informing your program? A lot. If you wind it back to the attacks on 9-11, you know, I believe we were really angry and justifiably so. You know, we had experienced the worst strategic attack in our nation's history.

We were asleep at the switch. We missed it. And a lot of innocent people died as a result of it. And by the way, the leader of the Northern Alliance was warning us this was coming, right? Ahmed Shah Masood was trying to warn us that this was coming. We didn't really take advantage of it or heed his advice. We had no real partnership on the ground to speak of because we had worked through Pakistan when the Soviets were there. So we didn't really have a standing capability.

And so when the attacks happened, I think fifth special forces group, the Delta guys, all the guys that went in did an amazing job, considering that there was no real preexisting relationship other than some retired CIA guys to get in there. And, you know, that's where the legend of the horse soldiers really showed up. And they did an amazing job of mobilizing posthune tribes in the South and the Northern Alliance and routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda in less than 100 days with less than 100 dudes. I mean, everything was really set. at that point to then move into a very rural foreign internal defense construct, where we would then work with the government, yes, but also with the outlying villages who had been decimated for 40 years. And 80% of Afghanistan is off the pavement.

These are places where governance, dispute resolution, farming, participatory development, even security, is provided by the community. And the community had lost that capability, the Soviets had destroyed it intentionally by design. They understood the rural construct of Afghanistan. We did not map that. We did not do our area studies on that. In the beginning, we went in and we put in power the very ministers that had raped the people for years that caused the Taliban to come in. We made them the government ministers because we didn't understand the bottom up dynamics of that country and how they interacted with the top-down dynamics. We just.

just went top down. So as a result of that, and plus we wanted payback. We wanted to avenge. I wanted to avenge my friend Cliff. And I did. I put a lot of bodies in the ground, and I know a lot of my brothers and sisters did the same. But the reality was we almost slipped into a collective trance-like state for eight or nine years doing that. And it actually put us in a position where the Taliban by 0809, they had reestablished their narrative in the rural areas. You know, one of the ways I've heard it metaphorically put that I think is so accurate is that we started in the in Kabul and we worked our way out from Kabul to the villages so by 2019 2020 we were at the gates of the villages well the Taliban they started in the villages and by 2020 they were at the gates of

Kabul and because we did not understand the operating dynamics of that country at a policy level none of us understood it and didn't even try to get into it until 2010 and by then It was too late. Someone asked me, how long is this village stability program going to need to go? I said about 75 to 100 years. Because that's what it's going to take to not only build back formal civil society in Kabul and Kandahar, but informal civil society, which has been decimated. There's no elders in these villages.

The people are killing earthworms with their thumbs because they grew up in refugee camps and they think the earthworms eat the crops, right? So it's too easy for Taliban. to come in and exploit those local issues. It's going to take time. But before I close on this, I will say this. And I would get this response, like you're out of your mind, but I would say, how long have we been in Columbia? Special forces have been operating in Colombia for decades, right? When I went to Columbia for the first time as a captain in 1996, the Colombian military wouldn't even leave the perimeter. They wouldn't venture out. The FARC had a demilitarized zone given to them by the

government called the Dispeje that was the size of source. Switzerland. Like the government had no control. If you go to Columbia today, you will see very little presence of the FARC. You will see Colombian commandos fast roping at night onto targets flown by Colombian aviators. But it's been decades to build that capability. No one bats an eye at that. And I believe that is the kind of approach we needed in Afghanistan. We needed a multi-decade foreign internal defense approach. But the country is in love with the door kicking. And until we realize the long game is the ultimate antibody to defeating violent extremism, I'm afraid we're just going to rinse and repeat.

So there's another expression that I like even better than long game, and you've used it twice. It's bottom up solutions. We talk a lot about those on this podcast in a lot of different ways. But in reading your book, it became screamingly obvious that sometimes all the other stuff has to fail for people to come together and work from the bottom up. And that's what Operation Pineapple Express really was. And I want people to understand, I think it's most analogous to maybe the Underground Railroad. What you guys did to get Nazam and, what, four, five, six hundred other people through that nightmare of a botched withdrawal, talk about that.

Because, you know, I think some people might have thought you put on your war paint and got, you know, zip lined into some ridiculous, you know. You were doing all this from like smartphones and contacts in the Pentagon and former retired and so forth and so on. How does a network like that coalesce so quickly with no apparent top down supervision? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's two levels to this, too, to I'll bring it back when I close on this to your point about what's happening here at home, because I think it's indicative of that. But let's just kind of do a postmortem on what we called Operation Pineapple Express because I think there's some things to it that are really relevant. First of all, it started with Nazam and five or six of us who loved him very dearly. And we leveraged our preexisting networks that we had built over the years. All of us had built some version of an unconventional network. that you used to do your job in that country, by with and through, right? But then we basically reverse engineered those networks to help Nizam move as a precious cargo through the various challenges that he faced in the city with the Taliban checkpoints, through the crowd, and then ultimately through the gate where the guards were.

And using that network to do that, a whole lot of luck, man, to be honest with you. I mean, we were burning the diplomat J.P.'s phones up and a few others, and it worked. We got him out. But what struck me was I thought that was it. I thought we were done. I fell on the pavement. Like when I learned that he had gotten out and I got the selfie from him and my wife, Moni, she comes running up thinking I'm upset because he had been killed.

And I was like, no, baby, he made it out. He's done. We're done. We're done. And then all of a sudden my phone just started going, blowing up. And it was a buddy of mine who was a seal that said, hey, I heard Ness got out, man. Congratulations. I've got five national mine reduction group guys plus their families that were moving to the

airfield right now. Do you want to work together? And then another green beret that says, hey, I've got seven of our former interpreters from Kandahar moving to the airfield right now, man, do you want to work together? And that's what went down. And I'm just sitting there looking at my phone, like, you've got to be fucking kidding me. Like, I'm sorry, but like you have got to be kidding me right now. I mean, the NMRG, for example, Mike, are the national mine reduction group. These guys go in front of seals and green berets when they're moving on a target and deactivate mines. They are the guys who who we trust so deeply that they are our protection from insider attacks. That's how vetted these guys are.

And they are now on the run. And it's a bunch of retired dudes that their safety is responsible. If these guys get rolled up by the Chinese or the Russians, do you know how many tactics, techniques, procedure, and personal data of our special ops inventory is going to be extracted? And I'm sitting here going, you have got to be kidding me. Like, I am a 53-year-old storyteller with a MacBook. And you want me to do like what?

Personnel extraction? You know, it was one thing helping Nazam, but it's a whole different thing when you got a hundred volunteer dudes with thousands of their friends and allies that are now like nobody's coming, man. No one is coming. And it was at that point, I'm just being candid.

I was clueless. I looked at my wife and I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing right now. You know? And it was then that a guy we had met on LinkedIn named Zach Lois, and I cannot say enough about this guy. Former Green Beret, Syracuse school teacher

who had just taught a segment on, and so funny you mention it, on Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. And he goes, hey, man, I know I'm new to this group. And like, you know, there's all Jim Gant and Mark Nuch, the horse soldier in here, but I got an idea. And I'm like, dude, spill it, because I got nothing. And he said, I think we could make an underground railroad. I think we could use the sewage canal.

and, you know, if we could find somebody on the inside who was willing to work with us, I think we could create basically challenging password and we could get them pulled in in a very methodical way. And it just so happened that Congressman Mike Walsh's staffer had just met some dudes from the 82nd named John and Jesse, company commander and first sergeant, who had said to her, hey, we want to do more if you guys have a plan, not blowing our phones up, but a plan. And you can move these people responsibly, we're in. And so it came together right there, and we named it, you know, it started off Operation Harriet, and then it morphed into Operation Pineapple Express because they were holding up Pineapples on their cell phone.

And actually, the guys on the gate started calling it that. And honestly, man, that's how it went down. Just so people can really get it in their mind's eye. It's almost like the eye of a needle through which certain people can pass. Everybody wants to pass through the eye of this needle, and there are thousands of them, grouped up around it. Okay. So Scott's job is to figure out how to get the good guys through this incredible crowd,

many of which are also good guys, but very few of which are permitted to enter through the eye of the needle because our own people have been instructed to turn them away for a variety of perfectly understandable reasons. And so we have to go through a whole series of proofs and people have to work the edges. and somehow they've got to get through this gauntlet of things. And so many things have to go right. Otherwise, you die in a horrible, horrible way. And you're 7,000 miles away,

trying to run your part of this operation through signal and a smartphone and a laptop. Dude, I mean, we'll get to the storytelling next. But, I mean, right there, right there. That you just, you're just, you're just at the heart of a truly remarkable narration. And you're trying to look through a soda straw, basically, to understand what's happening and really relying on your experience in that country and your personal relationships with

the person or people that you're guiding. And to be clear, the real heroes in all of this were the Afghan partners. They were the ones that brave those Taliban checkpoints, that crowd of thousands where their children were trampled. They were out in the sun for 48, 7,000. 72 hours at a time with nothing to eat, having to take a crap right there with the guy next to you. Like, it was the most abysmal living conditions you can imagine. And if you're thinking this was, you know, so like you said, Mike, when this happened, the word got out quick that the only way out was Afghanistan and the Taliban, or excuse me, was Kabul Airport and the Taliban were coming. There were cab drivers that just left their cabs running and jumped into the crowd. And a lot of

them got through, right? Because there were not standing orders on who to let in, and who not to let in. Right? So you had all these people pressing on the gates. The big dilemma that a lot of these young men and women had, and I've interviewed dozens of them since then, was that they didn't know who was who, right? They're looking at these thousands of faces.

They're looking at this perpetual suffering that's happening in front of them, and they don't know who's who. Our value proposition in all of this, Mike, was that we knew who the special operators and interpreters were. We knew where they were, and they trusted us to guide them and present them responsibly at the right time and the right place at select points on that perimeter.

And it just so happened that the best way was into that sewage canal because the Taliban wouldn't get in it. And then to a point where Jesse and John were because they had a four-foot hole in the fence that they could pull people through. And that became the express. And it didn't hurt that our people that we were moving for the most part were a Commandos, Special Forces, Interpreters, they were highly trained in tactics, and they knew how to do challenge and password. They knew how to do passage of lines, link up, and they understood moving tactically

and reporting. So then what Zach was able to do as the conductor is he was able to organize all of these families into what we called chalks, and they would position themselves at different loiter points, kind of like you see at the Atlanta airport when planes are coming in, they stack. We would stack them, And then he would send baseball cards with the picture and the identity and the family info over to Jesse and John on the other side of the wire. And then an order of movement and times for link up far and near recognition signals. Our partners understood all this. And so we were able to move them very methodically through at a high rate. I don't want to gloss over something that you said before.

It was the sewage canal is literally a river of shit that these people have to go through to get to the gate. Yeah. And to add on that, Chuck, you know, if you think it was just like commandos and interpreters, the Minister of Women's Affairs, Hussin Asafi, was the most wanted woman in Afghanistan. And the State Department wouldn't pull her in. None of the foreign ministries would pull her in. She had to wade with her family through that open canal of shit that one of four female ministers in the country. You know, we talk about how we are global advocates for women's affairs, right? We've got the minister of women's affairs waiting through a canal of shit with her family to get pulled in by a first sergeant from the 82nd Airborne.

And we're not for that first sergeant. She'd probably be dead, you know, along with her family. And that to me is just staggering. Indeed. Well, look, I mean, it's a gauntlet and a crucible that I'm familiar with, at least on a scatological level. I mean, Dirty Jobs 101 is redemption. in a river of crap. It really resonated with me that the way towards something like freedom and redemption

requires you to physically do a thing that your adversary won't, right? Yeah. It's not simply leaving your comfort zone. It's wading into the epitome of discomfort and filth. Absolutely. So, I mean, that's a hero's journey. That's a component of, you know, one of the great. themes. And I'm going to pivot to the play now, but not until I make one final point, and forgive

me if this is a bit of a spoiler alert. But tell me about the incredible support you got from the U.S. government after they saw what incredible success you had getting over 500 people out. Tell me about how the government, tell me about how our top general stood behind you and unleashed the vast resources of this great country to double, triple, quadruple down on the undeniable results that Operation Pineapple Express had so convincingly gleaned. Chapter 156, I believe. Yeah, was that sarcasm? I think it might have been in her voice.

You know, but I feel it. And so many of our men and women feel it, Mike, the other day I was talking to a buddy of mine, I'll call him Donnie. and I think I talk about this in the book, and he had just lost a guy that he was guiding, had been executed in, the pictures were sent to him. And he said, and he was an iconic Special Forces NCO. I mean, this guy was legendary. And he said to me through tears, he said, if I had known on the day after 9-11, when I went to enlist in Special Forces, that we would treat our allies like this,

I never would have joined. And as God is my witness, I will never, ever, ever. make it possible for my kid to serve, you know. And I just want to put that out there. And that is not an isolated comment. I have heard this comment from some of the most respected NCOs and junior officers in our inventory who gave so much and who continued to give all the way through the withdrawal. They feel in many ways betrayed by their government because what we stood for was violated. What we were held to account for for 20 years was violated by the very people who held us to account. That's defined as a moral injury, an injury on the soul, an injury of, you know,

a violation of what one values. And that is permeating our veteran population right now and our active duty force. The reason I start with that is because a big reason that that has happened is because so many of the senior leaders in the military, the state department, and the government that we trusted and that we're frankly in front of the cameras and we're saying things, we're contacting guys like me and our volunteer groups under the table on their personal cell phone saying, hey, can you get my guy out? And that included connections from the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Office, the front office. It included cell phone calls from the office of the Vice President of the United

States of America to get their favored Afghan out and help them move to safety. It included multiple congressional officials. But to their credit, they also put their staffs against it and they were not, most of them were overt about it. I didn't have a problem trying to work it with, you know, like a public-private partnership, as weird as that is, as long as they were willing to be overt about it and help with their title and help with their, you know, their Wasta. But most of these men and women did not. When I went to see General Millie and I'm very, you know, look, I don't get any Christmas cards from the Pentagon or Fort Bragg, North Carolina or whatever it is the artist formerly known as Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The reality is

Millie contacted me. I'd never met that guy in my life and said, would you like to come to the Pentagon and talk about how we can get more guys out. So I went. And what I witnessed, honestly, was just a dog and pony show. What I witnessed was just the politicalization of this whole thing. And what was most disturbing to me was this doubling down of the greatest evacuation in American history. And he was saying this to several of us who were very involved with the volunteer effort. And, you know, it was very obvious and it was made clear very quickly that nothing was going to get done on the governmental side at all, you know, that we were continued to be on our own. And I think that was probably the most depressing thing about it was that we actually articulated to senior military

leaders, hey, I've got like reams of information from the commandos, from Afghan, like they are coherent right now. They are still together. Do you not want this? Do you not want me to hand this off to you? Like, do you not want these guys to at least turn them into a resistance or to help them survive? For God's sakes, you know? And the answer was crickets, man. Not one senior officer or one senior politician said, hey, let's get with these volunteer groups because they're the only ones right now with direct lines of communication to an operational force that we took two decades to build. And we need to hand that off responsibly. Never happened. To this day, these volunteer groups have cashed in their kids' college funds. They're 401ks. They've lost their jobs. But what they

haven't done us hang up the phone they are still talking to and front in some cases paying for safe houses food drops because these guys can't work Mike like they can't just go into you know the local market and say I'm here to get a job like they were former special operators they hunted and killed the government in power and they will be executed they cannot do anything so how do you hang up the phone how do you tell these guys I'm sorry I can't help you anymore and it's killing our veterans It's just not right. It's not right to put this on these men and women who gave so much to this country voluntarily

and then make them responsible for keeping these people alive because it's an Uncle Sam size problem that we're trying to solve with our pensions, you know, and it's wrong. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level. We need more organizations like Skills USA

making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA.

And I'm encouraging you to at least continue, consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA.

There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them.

Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S. Skills, USA. To what degree do you believe that that personal level of betrayal is driving the scandalous suicide rates that we've been seeing for years now? I don't even know what the number is. It was 22.

I don't know if it's up or down. But to what degree is what you're describing and forming that? To a very high degree. I mean, first of all, at a personal level, you know, I almost took my own life 18 months after I got out of the Army. It was a very dark place for me. And this whole thing that happened, it took me back, not that far, but deep. And had my wife and some friends not intervened, I don't know.

I know for a fact that some of the most iconic sergeants I've ever worked with and junior officers I've ever worked with are in such a state of depression right now. They can't leave their house. They don't know what to do. And they're wondering, was it worth it? Did it matter? I started seeing it anecdotally. Like I started hearing all these phone calls as we were going through this. One of my friends, Brad, was found dead in a hotel room. He had served in special forces with me in Afghanistan. He had, like me, had gone through alcoholism and recovery and had found his way into the light and was doing really pretty damn well. And then he started texting me when Cobble collapsed. And, you know, within a few months, he was gone. We found him in a hotel room. And then the numbers started to come in.

And we've traveled all over the country with this play. I've been doing this play since 2019 touring. I have never, ever seen the level of emotional betrayal and just darkness that is weighing on the shoulders of our volunteer force. that did this for 20 years. I've never seen anything like it. The talkbacks, it's unbelievable what they're feeling. And then the numbers to the VA hotline and other stats are bearing it out. I think it's closer to 44 a day.

I don't think it's 22 a day. The VA has not counted overdose. And so I think to a very high degree, Mike, and I'm sad to say, this is just the beginning. If we don't get in front of this, and if our leaders don't start owning the personal responsibility of what went down in Afghanistan and how it went down and building assurances that it won't happen again, I think we're going

to continue to see this mental health issue climb. Well, a bunch of things clearly have to happen to turn the ship around, but you can only control so much and the stuff that appears to be in your control, and really in anybody's control, is their willingness to tell their own story. You're not a playwright. You're not an actor. And yet you've written a play. that you're starring in.

And I watched it last night on Amazon. It's the best $2.49 I've spent in a long time. I encourage people to do likewise. Three easy payments. But, dude, this play, and, you know, Chuck and I have done our share of plays. Chuck more than me. I'm not even sure it's fair to call it a play. There are parts of it that feel like performance art.

They're parts that absolutely move like a play. but the whole thing is being driven by something else. And it's so intensely personal that, you know, I'm not sure I have the right word, but I bet you do. I call it the generosity of scars. And when I was listening to you talking about your redemption and having to just go back into it and weighed through it. I had a really bad transition. I almost took my own life. I was standing in a closet holding a pistol. And my son came home unexpectedly and it broke my state and I walked out of that closet, but still in a place where I didn't know how to live and I didn't know how to die. And it was

terrible. It was humiliating. It was embarrassing. It was an internal scar that I didn't even tell my wife about. And then not long after that, I lost another friend to suicide and I was about to do a TED talk. and I, you know, I had started to explore this art and science of storytelling as a way to heal myself. I had a couple of civilian mentors who really showed me how storytelling could help me come to terms with what I was doing. So they had talked me into doing this TED talk, but I changed the title right, but the topic right beforehand because of that suicide. And I told my wife, sat down with my sons, told them what had happened that day in the closet. And I said, I have to tell this story. Like, I have to put this struggle out there because I think,

think it could help some people. And I did, and it got a lot of views. And the point, though, in that topic, the generosity of scars is that all of us go through struggle. I don't care whether you served in the military or not. The human condition is such that we go through struggle. And it's the most relatable thing we do as humans is we go through struggle. And if you know, think about it, like it's when someone talks about their struggle that we actually connect with them and it accelerates trust. And the reality is, in this tough time that we live in, we can repurpose those struggles through stories in the service of other people. And that TED Talk really helped me, and storytelling helped me understand that there's a way that we could actually help Americans

understand what's going on with modern war because they don't. They think it's a Fortnite game. Most people don't even connect with veterans. And our veterans are asking themselves, was it worth it? Did it matter? And our families of the fallen are asking, does anyone even know that my son died? Does anyone care? You know? Again, my mentors were pushing me, hey, man, you know, the way to do this is to do a play, to make this into a play. And it started as a one-person show. I had never acted in my life. I have never written a play in my life, but I just started moving the pen. And I personally believe it was inspired by my higher power and a lot of friends that aren't around anymore. I think they came to my aid and they

They helped me just tell the story because I just kept thinking, like, how do I, if there were two people in that audience, a civilian that had never served and a veteran that was wondering if it was worth it, what would I say to them? What's the story? And I came up with this character, Danny Patton, who was based on three team sergeants that didn't make it home, turned him into one composite character. And he's, you know, mortally wounded in the first scene. He's trying to ascend to the warrior resting place of Valhalla. But he's stuck. Get moving. His buddies come down from Valhalla and they become the people in his life that made his heart pumped the most blood. And they help him. and figure out what he's holding on to. But in doing that, the audience goes for this narrative ride. And they experienced through Danny's eyes what he went through, joining the military, going to special forces, marrying, having his kid, 9-11. And what we found, and again, I was guided and aided by something bigger than me, but then making the cast all veterans, Mike, and military family members, that felt like we needed to do that.

And then, you know, of course, my midlife crisis was, well, never acted. in my life and I'm 50, so we might want to figure that shit out. So, hey man. How hard can it be, honestly? You memorize a few lines. You hit your mark. You stand in the light. Put some tape on the floor.

Lassie was a star. It was more intimidating in a lot of ways than doing military stuff because as one of my acting coach, Carl Bury says, is like everything that you learned in the military is how to armor up and protect yourself. Well, in acting, and you guys know this better. than anybody, you have to take all that off. All that has to come off and you have to present yourselves and be available to yourself to these people who need this. And for them to locate themselves in the story, it's the only way. We had to go through breath training. I had to go

through over a year of intensive acting training in New York with Larry Moss and Carl Bure. But we found this all veteran cast, this military family member cast, and half of them are pros, half of them are not. And it became this special group of like the island of misfit toys. and we put this story together, and we performed it the first time there wasn't a theater in Tampa in 2018 that would rent to us because they're like, wait, you're doing what? And we couldn't get a theater, even paying for it. So we ended up renting the Marriott down by the river in Tampa. We rented our own lights, our own sound, and 350 people of my closest friends and family came to bear witness to my midlife crisis. And you know what?

It went pretty damn well, and they loved it. And from there, it just continued to go. COVID shut us down after touring 19 cities in 2019. We made it a film. We raised the money ourselves. We made it a low-budget film. And then Gary saw it. After the collapse in Afghanistan, John Androsic had worked with me on the Afghanistan problem,

and he said, Gary Sinise needs to see this. And I'm like, dude, I've been trying to get this thing in front of Gary Sneeze for six years. If you can figure that one out, you let me know. And I just blew it off. And the next day, Gary calls me. and we're on the phone for two hours talking about this and what's going on in Afghanistan. He was so heartbroken by it. And he talked about how he had done something similar with tracers for the Vietnam veterans.

And he said, Scott, you know, this is a modern day tracers. Let's put it on the road. And I mean, the next day shit started moving. I've never seen anything like it. And I will never forget what he did for us, man. I will never forget it. And we're wrapping the tour up now. But I think we're going to keep going in 2020.

for you're going to Milwaukee next. Yeah. Yeah. And that was the other thing that Gary and I landed on was, you know, we'll go to big towns, but let's go to places that are underserved. You know, let's go to places where veterans and their families, they don't have access to a lot of things. And, you know, that isolation can be even more profound.

So we've gone to Sioux Falls. We're going to Milwaukee, you know, this month. And then Topeka. And then the Gary's tour with us, I think, is going to wrap there. But we're going to keep going. We've had such an outpouring of support for this, and we've seen it have such an impact on people that we're going to just keep going with it.

Talk more about the talk backs after the performance. Because full disclosure, I watched 90% of the thing on Amazon, but I watched 100% of the documentary that you did about making this play. and the audience experience, I think, is probably more important than anything I've ever seen, except maybe O'Kalcutta, which was pretty big. Yeah, that's a comparison. You know. Well, Chuck starred in that on Broadway many years ago, and so it's just, it's my promise to him to every now and then mention O'Kalcutta in the most absurd possible context.

You know, when I hear in all seriousness, like when I hear someone that performed on Broadway, one of the things that I've developed is such a profound respect for that realm. Because I didn't, I just didn't understand it. And I just like anything else, I made my own preconceived notions on that craft based on what I saw superficially. And it was only when I got into the craft of it. When someone says now that they performed on Broadway, I am much props, my friend. I mean, because that is, that is astounding. to be able to do that and because you cannot do that in a casual way. But it was actually a Broadway performer who mentored me and he said to me, uh, when you do this play. Because at the time, understand this was 2019, we didn't have anything. We were a little nonprofit called the Heroes Journey. We were traveling the country and I swear to God in a U-Haul van. We put 28,000 miles on a U-Haul van. We traveled with our own PTS counselors. We did 250 PTSD interventions in the lobbies and in adjacent rooms. We are all of our team, our support team, not one person on the team had ever worked

around a play, ever. Like, and we were traveling and touring. Our tour manager is the survivor of a suicide. Like her husband was an Air Force veteran who killed himself and she just wanted to help. And so we were truly the island of misfit toys and we traveled all around the country doing this thing. We were performing in cafeterias. We were performing in business office.

It didn't matter. Wherever there was a need, we went. And local hosts would sponsor it, and we usually ended up writing the check for it, but it was crazy cool. And one of the things, Chuck, that they suggested that we do was a talkback after every show. So we would do a talk back. The cast would come out on the stage. We'd sit on the actors' blocks because there's not much in terms of props except the wall of honor in these actors' blocks. The audience's imagination does everything.

And so we would have this conversation, and we would ask the audience, what did you think? you know and what was crazy because beau my mentor he said the audience is smart stay open to them giving you script suggestions and scene suggestions and so we did we'd say hey what did you like what did you not like it wasn't just asking questions and most of the scenes that you see in the play today like if you go to the play live or even 80% of what you see on the film was suggested by audience members every Monday after the performance we would sit down and we would rewrite and we would take their notes and we would integrate them. Sometimes entire scenes, where like, for example, the scream scene, where my stage wife, Lynn, screams as she's watching the news. That came from a military spouse.

And she said something to the effect of, hey, listen, I get it with you veterans and that you guys have a lot going on. And you know what? You guys can break down anywhere you want. You can just throw a little tantrum right there on the floor if you want to. And everybody will say, oh, this veteran needs help. But is a military spouse with three kids while you guys are deployed? We can't do that shit. We have to go in a room, shut the door, shut the other door, sit in the linen closet, stuff a towel in our mouth and scream. And she's like, show me that in the play. And so on the way home, I was talking to my wife, Monny, it's like, can you believe that? You said that didn't really happen. She's like, huh. And I was like, huh, really? And she started to tell me a time when she did that.

And so that scene that you see with the scream, when there's no dialogue except the scream, that came from an audience member and a talk bag. I got to say, Scott, that the thing that I loved most about the play was the fact that it really brought to light the idea that when someone serves, it's not just you, Scott, man, who went through this. It's the wife, it's the kids. And all of that is represented so beautifully. It's like when I think of the seeing the play, having seen it, there's nothing missing in my mind. It touches on everything. Yeah. And the spouses and the kids of veterans suffer and serve just as much as the veterans. Do you agree? I do. And you know what's cool is my son now, Cooper, and this is not in the film, but my son,

Cooper, my middle son, who was in federal law enforcement now, he works, or he's in the play. He plays my son in the play. And he does, because he was a military kid in the war. He lived it. And man, it breaks the audience when he performs. And he's never acted a day. day in his life. He started studying acting last summer. But it's just another example because it's so authentic. I mean, he lived it. But we've had Chuck, we've had family members. I remember one time we showed the film in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, Fort Liberty. It was all gold stars, all families of the fallen sitting in the audience. And we showed this film, and we've shown it, we've performed this film for dozens of gold star families. And they love it because it's their life. This is the story of a

gold star family. And I asked this 17-year-old girl, I said, what did you think? Gold Star daughter. I said, what did you think of the play or the film? And she started crying and she said, you know, all of my friends, they don't have any idea what I've lost with my dad. They don't understand war. They don't know

that I won't have anybody to walk me down the aisle. But she said, you know, when you guys told this story, I was able to see how my dad fell and how he died. But most of all, I was able, I was able to see why he loved you guys. much. And I understand now, you know. And when you can see that in a gold star daughter's eyes

and hear those words come out of me, and shit, I don't even know what, you know, Monty and I would just look at each other and we're just like, we've got to keep going. Like, this is what we're supposed to be doing. And they have stories to tell, you know, they are the ones, honestly, that are going to lead us into better days. Our military families, our families of the fallen, our veterans. They're such great leaders. That's why we run storytelling workshops. Every place we go now, we do a storytelling workshop for veterans and first responders in that town, and we do our own PTSD interventions because it's great that they watch our story, but what I want them, I want it to be an emotional breaching tool where they are so opened up at the end of it.

They're like, damn, I got something to say now. I got a story to tell because that, in my opinion, is what's going to get us into better days, is when we can get our veterans and our military families and our first responders leading with their stories, we need it bad. You talk about it in terms of what are you carrying around that you need to jettison, you know, what are you holding too tight to

that you could let go of? It reminds me of that book by Tim O'Brien. Did you ever read it, the things they carried? Absolutely. Yes, yeah. When I hear you talking about the U-Haul, it kills me, right? Because it's like part rock band, part Woodstock, you know,

know, part Summerstock, I guess, is a better, you know, it's like there's, like there's so many different elements in this thing. Like, when I see a band, a good band playing in a local bar, I always like to stick around and watch them strike their gear because you get to see just how committed they are to the music and to the communion that happens between the audience and the performer, that they'll stick around, that they're no roadies. You know, 99.9% of all bands. And They don't have any roadies. And people who do what you're doing right now, they don't have that stuff.

They have a U-Haul and a bunch of gear and some volunteers. And around the country, they go. Those are the things that you're carrying. And those are the things that are helping you get rid of the crap that maybe you don't need the snakes in your head, right? Yeah, no, that's so true, Mike. I mean, it's a good place to start to land the plane because I'm sucking up all your day here.

but, I mean, that to me, you've made the most of a midlife crisis that I've ever seen anybody go through. You know, the idea that not so long ago you're standing in a closet with a gun to your head and your kid comes into your home. Yeah. I mean, to step away from that and into this, that's not a step. That's a leap, a leap of faith, maybe. but a leap. How many lives have been affected that would not have been affected if your kid hadn't come home that day? How many people have you touched myself and Mike included, you know, to share this message with?

It's a wonderful life is what it is. It's a wonderful life with body armor. That's our play. I'll land it with this. Mike, you talked about letting go. You know, in the play, you know, Danny wears this bracelet. We give this bracelet out to get in the play. That's proof that you bought your ticket or whatever.

And it's so funny. Silly what? Silly bands. Silly bands. Yeah. And, you know, back in the day when our kids wore these silly bands, they were much thinner. But we decided to make this one sturdier. But this is really based on my son, Braden, gave me a magic silly band.

And it really was the nexus of the play. But we give these out. And then in the scene where Danny's talking to his wife, Lynn, about the silly band that his son gave him and how it's going to keep. keep them safe and bring him home, you can hear the audience go, they look down and they realize they're wearing the same silly band. And in that moment, you know, they all, they all look down and see this. And it says, let go on it, you know, because in my assessment, whether we served in the military or not, or, you know, whether we were in a military family or not, we're all holding on

to some kind of residue in our life that is keeping us down. It's keeping us from ascending. It's keeping us from becoming what we're capable of becoming. And I do believe that, letting go of that pain. Letting go of that residue is what we're meant to do. You know, and in the storytelling, if this thing can help one person let go of that pain, I'll close with this. There's a woman named Tina, and I met her through the Gary Sinise Foundation. We run storytelling workshops for war widows and first responder widows and their kids,

and we teach them how to tell their story through that trauma. And Tina had come to one of our workshops in Seattle, and then she came to the play. And she lost her husband in a terrible. way and she just hasn't been able to move forward but she came to the play she hung out with our crazy cast and our team backstage and then she came to another play then she came to another play i just told her i said tina look you can come to any play we do we just like having you around she's like well that's good because i just like being around you guys and next time i come i'm going to bring salmon she lives in alaska so we performed this last play in uh franklin and she shows up with

salmon that she had just caught and a green beret that lives up there off grid had smoked it for her. And so we're getting ready to perform the play. It's our biggest show of the tour. Like the place is packed. We're backstage warming up, getting into our, you know, getting ready to go out because it's an intense play. And I look over at the little kitchen area in the old Franklin theater. And there is Tina making salmon dip. And I thought, I fucking love this, man.

This is as good as it will ever get. You know, and I just looked over and she just gave me a smile. And I looked at my cast and I'm like, let's go do this, man. You know, let's go tell some stories. And for me, it's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life as long as I can because it keeps me alive. And I think it allows me to, more importantly, hear these stories from some amazing people and maybe help get them out into the world because I think we need it. Yeah, and I'm just grateful to you guys for doing all the background that you did on this and watching the show.

I'd love to get you to a live show sometime because I think it would be really. really special. I'll bring the salmon dip, honestly, because you're right. It doesn't get any better than one authentic fan who goes out of his or her way to pull you aside and tell you a snippet of their story and maybe leave you with a talisman. Maybe it's a silly band. Maybe it's a challenge coin. Maybe it's a flag that somebody carved, right, out of wood and sent to me. And look, that's the last thing I want to say, Scott. I love this country a lot. And my shirt says American made, although full disclosure, this is a ladies extra large. It's a long story. How it came to me is neither here or there. But I'm happy to sit, you know, in front of a flag. Here, I'll turn my

camera and show you. You know, there's another one over there. There's a, I got the Navy SEALs paddle up there and the Trident and all the stuff. But it doesn't mean when I see something as jacked up, as I read about in your book, that I don't get angry. And I just, I want to leave on a very positive note. Yeah. But I also want to make sure we understand that we're just not living in a binary world anymore. And it's not about right or left.

It's not about who's in office at any given moment. it's about that promise made. Is it debt unpaid? And it's about, you just said it in passing. And I almost laughed because it sounds like one of the most jacked up game shows of all time. But my favorite Afghan is so powerful when you think about the people in the White House, reaching out to somebody with a bottom up solution to try and get their favorite Afghan through this myasma. because the best minds at the top of the food chain couldn't freaking manage it. So some guy in Florida with a laptop had to.

That's something I think to feel nauseous and hopeful about in some weird way all at the same time. I think our best days are in front of us. I really do believe that Robert Putnam in his book, The Upswing and Bowling Alone, he talks about an upswing in our society where bottom-up solutions happen. And it happened in the early 1900s.

America was at a very low point. We were at the darkest time, you know, where there was political division, the haves, the have-nots, the people moving from the agrarian areas to the cities and the infrastructure was collapsing. And all the pundits were saying, our best days are, you know, behind us now. We're on our last leg.

And then a few years after that, you know, two drunks in Akron, Ohio couldn't get sober. Nobody else could help them get sober. Dr. Bob and Bill W. So they had a meeting, man. You know, they had a meeting. And they called it Alcoholics Anonymous. us. And all of a sudden, years later, it got all these people sober, including me, the Junior League,

the Rotary Club, the NAACP, future farmers of America, they all started during that period and created that upswing, that upswing in social capital. And Putnam, like a lot of social scientists, believes that we're due, that we have hit a down swing culmination point and that we're due that upswing. And I honestly believe that what you saw these veteran groups do when nobody else was coming is the first shot across the bow. I think what you guys, all the movements, Mike, that you and Chuck have led. I mean, those are just, you know,

what my dad's doing to restore the American chestnut. Like, our best days are still in front of us. And I do believe that. I really do. But it's going to take a lot of us looking around and saying, okay, nobody's coming. You know, what am I going to do? Leading from the bottom up without a title.

We are the cavalry, dude. We are the cavalry. Yeah, 100%. Would you come back? in five or six months, just to talk about literature and the hero's journey and whatever else is on your mind? I'd love to. I'd be honored.

Love to do it. I mean, look, we're nothing without connective tissue. This is a result of a phone call from Gary Seneas. Absolutely. And who knows what this will do. Chuck, say some things that will help people get to know Scott Mann a bit more intimately. So the play that Scott wrote and stars in is called Last Out. You can find out where it's playing live next at lastoutplay.com.

You can watch the production of it on Amazon Prime. You can rent it for, I think it's... $2.49. It's very, very... Worth every penny. It totally is. Also, the book that we spoke about was Operation Pineapple Express. Is there a particular place that people should get that or just anywhere where fine books are

sold, Scott. Yeah, we're fine books are sold, but really, Chuck, on Scottman.com, all of those things are there, including the book. And yeah, man, but yeah, certainly on Amazon in any place where they sell. Scottman.com, two T's, two ends. Thanks so much, man. It was really a pleasure to chat with you. It was my pleasure, gents. Thank you so much. It was okay. I don't want to oversell it. If you like what you heard, and even if you don't, won't you please, won't you please, Pretty, please, pretty please subscribe Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead But police, pretty

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