#36 Lt. Col. Scott Mann - Operation Pineapple Express

Retired Green Beret Lt. Col. Scott Mann and a small team of former special ops personnel orchestrated what is now known as Operation Pineapple Express. Extracting our Afghan Allies from Taliban regime during a time of extreme violence due to the United States withdrawing all forces from Afghanistan. OUR SPONSORS: https://bullionmax.com/srs https://prepwithshawn.com Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 🚨↘️ Sign up for the VE Newsletter ↙️🚨 https://www.shawnryanshow.com/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Shawn Ryan?

  We cover a lot of different topics on the Sean Ryan Show. Everything from, in graphic detail, how tough it is for vets, combat vets, to reintegrate into civilian life. We talk about government corruption at the deepest levels. We talk about how the cartel is fueling this fentanyl epidemic that we're all feeling throughout the US and Canada. And no matter what the subject matter is, the question from you all is always, "What can I do?" And... We give advice, we answer all those emails, at least we try to. And I think a lot of people don't think that, they think, "Oh, well, what can I do? There's nothing I can do."

• 2:15Shawn Ryan?

  There is something you can do. And what I really like about this episode is that it proves that if a few dedicated, driven individuals get together, you can make a major impact in the world. And that's what, that's what these people did. The people of Operation Pineapple Express saved a lot of lives. There was just a few of them. When everything else failed, the entire government was a complete disaster during the Afghanistan pullout. These guys made some shit happen and left a major impact in the world with what they did.

• 2:55Shawn Ryan?

  And so, what I'm trying to highlight here is it doesn't take an army to make a difference. It just takes a few dedicated, driven individuals that can make a major impact. And so, I really think you're gonna like this episode. It's actually very uplifting, once we get into what they actually did at Operation Pineapple Express. And without further ado, I'd like to welcome Scott Mann to the show. If you don't mind, please, this helps me out. It helps get the word out about this exact piece of content. Hit the like button, hit the subscribe button, and leave a comment.

• 3:40Shawn Ryan?

  And if you're on iTunes and Spotify, please leave us a review. Tell us what you thought of the show. I read all of that stuff. Love reading it. Love you guys, thank you for being here. Cheers. Enjoy this one.

• 4:05Speaker 05

  Scenes shockantes de desesperación y caos en Afganistán están siendo vistas en todo el mundo. "No puedo creer mis ojos", dice el hombre que filmó este video, de personas que se aferran a un jet de cargos estadounidense mientras despegó. El fuego de las armas podría oírse mientras miles de afghanes de pánico estallaban en el aeropuerto.

• 4:26Scott Mann?

  Para las fuerzas especiales, o Green Berets como es nuestro apodo, nuestra especialidad es guerra irregular, guerra no convencional, donde trabajamos con personas indígenas para ayudarles a levantarse por sí mismos y luchar contra la depresión.

• 4:44Shawn Ryan?

  Cuando comenzó el desplazamiento, tenía amigos que me enviaron videos de lo que estaban haciendo a nuestros comandos. Debe haber sido 20 comandos juntos, manos detrás de la espalda, y ellos solo estaban poniendo una tira en la espalda, y todos los cuerpos iban hacia un lado. Parecía...

• 5:01Scott Mann?

  Sí.

• 5:02Shawn Ryan?

  Parecía una mierda de Guerra Mundial.

• 5:08Scott Mann?

  El llamado que sabía que venía,

• 5:12Scott Mann?

  de Nazam, y él dijo: "Señor, están mirando mi ventana ahora mismo".

• 5:21Scott Mann?

  Le dije algo en el efecto de: "Mira, no vas a morir solo. No vas a morir en absoluto. Vamos a sacarte, amigo. Vas a pasar por esa ciudad, vas a pasar por la multitud, vas a pasar por el Taliban, vas a pasar por los marines".

• 5:38Scott Mann?

  "¿Por qué este chico tiene que morir? No es justo". Y todo en mi vida, en esa guerra, se redujo a él. Si no lo llevamos a la parte interior de ese ring de Taliban, van a ver sus credenciales y está muerto.

• 5:59Shawn Ryan?

  I used to live in Florida. And when I lived in Florida, I learned a very valuable lesson going through hurricane after hurricane after hurricane after hurricane. And that lesson is do not wait for the last minute to get the emergency type items that you need because they are not going to be there because guess who else is looking for that? Everyone else around you, everybody on the planet. So I invested in some long-term emergency food with My Patriot Supply. This is a one-month supply. This food lasts for 25 years, doesn't go bad for 25 years.

• 6:42Shawn Ryan?

  You just keep it somewhere safe, hold on to it. And then when things like 2020 happened, the food shortages, the next hurricane, maybe a tornado, any type of emergency, guess what? While everybody else is scurrying around trying to figure out how they're going to survive this thing, you've already got everything prepped and ready to go. It's, I'm telling you, it is the best feeling in the world to be at home, see something happen on the news and know we're already ready for this. It's no big deal. And everybody else is going to be out there scurrying around the grocery stores, fighting for a little case of water or some food.

• 7:26Shawn Ryan?

  My Patriot Supply is the nation's largest preparedness company. It is currently offering a 20% discount on their popular three-month emergency food kit. Go to prepwithshawn.com right now and grab your 20% savings off each three-month kit you need. That's prepwithshawn.com. Scott Mann, welcome to the show.

• 7:53Scott Mann?

  Sean, thanks for having me, man. So cool to be here.

• 7:55Shawn Ryan?

  It's my pleasure. I'm super excited about this interview. So just quick background on you, author of Operation Pineapple Express, New York Times bestseller. You basically orchestrated that entire pullout on the civilian sector, correct?

• 8:13Scott Mann?

  With that group, I was, yeah, definitely one of the guys that helped lead that, yeah, for sure.

• 8:17Shawn Ryan?

  Amazing. Retired US Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel, 23-year Army career, 18 of that in special operations, 10 years with 7th Special Forces Group, deployed to Central America, South America, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Co-founder and president of The Hero's Journey, writer and actor of the play

• 8:39Shawn Ryan?

  Elegy of a Green Beret.

• 8:42Scott Mann?

  Yeah, Last Out, Elegy of a Green Beret, yeah.

• 8:45Shawn Ryan?

  Founder of Rooftop Leadership.

• 8:47Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Shawn Ryan?

  That's a hell of a career.

• 8:49Scott Mann?

  Yeah, it's been, uh, it makes me tired thinking about it, but, uh, it's been, and I was supposed to, you know, retire, but not exactly.

• 8:58Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I want to talk all about your book and what you experienced over there, but first I start. Everybody gets a gift that comes on.

• 9:08Scott Mann?

  Oh, man.

• 9:09Shawn Ryan?

  There you go.

• 9:09Scott Mann?

  This is so awesome. Do I open it now?

• 9:11Shawn Ryan?

  Open it up.

• 9:12Scott Mann?

  All right, okay. I'm never good at doing the tape thing. My wife is so mad at me. What's that?

• 9:18Shawn Ryan?

  Any guesses?

• 9:19Scott Mann?

  Um, no, but like looking around this room and all the stuff that you have in here, like I can barely wait to check it out, man.

• 9:25Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 9:27Scott Mann?

  Oh, my God. The gummies.

• 9:31Shawn Ryan?

  There you go.

• 9:31Scott Mann?

  This is awesome.

• 9:32Shawn Ryan?

  Made right here in the USA.

• 9:34Scott Mann?

  Absolutely. So grateful, brother. These will be put to use immediately.

• 9:38Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 9:39Scott Mann?

  Thank you.

• 9:44Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I want to start, we're going to talk about the Afghanistan pullout and Operation Pineapple Express, but one thing that I think that the civilian sector, they just don't understand is how close special operations units, actually all units in all agencies, worked with their Afghan counterparts, whether it's, you know, fighting force or an interpreter or an asset, you know, people don't understand how closely we were working with them and how close those relationships were. And so I wanted to just have a conversation with

• 10:25Shawn Ryan?

  you about what those people were doing for us over there and we couldn't have accomplished any of the stuff that we accomplished without them.

• 10:34Scott Mann?

  It's such an important question and point, Sean, when we think about the Afghan issue, because a lot of people, they do, they come up to me, and I'm sure they have you too, and go, "What's the big deal? Like, we were there for 20 years, they need to fight for their country and we shouldn't be there," you know? And trying to help someone understand the level of relationship and connection that exists between our operators, our service members, and Afghans and Iraqis and other people that we've partnered with is so critical. So I think to unpack it, what I would start with is this: If you look at the Afghan campaign, when we were hit on 9/11/2001, the worst terror attack in American history, and members

• 11:18Scott Mann?

  of the special operations community within weeks responded by inserting into that country, and, you know, they didn't go after al-Qaeda and the Taliban unilaterally, for the most part. They immediately partnered. They partnered with members of the Northern Alliance. These were the Uzbeks, the Tajiks, the Hazaras, the ethnic groups that were resisting the Taliban already. And they also partnered with Pashtun tribes in the south and the east, who were also resisting. So from the very beginning of Afghanistan, we were partnered. And we knew that the only way that we were going to have a fighting chance in that country to serve an antibody to Al Qaeda and keep this from happening again and get retribution

• 12:03Scott Mann?

  was by, with, and through the indigenous people of Afghanistan. So I'll start with that and see how that lands on you. But like the right out of the gate, we partnered with these resistance groups. And from, and one more thing I'll say. If you look at what happened to our country, if you look at how we were hit, we knew Osama bin Laden was developing Al Qaeda into a strategic strike capability. We had the USS Cole, the attacks in Africa. We knew that he had a safe haven in Afghanistan. But you know, we did not have, we didn't have the ground intel network that we needed. We didn't have a partnership with the resistance forces. We had no Afghan military to partner with. So there was no way to reach him

• 12:48Scott Mann?

  except with this over the horizon strike capability, which we tried multiple times and failed. And so if you look at the lead up to the strike of 9/11, the conditions on the ground that led to that are almost identical to what we put in place when we abandoned 20 years later. Wow, that fast. Yeah, and, and the, you know, we still have partners. So if you look at all of the service members who deployed to Afghanistan over that 20 year period, had some version of partnership with the Afghans. You know, and there was an evolution in the indigenous capability. It started with a resistance group. And then around 04, 05, that was my first deployment in as a Green Beret. You saw the Afghan National Army start to stand up.

• 13:34Scott Mann?

  And my old group, 7th Group, we worked a lot in Latin America before 9/11. So we were real big on partnering with foreign armies. The, you know, the Colombian commandos, the Lanceros. And so when we saw the emergence of the Afghan National Army, we saw that as a way to really build formal capacity now. Now you've got a formal partner, the Afghan police, the Afghan army. But they hadn't existed in decades. You know, so they were literally built from the ground up. Um, and it, and even when they collapsed, there were still all kinds of systemic problems. But the point is partnership really went through a lot of iterations in that country over several decades. But one thing was consistent, whether you were an infantryman, whether you were a marine,

• 14:19Scott Mann?

  an airman, a SEAL or a Green Beret. Yes, you would do some unilateral strike ops, but your focus was on building capacity with partner forces.

• 14:31Shawn Ryan?

  Very true. That's a great overall picture. I, I would like to get a little more personal now and talk about, especially being a Green Beret. I mean, with the, with the, do you want to describe the mission?

• 14:45Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Shawn Ryan?

  Of the SFUN.

• 14:46Scott Mann?

  Yeah, I mean, you, you know, and, and when you hear me talk today about this, I, you know, please know that like, uh, the special operations community in general did a huge chunk of what I'm talking about, that my experience was as a Green Beret, as did the, the, the conventional forces. But for Green Berets, uh, who are part of the overall SOCOM or Special Operations Command Community, every single constituent in SOCOM has a specific, unique capability. Whether it's Navy SEALs, Army Rangers or Green Berets. Each of them has a specific capability that they're the best in the world at, in my opinion. Um, for special forces or Green Berets, as our nickname calls, our, our specialty is irregular warfare, unconventional warfare.

• 15:31Scott Mann?

  Where we work with indigenous people to help them stand up on their own and fight against oppression. Now, whether we do that with a formal app, like a partner force, like commandos, or whether we do that with rural farmers, that's our bread and butter. We, uh, I tell people that a modern day Green Beret is a, is a combination of John Wick, uh, Lawrence of Arabia and the Verizon guy.

• 15:55Shawn Ryan?

  Verizon guy.

• 15:56Scott Mann?

  You know, the guy that's going around making the connections all the time? Because that's what, you know, they are strategic catalysts. They are connectors. If you look at the early days of Afghanistan, when 595 and those other teams went in and the horse soldiers, and they connected with the Northern Alliance, they connected with the Pashtuns in the South. What they really did was they mobilized an indigenous population. So they went in with 12, came out with 1,200. So that really is where, in my assessment, special forces have a very, very unique approach. Is we are hardwired through language, cultural immersion. We're taught in the qualification course to make, build relationships with indigenous people.

• 16:37Scott Mann?

  And, and in fact, I, I would submit that the SEALs and a lot of the other groups, uh, you know, because of the unilateral strike capability that you guys work on so hard, like that's, that's your thing. Where, where our thing is, we can do that, but when we can do that in conjunction with a partner force, an indigenous capability, I think that's when we best serve the nation.

• 16:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I've always been fascinated with the, with the SF mission and I did some of that kind of stuff, but we weren't, being a SEAL, we weren't trained in that kind of stuff. So it kind of, it kind of turned into a mess for me. But watching, then when I went to the agency, I was able to kind of co-deploy with a lot of SF units. And when I saw the capability that, that you guys have, you know, with such a small team, embedding in a village where nobody's been in, and, and turning that into a fighting force. It's, it's, it's incredible.

• 17:39Scott Mann?

  It is really cool to watch and I, I was so in awe of the years that I, cause I wanted to be a Green Beret since I was a little kid growing up in a logging town. I fell in love with it because I met a guy that was a Green Beret when I was like 14. And when he told me the stories about what he did, I just thought, man, like that is, but being around Green Beret NCOs that, that had done that for years, to watch them, Sean, go into these places where the rest of the world's just forgot about them. And the level of appreciation that they have for culture and reality at a local level is I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen anything like it. Their ability to just immerse in the language and the culture.

• 18:21Scott Mann?

  And, and, and everything they do is built around relationships. You know, the social capital that they build with these communities, that they build with their, with their partner force. And they, they take it so seriously. And they understand that like that social capital that you build when risk is lower.

• 18:41Scott Mann?

  That's the stuff that you leverage when it all falls apart. Or that when you got to do the nasty work.

• 18:45Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, very interesting. Let's talk about, let's talk about some of your personal experiences going in and, and standing up a force. Any, any part of the world you want to talk about in particular that you were a part of?

• 19:01Scott Mann?

  I think my first exposure to it was in the nineties, uh, when we were doing work in, in Colombia. And, uh, as a young special forces captain, you know, I, I thought I was advising my Colombian counterpart in the, in the, in the, uh, he was Colombian, you know, special forces. And he was a major and really, really sharp dude. And I was, we were talking about their, their dealings with the, with the guerrillas in Colombia and the narco traffickers. And I was giving him like the, the standard token special forces advice and how to, you know, how to think about it. And he kind of looked at me and he's like, have you dealt with the FARC before? And I was like, no, but you know, this, and he's like, sit down for a second, captain. And he took me to school, man.

• 19:46Scott Mann?

  And it really opened my eyes in that moment. I was like, wow, like first of all, the partners that we work with, they really, in a lot of cases, they know far more than we do. You know, it's important to look at where you fit, just like anything else in life, right? I mean, to walk in the room thinking you know it all. And you have all the answers. I'm from the government, how you like me so far? It's, it's not only is it off putting, but it's, it's naive. And, and that was a real wake up call for me, a humility lesson in what partnership really looks like. And thankfully I had some wonderful, uh, NCOs, uh, that taught me, you know, the value of that. I'll remember one time in Paraguay, we dropped into Paraguay, um, my team, I had a very senior team. This was back in the nineties.

• 20:31Scott Mann?

  Like my team sergeant had been in seventh group for 21 years.

• 20:35Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:36Scott Mann?

  My, my warrant officer had been in for 19 years, uh, and my, uh, my intel sergeant like 17. And I was, you know, right out of the Q course as a captain and I'm the commander. But we went to Paraguay and it was right after an attempted coup. By General Oviedo. And our job was to help stand up the Special Operations Command, or to bolster the Special Operations Command Forces from Paraguay. And really, multi-echelon training with them and then culminate it in a training event where it would be attended by parliamentarians and the Southern Command's four-star. It would really send a message to the rest of the folks that might be contemplating an insurgency.

• 21:20Scott Mann?

  Don't mess with this force. Like, they are the core of the Paraguayan military. So it was a pretty big mission for a young captain and nine other dudes. Absolutely. And so we go down there and we're training. You know, the NCOs immediately go into what they do. The medics are training on medical portions. The weapons guys are teaching ambush and light infantry. And then we're going to bring it all into this complex, multi-echelon exercise with infill platforms and medevacs and field artillery. And so my job as the captain was to really, you know, empower these teams or these NCOs, make sure they had what they needed and ensure that the resources were in place for all this. Well, I had managed to square away everything for the actual day of execution, but the rehearsals, the full mission profile rehearsals, I dropped the ball on that.

• 22:04Scott Mann?

  And so we did not have training areas for the full mission profile rehearsals. I go in, I have to tell my team sergeant, these senior old crusty farts, that I dropped the ball and I'm going to need some help. And we're already in Paraguay. So I tell them, and they were super cool about it, you know, kind of shook their head. And the warrant officer's like, "Come with me, sir." And I'm like, "All right." So the Chief Macag takes me in the truck. We drive across the base to the range control area. And there's this little, short, fat Paraguayan captain sitting there. And Chief and him start rapping in Spanish really fast. I'm trying to keep up, you know, with my defense language institute, "One plus, one plus."

• 22:46Scott Mann?

  And they talked for a while and, and I tried to just follow along as we're walking out. I was like, what, what did you guys say? I missed part of it. And she said, good news and bad news. Good news is you got your ranges. The bad news is you got dinner plans tonight. So I'm like, okay. So we go back, we take the team home, we go back to the base and we drive on the other side of the base where the officer housing is. And it's like, not the kind of housing you would see on our bases. It's little cinder block homes, didn't even have a front door, chickens running around in the yard, kids everywhere. And this little short fat captain is there, same guy. He's now in his PT shorts and his seventh group T-shirt and drinking a beer. And he motions us inside and like, it is, I'm not kidding

• 23:27Scott Mann?

  you, like, it's, it's half the size of this room, the whole house, dirt floors, um, you know, salsa music blaring. And in there, he's got one couch, a TV tray with a TV with antenna ears on it. And in the room on the walls, certificates of appreciation, covering every bit of space in the room going from Septimo Grupo, Seventh Group, going all the way back to 1986. Are you serious? Yeah. Wow. His whole house was decorated with certificates of appreciation from Seventh Group over 15 years. Damn.

• 24:12Scott Mann?

  And creepy as hell. Like, I'm sitting there going, oh, my God, like, this guy decorated his house with those little cheap certificates of appreciation that we get out of the supply room with the, with the five cent black frame. And, but yet he, he decorated his whole house with it. And in that moment, that's when I, I, I was like, okay. Every one of these detachments that came here got me this range. Damn. You know, that every one of them incrementally contributed to the organizational relationship with the Paraguayan military that manifested between the three of us, right? And it did end, it ended up being a great event. Uh, the multi, I mean, it was, it was, and I, and I do believe that, that it sent such a strong message through Paraguay. There were

• 24:55Scott Mann?

  no more attempts, you know, at insurgency. And you never hear about that in the news. That's not sexy. Yeah. But from a capacity building perspective, from what that team was sent there to do. It was all made possible by the actions and activities of a bunch of SFODAs, 12 man teams I never met.

• 25:11Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 25:12Scott Mann?

  And for me, that that really drove home what it is that we do is that we move the ball five yards down the field every time. If you look at what happened in Afghanistan, when the agency went in as the pilot team in front of the special forces guys, we hadn't been in Afghanistan since 78, when the embassy fell and the ambassador was killed. So there were no pre-existing relationships in Afghanistan for the SF guys to leverage. So guys were brought out of retirement, senior guys from the agency were sent in on the jawbreaker teams. Who were they? They were all guys that had worked with the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation.

• 25:54Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 25:55Scott Mann?

  You know, it's, it all comes down to those relationships that you build when nobody's looking.

• 26:01Shawn Ryan?

  I think that's a perfect story to bring up because it's 15 years. You know, the guy had 15 years of relationships with, with 7th Group Special Forces. And then, you know, fast forward however many years to Afghanistan, that was a 20 year war.

• 26:20Scott Mann?

  Right.

• 26:20Shawn Ryan?

  So we have Afghan interpreters, commandos, all these different, you know, types. And that's it. Some of them have a 20 year relationship, you know, with, with US forces. What I'd like to move into a little bit now is,

• 26:39Shawn Ryan?

  did you, did you work as a Green Beret in Afghanistan?

• 26:43Scott Mann?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 26:44Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk a little bit about how closely you work with the Afghan counterpart. Because, I mean, essentially, in civilian terms, what you guys do is you go in, you train up a team, and then you, you fight with that team just like you would fight with your own team.

• 27:02Scott Mann?

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, the original Green Berets that went into the country, you know, they worked very closely with the militia, with the resistance. And then when, when my teams went in in 04, 05, um, we worked closely with those folks, but also the emerging Afghan National Army. They were brand new. And in fact, I was I was mission commander of a of an operation that went into Aruzgan province called Nam Dong was the was the was the mission. But it was it was in the spring of oh five and we took the brand new members of the Afghan National Army two oh fifth Corps into really the one of the heartland areas of Taliban sanctuary up in the mountains of Aruzgan, which is south central Afghanistan, really rough country.

• 27:45Scott Mann?

  At that time, there was almost no US presence up there. So we were going in, it was really the first maneuver warfare to be conducted by the Afghan National Army. Most of these soldiers were fifteen years old, had not seen combat, the officers had not been tested, and it was Green Berets that were taking the Afghan National Army in. And we infiltrated on helicopters, on seven HLZs. You had probably anywhere from seventy five to a hundred Afghan National Army members and like three Green Beret NCOs with them in their woodland pattern camouflage uniforms. And we sat down in seven HLZs at the same time. I set up my mission command post, I was combat advising two battalion commanders and a brigade

• 28:29Scott Mann?

  commander and their staff who had never maneuvered forces. At the time, we didn't even have, you know, they had one, they had HF radio, but like that was about it. You know, they were using sat phones and and really antiquated ways to maneuver their forces. That's why Green Berets were so instrumental in that. But as soon as we landed, Sean, on those seven HLZs, we could we could hear over the ICOM scanners, the Taliban saying, what is this? Like, look at, look at, look at all of these, look at these Afghan soldiers, what is this all about? You know, and and even like some of them were laughing about it and and they decided to mass and hit us and they hit us like in all seven areas.

• 29:09Scott Mann?

  What they didn't count on were those embedded SFNCOs with their multi-frequency radios and access to fighter aircraft that we had loitering at, you know, at IPs all over the place. And it it started like a twelve day firefight. Just right off the bat. Right out of the gate. And, you know, a lot A lot of the ANA broke and ran, you know, for the first crack of the round and you had SFNCOs that were fighting overwhelming odds, but they used operational fires to reduce it. It ended up being a really successful mission in the sense that it was the first time that the 205th Corps had been tested. And it allowed them to put their flag, their, you know, their flag down in a ruse gone at Taran Kaut and they never left.

• 29:51Scott Mann?

  And we were able to establish a firebase there at Cobra that became, you know, a notorious firebase for pushing into Sanctuary. But the point is like, you know, in 04, 05, we were working with the Afghan National Army. Now, I'll give you an example, like Matt Coburn, one of the guys in Pineapple. He retired as a Colonel. He trained the original Afghan National Army members that came out as like lieutenants and privates right off the assembly line in that time period. Fast forward 20 years later, he was the final SEJISOTIF or Joint Special Ops Task Force Commander.

• 30:33Scott Mann?

  And his peers, his partners, who are generals, sergeants major in the Afghan commandos, the special forces, the KKA, were the privates and lieutenants that he had trained as a captain.

• 30:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing.

• 30:46Scott Mann?

  You know, and, and, and then he was the guy they called, because he had retired, when the government didn't pick up the phone. You know, they're calling Colonel Coburn, who they've known since they were privates. And I think that's what a lot of people don't understand is that the relationships that we built with these people are not only measured in blood, but in years.

• 31:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, we're talking 20 years.

• 31:12Scott Mann?

  20 years, two decades.

• 31:14Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's the life of raising a kid.

• 31:17Scott Mann?

  And understand too, Sean, that like...

• 31:21Scott Mann?

  There's only 6,500 Green Berets in the inventory.

• 31:26Scott Mann?

  For example, and, and most of the special ops units have similar, they're small. Right. And then when you'd split that across Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, and we only had,

• 31:38Scott Mann?

  well, we had third group and, and seventh group that were primarily focused on Af- on Afghanistan. While, you know, while 10th and 5th were focused on Iraq. And then you had the first that went back and forth. But the point is like, you were either in Afghanistan or you were getting ready to go back. That was your life, you know, that was your life in the special operations community. So you had a very small number of these individuals who were building these relationships. You know, you were there all the time.

• 32:06Shawn Ryan?

  Would you, so,

• 32:09Shawn Ryan?

  do most SF groups, do they redeploy back to the exact spot? So you continue that relationship? So.

• 32:16Scott Mann?

  I mean, you would think so. You, you would think so.

• 32:20Scott Mann?

  You know, one of the things that, the, the, the other thing that I did in my tenure there on my third rotation to Afghanistan was I helped put in place what was called the Village Stability Program or Village Stability Operations, VSO. And it was basically where we worked with rural farmers, Pashtuns primarily, at a village level, similar to the CIDG program with the Monten yards in Vietnam. That was actually who inspired it with us. But we, it's kind of a modern day magnificent seven, right? Where the teams would go into these villages and they would live in these villages. Seals did some of it too, in Zabel province, it was 2010. But we basically helped build local militias to stand up against the Taliban at village and community levels. And it spread all over Afghanistan in 2010, 2011, 2012.

• 33:03Scott Mann?

  But what I, where I'm going to with that is that you would think that the special forces community would send the teams back to the same areas that they fought in. As a general rule, our special forces command, the force provider out of Fort Bragg, did not do that. They had this thing called the playbook that they operated off of. And it was a, it was basically like a matrix that they used to rotate different units into Afghanistan. And they, we did not do a good job as a regiment, in my assessment, of putting teams back in the same areas. It happened on occasion.

• 33:39Scott Mann?

  In one area like Maywand, Kandahar, where one team went back three times in a row. And when you look at their rate of accomplishment with that community and that district, 10x better than those around it. But yet, when we tried to bring that up to the senior leaders at SF Command, it just was lost on them. There was too much of a programmatic solution to how we fielded forces against this thing. And everything except pre-existing rapport, in my assessment, was considered in that. So we could have done a much better job of continuing those relationships in those areas, and we didn't. So you had these start and stops every six months to a year.

• 34:21Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. But still, they're still, it's another SF unit.

• 34:26Scott Mann?

  It was another SF unit with an appreciation for that kind of work. And they would typically build on what the other team had done to some degree. But you know the deal. I mean, you bring third group in and seventh group, even if it's two ODA, one ODA from each. The cultures are so different and how they think about the world and just the pre-existing rivalries even. Overall, it was pretty good, but it could have been so much better.

• 34:51Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about some of the living conditions, you know, how close you guys were living with them. Like, for example, when I was in the agency, if we were going to an outpost, you know, it was, I mean, you're eating with them, you're working out with them, you're getting to know them. You're learning their culture, they're learning yours, you're sleeping next to them. I mean, it's... It just becomes, it gets to the point where there is no difference between hanging out with fellow Americans and your Afghan counterparts because you're co-located in the exact same living conditions, living side by side with each other. Did you guys, I mean, same?

• 35:35Scott Mann?

  100%. I mean, you know, you brought up, I mean, the way you characterized it's spot on. The only thing I would probably add to it is, for Green Berets, When you go through the Green Beret qualification course at Fort Bragg, no matter what you do, whether you're a weapons person, or a captain, or a team sergeant, whatever, when you go through this course, you are, the culminating event is a role-playing exercise called Robin Sage. It's the largest role-playing exercise in the world. It covers five rural counties in North Carolina, and it's been going on since like 1952. And you parachute into this place, and it's a replicated insurgency. And you jump in, almost identical to what our teams did in Afghanistan,

• 36:16Scott Mann?

  and you, you connect with the guy that owns the Subway shop in Dunn, North Carolina, is actually a leader of the resistance, and he drives you around in a cattle car at night. Like, and, but he lives there, he's actually a resident, and he's a third-generation role-player. The point is, we, we spend an inordinate amount of time training and inculcating in our, in our operators, the importance of immersing in the culture, the language, and the environment. And that is exactly what they do when they move into these communities. Like, the Village Stability Program, our Green Berets grew their beards out, they're wearing indigenous clothing, they're speaking the language, they're living in a colot in that village. You know, eating what the locals eat, shopping at the market.

• 36:59Scott Mann?

  There is an expectation that you are, you go local, or you go home. You know, if you are working with the Afghan Commandos, you wear their uniforms, you wear their patch. You, you know, you, you go into combat with them. You are at their shoulder. And you don't necessarily want to be the first in the stack, because you want them to build that capacity to do that, but you're in that stack. You know, and, and it becomes such a brotherhood, such a connection, that your whole purpose for being there, there's a saying in Special Forces, which is to work yourself out of a job. The way you measure success, when you are working by, with, and through indigenous partners, is you work yourself out of a job. In other words, that partner force is so good,

• 37:44Scott Mann?

  that you can over-watch them, and they are able to handle unilaterally what they need to handle. And I would tell you, by, there was so much bloodshed, so much sweat, so much partnership that occurred between '08, when the Commandos stood up, and the Special Ops Command stood up for the Afghans, until the collapse, that in the last couple of years...

• 38:06Scott Mann?

  Of of the war. The Afghan Special Operations Forces were carrying ninety-eight percent of the combat load. And they were doing so unilaterally.

• 38:14Shawn Ryan?

  I did not know that. That's incredible.

• 38:18Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Shawn Ryan?

  I do have a question.

• 38:22Shawn Ryan?

  When you guys go in, like the twelve that went in at the beginning, or the or Paraguay at the beginning of that relationship or Colombia. I mean, if there's only twelve guy, who? How are you making those relationships before?

• 38:38Shawn Ryan?

  Before the twelve guys are going in?

• 38:40Scott Mann?

  Right. So in in special operations, you you know, particularly in special forces, indigenous engagement. You always, a couple of things. One is there's usually a pilot team that can go in in front of you and and do that kind of work. So in the initial invasion of Afghanistan, you had a pilot team. Uh, where the agency and if you ever read the book Jawbreaker, like, you know, for folks who listen to this, like that. That was the pilot team that paved the way for the special forces team that came in behind. So the idea is you always want to build on whatever pre-existing mechanisms are in place. Right? So in the case of Afghanistan, if you're going to roll in there and you're going to work, say, with the commandos in the in in in Kandahar in our original command south.

• 39:25Scott Mann?

  So you know, your team is going to go do that. Well, you would get notification ahead of time that that's what you're going to do. And you would immediately start talking with that detachment that's already over there. You'd find out who that is. You would launch a pre-deployment site survey or a PDSS. You'd get over there with your senior leaders. Get on the ground with that team, start building those relationships there. Uh, you know, and then go back to your unit, continue your pre-mission training based on, continue to talk with that unit as you're moving through the training. And then you get on the ground and then there's a, you know, usually a two to three week left seat, right seat ride. Where you start to assume those relationships from the outgoing team. What I will tell you, Sean, is a great question is. Some organizations did that really well.

• 40:10Scott Mann?

  Some didn't put as much stock in it. The ones that really thought about it and worked at it ahead of time were the ones who were able to accelerate their results on the battlefield. And I think they saw better outcomes from their partner force. With our Afghan special operations partners, the Commandos, the Afghan Special Forces, the KKA, as they were called, and the Special Mission Wing aviators. I have to say that our community, our self-community, developed a really good system for building a center of excellence with them. I don't think people realize how competent and capable and effective Afghan special operators were.

• 40:51Shawn Ryan?

  I had no idea. You know, I didn't, I did not realize it until I started contracting for the agency. And we tried that when I was a SEAL. We weren't trained in that kind of

• 41:03Scott Mann?

  Right.

• 41:03Shawn Ryan?

  operations and it just fell short. It didn't go great. But then when I, when I went to the agency and I saw some of the GB teams and the Afghan teams that they were training, I was, I had never seen it. I was, I was just like, holy shit, these guys are switched the fuck on.

• 41:26Scott Mann?

  They really are.

• 41:26Shawn Ryan?

  They're kitted out. They know what they're doing. They're dedicated. And it's more dedicated than some of the Americans that I was working with.

• 41:35Scott Mann?

  No, I agree, man. Like, one of the characters in my book, his name is Nazam. And Sergeant First Class Nazam Nazami. And, you know, he's a big part of the book. And he's a big part of my life. I met him in 2010 when we were doing that village stability mission I was telling you about. And the thing about Nazam, you know, this was a guy, just to give you, when you talk about the relationships, right? So his father was a Mujahideen fighter. He's Uzbek. And he was killed when Nazam was, I think, four months old. And then like a couple of days later, MiG fighters Bombed Nazam's village and his house collapsed on top of him. Everybody ran out. They forgot the baby. Nazam was covered in debris. They dug him out. Not a scratch on him, right? He was, his mom was sold into slavery to a man that was like three times her age.

• 42:21Scott Mann?

  He hated Nazam so much, he wouldn't even let him sleep in the house. He slept in a barn till he was 11. Ran away from home, lived on the streets of Takkar. And when he was 17 and this Afghan National Army stood up that we talked about when the NATO forces came in, he joined it. And it was all he ever wanted to do because it was for him, it was a home. He had never had a home to call his own. You know, his aunt called him the backpack man. Cause he just moved around with his backpack as a kid. But, but he found a home in the army and then he joined, when he saw these Green Berets walking onto the base, where he was working as a combat engineer, private, just cleaning the floors and, you know, really doing nothing. He saw these commandos come walking onto the base with these bearded SF guys.

• 43:04Scott Mann?

  And he, and he looked at his buddy, he's like, man, I want to do that. And, and, and his buddy was like, the sergeant will sit on you if you even try to do that. Don't even try it. So he told the sergeant he had to take a piss. Because they announced that they were going to meet in the, in the classroom if you were interested in the recruiting. The sergeant, the mess hall sergeant he was working for locked the door so none of the, none of the Afghan privates could get out and go to the meeting. So he told the fat sergeant, he said, I gotta piss. And the sergeant is like, screw you, man. Get back to where you know, I really gotta piss. And, and he was like, all right. So he opens the door and the second he opened the door, Nazam bolted. You know? Yeah. He ran into that room sprinting and

• 43:48Scott Mann?

  the, everybody turned around, looked at him. Now he's like five foot nothing, weighs like a buck oh five soaking wet. He had to wear women's high heels. Just to meet the height requirements. Are you serious? I'm not even kidding. And the recruiter thought it was so funny that he, that he let him in. But like he ran into that room, you know, this is a guy who had lost everything. He had lived on the streets. He had never had a home to call his own. And he sprinted into that room with the commandos and he, and he sat down and he never left. You know, he became a commando. He became Afghan special forces. He went to our Q course. He went to the Green Beret Q course at Fort Bragg. He was shot through the face. When he turned around to tell the SF guys behind him ambush and was back in the

• 44:33Scott Mann?

  fight three weeks later, he was shot in the chest plate three times by ISIS in a unilateral strike, you know, that they ended up winning. That's the kind of guy that every, almost every one of these commandos, special forces, KKA, were and are. And, and the level of trust and loyalty and love between them and their American advisors, that was one of the hardest things to write in this book, was to put it into words.

• 45:01Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. It's a perfect description. Let's take a quick break and when we come back, I'd like to talk about Afghan culture under Taliban rule.

• 45:11Scott Mann?

  Sure.

• 45:17Shawn Ryan?

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• 46:33Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Scott, we're back from the break. Let's talk about what Afghan culture under Sharia law looks like. What did it look like before we got there? And, and you know where I'm going with this.

• 46:47Scott Mann?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the problems, you know, we try to do the postmortem on what happened in Afghanistan and we'll be doing that for years, I'm sure. But one of the things that I've always contended is that I don't feel like we, we got deep enough on Afghanistan and what makes it tick at a civil society level at all. You know, and, and, and what I mean by that is, we tried to put a square peg in a round hole with Afghanistan. We tried to make it like a taut down liberal democracy. And that's just not how that, that culture, that's not how that society is set up. It's not how it's operated. The way to maybe think about Afghanistan is, um, you know, it is, it's what they call a status society in many ways. It's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a society where it's tribal, uh, in many ways.

• 47:32Scott Mann?

  It's a clan honor-based society. So in other words, the way that, that, that country operates is in groups and clans and tribes. That's how they, and it's all about honor and shame. And the reason you see that in places like Afghanistan is that there's a huge amount of resource scarcity. So the way that you survive and that you navigate the world is you form groups. You form clans, you form tribes or qualms. And that's how you survive. That's how you acquire, that's how you protect your resources. And it's a code of honor that allows that collective to function, that allows that collective to maintain its resources, acquire new resources, protect against other groups trying to take your resources.

• 48:15Scott Mann?

  Every mammal on the planet has some version of this. And we all come from societies that do that. Afghanistan in many ways is still very true to that. If you go four feet off the pavement of Ring Road, the one paved road in that country, you're going to hit status society. I don't care which direction you go. The urban areas like Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad tend to be more progressive. You tend to see what they call contract society, which is what you and I know more readily. You know, it's some version of capitalism, some version of, you know, in this case, there was democracy that we helped instill, but it's more of a modern society that kind of focuses on the individual, not so much the group.

• 49:00Scott Mann?

  So, you know, when you saw the United States come in there, well, let's back up. So, the, the, the, the reality in Afghanistan is that this, this was a country largely status, ruled by a monarchy for years, and then in the seventies was, you know, the Soviets came in and toppled all of that. And they really targeted that rural leadership structure, the status society, the, the landed, land-owning elders from these tribes were targeted primarily by the Soviets and they were either killed or pushed out of the country. And so, the, the Soviet occupation really flipped that whole country on its head and how it governed itself. And, you know, it created an insurgency that lasted in, for quite a few years, and then

• 49:44Scott Mann?

  once they were pushed out, these warlords came in and filled the gap. Why? Because the tribal societies had been decimated by the Soviets. The, the resilience of that country had been decimated. And you know, the thing is, Sean, like, a lot of people don't know that, like, Kabul in the 1970s was a very progressive city. Like, women walked around in miniskirts, there were discotheques, there were hippies bouncing around the, the plains of northern Afghanistan, smoking dope, like, it was, I mean, you still had the rural issues, but it was a pretty progressive society. And it was the Soviet occupation that set all that going backwards. People think that Afghanistan has been like this backward land, and, and in some ways,

• 50:29Scott Mann?

  it is very status, but it was pretty darn progressive in the seventies, you know?

• 50:34Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. I, I actually didn't know that.

• 50:36Scott Mann?

  Absolutely. And, and it, it, it went backward under the Soviet occupation, and it, that started like a 40-year cycle of violence.

• 50:45Scott Mann?

  That just pulled apart the fabric of that society at both an informal and formal civil society level. What I mean by that is, so the rural tribes, the villages that were used to handling their own affairs and just had like a loose affiliation with the government, they were decimated. They forgot how to farm, they forgot how to resolve disputes. All of the elders who normally led those things were either killed, displaced, or were in hiding. At the same time, the governmental structures were destroyed by the Soviet occupation and then the civil war that followed. These warlords like Dostum and Atta, they came in and they filled the gap, the security gap, and then the governance

• 51:27Scott Mann?

  gap and the development gap. And it was all patronage and it was this warlord type approach that went on. And the civil war was awful. It was worse than the Soviet occupation. You know, and that lasted well into the 90s. Soviets left in 89. You know, so then you had the warlords come in, the civil war, it decimated the country even more than the Soviets. And that is what led to the influx of the Taliban. You know, the Taliban were trained in Pakistani madrassas, Pakistan's ISI, their intelligence service had a lot to do with the emergence of that group. The Wahhabi mosques from the Saudis years passed.

• 52:11Scott Mann?

  But the point is, the Taliban came into the country because the people in Afghanistan needed a security solution that was better than these warlords. You couldn't go 20 meters, according to some of my friends, without hitting a checkpoint every 20 meters where you were shaken down.

• 52:25Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 52:26Scott Mann?

  Yeah. And so the Taliban, at first, were welcomed with open arms because they brought in a level of security. Brutal. And then they also brought in a very, very strict application of Sharia law. You know, they had the Ministry for Virtue and Vice, which was like where women went out unescorted, they were beaten, stoned. So you saw this draconian governance of the Taliban. But, you know, people endured it because it was a better security situation. And I think probably, I don't know, had the Taliban not allowed Al Qaeda to come in country and strike us, I mean, that system may have stayed. You know what I mean? Like, people were enduring it.

• 53:12Scott Mann?

  And I think today you're right back at the same level of brutality.

• 53:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, when that, when that pullout started.

• 53:22Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Shawn Ryan?

  I had friends sending me videos of what they were doing to our, to our guys and, and pictures and by mean our guys, I mean our commandos.

• 53:34Scott Mann?

  Yeah, our partners.

• 53:35Shawn Ryan?

  That are over there.

• 53:36Scott Mann?

  Yeah, it's terrible.

• 53:37Shawn Ryan?

  I remember one, there must have been 20 commandos lined up.

• 53:41Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Shawn Ryan?

  You know, hands behind their back and they were just putting one round in the back of every one of their heads, just going down the line. It looked like.

• 53:49Scott Mann?

  Yep.

• 53:50Shawn Ryan?

  It looked like fucking World War II.

• 53:51Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Shawn Ryan?

  You know, in a concentration camp and

• 53:57Shawn Ryan?

  and, and those were our people.

• 53:59Scott Mann?

  Yeah, and we trained them and had relationships with them for years. And you know, the thing it really is to me is so egregious about this is that in, you know, in the special operations community, certainly in the special forces community, there is an implicit promise in partner work, which is I have your back, you know, and we, we are raised to know that and, and, and execute on that at a very early age in special forces, like it's for us in Robin Sage, it's, it's just grilled into you. And our, our operators for decades worked off that, I have your back. And, and it was just understood.

• 54:40Scott Mann?

  So if, if a commando unit went in on a mission, there were SF guys right there at their shoulder. If the KKA went in on a mission, there were Rangers or SEALs right there at their shoulder. Like it was just understood. And then all of a sudden, you know, really under two political administrations, this, this desire to just get out of the country, to get out of the war, completely dismissed.

• 55:05Scott Mann?

  This, these deep relationships that were in place and frankly, that we bled for for 20 years so that we didn't have another nine 11, so that we wouldn't have to rely on the over the horizon attacks that failed so miserably to prevent nine 11. You know, we had built this ground intel network. We had built these phenomenal partners. Now granted, the larger Afghan army and the police raft with corruption and desertions and they had all kinds of problems. But you know, it takes time to build those kinds of capacities, but the commandos were carrying the load, the SOF were carrying the load. And in, in June of last year, we completely pulled all of their contract support.

• 55:48Scott Mann?

  You know, we pulled out all the contractors without warning. Now, why does that matter? When people are saying that the Afghans didn't fight, that they did, that's just a complete false narrative. Remember that we built these commandos, these KKA, these special forces in our own image. Like we, if you looked at a, another group is the National Mine Reduction Group, the NMRG, who actually protected us from insider attacks. They slept in our compounds with us. That's how much trust there was. Right? They would trade their life for ours, you know, to block an IED, to sweep a road for SEALs and SF dudes. But all of these groups, you know, I mean, we had built such a capacity with them, but we built them in our own image. Like if you looked at them, they had their hats cocked up on their head, they had all

• 56:33Scott Mann?

  the kit, they're dipping Copenhagen, they go in, they do their mission planning like we do, they, they, you know, three to one ratio, overwhelming operational fires, precision fires to saturate the, all of that, to keep the Taliban off guard, you know, and punch them in the face and hit them hard and you don't know where they're coming from next. That's how Afghan SOF operated and they're very good at it. But they were reliant on the same things you and I were relying on. Surgical platforms, operational fires, medevac, you know, optics and tricked out weapons, all of those things that gave you that edge, night vision goggles. We pulled all of the contract support. So they had no operational fires, they had no surgical strike, they had no medevac.

• 57:18Scott Mann?

  Damn. You know, air medevac. And this happened in June, right? So this was after province after province was already falling, generals were deserting, and then all of a sudden you pull their contract support. You know, everything that gave them a decisive competitive advantage over the Taliban was removed.

• 57:37Shawn Ryan?

  We literally just chopped the legs out.

• 57:39Scott Mann?

  We took their legs right out from under them. And then, and then when they started calling saying, okay, we're, we're holding the line. I mean, there's a guy in the book I talk about, his name is Bashir, it's not his real name. He was an Afghan commando, Afghan special forces and a Q course graduate. Went, was at Camp Morehead, was the liaison to all the special forces teams that came through there. For years, his house was right outside Camp Morehead. He stayed on Morehead until the Taliban were literally at the gates. His, his guys killed, and him, killed 14 Taliban on 15 August. You know, at the ammunition supply point, up in a tower, a sniper, took out 14 dudes. And, and they stayed on target even after all the generals and officers left, they stayed. And were calling us, saying, sir, what do I do?

• 58:23Scott Mann?

  You know, I, my family's over here, if I don't go to my family soon, they're going to be killed. I'm willing to fight, tell me what to do. And they're calling retired guys because no one in the, in the government was picking up the phone or authorized to. It was maddening. Heartbreaking.

• 58:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit about? The headway that Afghanistan made with women's rights?

• 58:49Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Shawn Ryan?

  And schooling and all the good things that happened because we were there. And then we'll get into, then we'll get into.

• 58:57Scott Mann?

  Sure, I, I think that's an important point and I appreciate you bringing it up because you hear a lot. After what happened in the collapse of what was the point? What was it all for? I can't tell you how many Gold Star families contacted me on August 15th. Just through tears asking, Scott, what, what did he die for? You know, buddies that called me and you may have had the same thing like. Dude, what was all this for? Like, what was the point? And it was, and it was, you know, and I, I have to admit, I ask myself those questions as well. And I still see a lot of that, you know, in LinkedIn and, and I get it.

• 59:36Scott Mann?

  But I think you, you have to step back from that and really, I don't think it was in vain at all. I don't think the 20 years of sacrifice in that, in, in that country was in vain. And here's why, I'll, I'll hit it on a couple of levels. First of all, the primary mission was to dismantle Al Qaeda and prevent them from launching another strategic attack on the West or the United States. And I feel like our forces did that. You know, the Al Qaeda had a few other attempts, but for the most part, for 20 years, the West enjoyed relative peace and lack of Al Qaeda influence at the scale at which they were capable of striking when nine 11 hit.

• 1:00:20Scott Mann?

  And I think you have to attribute that to your brothers and my brothers and everybody, conventional forces that served there to keep that organization off balance at bay. And frankly, the Afghan commandos and special ops, they picked up the mantle, starting in 2014, when OEF officially ended Operation Enduring Freedom, and it became an Afghan-led endeavor. And again, you never hear that, but they, they took the lead. So Al Qaeda was kept really off balance and unable to strike at a strategic level for 20 years. But also, you had, I think the number is close to eight million boys and girls that attended school.

• 1:01:04Scott Mann?

  You had 20 years of relative stability in that country. Time for informal civil society to get its feet under it again, for farming to reestablish itself. And I saw this through the Village Stability Program, through local agriculture, dispute resolution mechanisms for that to start to, you know, to, to find its way again. You started to see elements of governance and economic development in that country. Now granted, the graft and corruption, and I think frankly, Western biases that we brought in, the industrial war complex, it overshadowed a lot of that. But I don't think you can ignore the fact that a lot of these resilient systems did start to emanate out.

• 1:01:46Scott Mann?

  It looks as if they're gone now, as if the Taliban have taken it over. I think the Taliban have a very fragile grasp on power.

• 1:01:55Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:01:56Scott Mann?

  I do.

• 1:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think that?

• 1:01:58Scott Mann?

  Well, first of all, they're not good at governing. They suck at governing. The draconian measures that they're putting in place are as bad or worse than what they did before nine eleven. But here's the difference. You didn't have eight million young men and women that had attended school back then. You didn't have the millions of Afghans who had endured some level of relative stability, opportunity, particularly in the urban areas that you have now. You didn't, you didn't have Uzbek's, Hazaras, and Tajiks who had finally enjoyed periods of non persecution by Pashtuns. So there were a whole lot of social factors

• 1:02:41Scott Mann?

  that were enabled to find some level of resilience in that 20 year period. And I tell soldiers, Marines, SEALs, Navy corpsmen, listen, you held space for these local civil society systems at formal and informal levels to try to get their feet on the ground. And I don't think we've seen the end of it. I don't think the Taliban have a good hold on power. I tell you that because I still have a lot of good contacts in the country with commandos and we talk to them all the time with our volunteer groups. There is an Afghan American, need to introduce you to this guy named Legend, former Army Intel NCO, who went back into

• 1:03:25Scott Mann?

  Afghanistan. He was featured on Fox News early, went back in there, helped his family get out from under the Taliban. He just went back in again and just came out, but has been working with the, with the, with the resistance.

• 1:03:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:03:37Scott Mann?

  I did a podcast interview with him, and I have to tell you, what he was telling me is, yes, the Taliban have a, I mean, they've got a death grip on things, but the resistance is really starting to rise in that country.

• 1:03:48Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 1:03:49Scott Mann?

  In the Panjshir Valley, in Bamiyan, even in the south, you're starting to see the resistance. A lot of them are commandos, special forces. Their ability to resist is vastly better than what it was. Now granted, they've been, you know, they're, they're beat down, the Afghan so far, they feel abandoned. And I think that we're going to have to give them some support. But I will tell you, here's, here's how I see it. I would not count the Afghan people out. I don't think we've heard the end of this. I think that what we did in that country for 20 years and held that space is going to be manifested in what happens now and going forward with how these Afghans, this generation of Afghans decide their future.

• 1:04:32Scott Mann?

  And a lot of it's going to be without us, and that's okay. You know, we need to support them, I think, similar to what we're doing with Ukraine. I don't think we have to put boots on the ground, but we need to give them more support than what we're giving now.

• 1:04:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Why, why do you think it happened the way it did? When it's, you know, it seemed like, to me, it seemed like it was a spur of the moment decision with zero planning, which turned into a complete fucking disaster.

• 1:05:04Scott Mann?

  Yeah, I think there's multiple contributing factors. I'll tell you the ones that I think are so relevant to me is, one, is our, we have become so factioned in this country and so divided in how we deal with problems, like, you know, the, the polarization between left and right, for example, has gotten so pervasive that the, the leaders that we now have in politics, diplomacy, and even military, I think it's careerist. You see leaders that are trying to, you know, take care of themselves or trying to take care of their small group versus the greater good. And I think if you look at how things went down under the Trump

• 1:05:47Scott Mann?

  administration, under Biden administration, like, it was, it was more about one party versus the other than looking at the problem itself. You contrast that to, and I know we're going to talk about this in a bit, but like in pineapple, you know, I went back through the Signal chatroom where we had 150 volunteers in this Signal chatroom for like days and days and days on end. Biden was mentioned one time, Trump, never.

• 1:06:13Scott Mann?

  And all those tens of thousands of chats. Wow, that's a, that's unheard of. Right. But it's our veterans showing us what leadership looks like when it's hard. Yeah. And what we should be doing. And I just think that we've moved away from our ability to look at the, at the, at the greater good. So that's one problem. The other one is, I think our politicians, our senior military leaders and our diplomats are not listening to the guys on the ground. We're just not listening to them. To, to, to withdraw the way that we did to close Bagram Airfield, to not have any special forces teams on the ground in the last 90 days leading up to the pullout, to at least get them cacheted and ready to fight.

• 1:06:52Scott Mann?

  You know, um, to, to not consult with the special operations community on how to do the NEO before you do it. Like, none of that makes any sense. You know, we've stopped listening to the operators that we put on the ground. The final thing I'll say, as to a why that we've got to get to through, I think, hearings and accountability. We have a systemic problem in this country of abandoning our partners that goes all the way back to Vietnam. The Montagnards, if you talk to a 5th Group Green Beret today, who fought in Vietnam, who worked with the Montagnards in the Central Highlands, they'll just start crying. Because of the moral injury that they still carry 50 years later for abandoning their partners and being forced to do that.

• 1:07:36Scott Mann?

  Um, the Kurds in Syria, uh, the Iraqi police and army, and most recently the Afghans. Like, we have a multi-generational reputation for abandoning our friends when it gets hard. Damn, you're right. And if we don't get that fixed, I mean, what country in the world is going to want to partner with us? You know, and my thing is like, okay, Russia, China, North Korea, near peer, I know we got to focus on that. And people are saying, we need to get out of Afghanistan so we can focus on the near peer threat. But, but do we really think that we're going to take those countries on unilaterally? You know, it's gonna be by with and through. It's gonna be with surrogates, with partners like

• 1:08:16Scott Mann?

  the Ukrainians. But right now, you know, we're not really in Ukraine. We're, we're doing it from the edges. And I honestly believe that if we don't start restoring the social capital that we've damaged from these abandonments, when it really comes down to time for needing a partner, they're not gonna be there. You know, if you do this with your friends, if you and I had a reputation of just bailing on our friends every time they were in trouble.

• 1:08:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Scott Mann?

  How would that work out for you?

• 1:08:47Shawn Ryan?

  Not, not good.

• 1:08:49Scott Mann?

  Nation states are no different. But yet somehow we think that it's, it's excusable.

• 1:08:54Shawn Ryan?

  Why, why do you think we continue to do that? I mean, when we left, when World War II was over, we still have bases in Germany and Holland and Belgium and

• 1:09:03Scott Mann?

  Right.

• 1:09:04Shawn Ryan?

  Spain and Japan.

• 1:09:06Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Shawn Ryan?

  All over the place.

• 1:09:07Scott Mann?

  Right.

• 1:09:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and why didn't we leave? I just don't understand why we, why we didn't leave at least some infrastructure there in case we need to go back. I mean, it's just,

• 1:09:23Scott Mann?

  Yep.

• 1:09:24Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, to me, that's common sense.

• 1:09:25Scott Mann?

  We even have, it's a great question, and I think it's a question that needs to be answered formally. Like, we need to answer this through, there has been one public hearing with Congress about Afghanistan since all this happened, one. Everyone, everyone has been behind closed doors. Like, there need to be, that question needs to be asked publicly, and there needs to be some accountability on it because, Sean, we have the capability in the special operations community of this thing called foreign internal defense, or FID. And it's a capacity building approach, where you go into at-risk, under-governed countries, and you build partner capacity. Right? Now, you don't need 100,000 dudes to do it like we did in Afghanistan and Iraq. A small residual force like SF.

• 1:10:09Scott Mann?

  Or the marine special ops who are trained expeditionary diplomats and let them go in there over the long haul. We've been in Colombia for 50 plus years and no one knows that, but you've had seventh group guys down there, 365 24 seven and SEALs for 50 years, building the Colombian special ops capability, you know, and even in the 90s, when I started working there, Colombians wouldn't leave the base, you know, but now they, they, they fly at night. They were actually advising Afghans in Afghanistan and they flew Afghans over to Colombia to see what they were doing, but it took decades, you know, and we don't think about the long game anymore, you know, and the reality is if we're going to set up antibodies to violent extremism like ISIS, Al Qaeda, or even be a buffer to the, to

• 1:10:54Scott Mann?

  the Russians and the Chinese, local approaches, local resilience is going to be key and building that capacity from the ground up. So back to your question, why didn't we, I mean, you had the general officers like Milley, Miller, saying, hey, a 2,500 person with force, residual force in country to include a CT capability is essential. What I'm disappointed in those generals and others is they did not recommend a FID capability as well. Like, yes, you should have like a hammer, you know, I don't know, half a squadron of, of SEALs or Delta, but you should also have SF guys and other advisors working with the commandos,

• 1:11:38Scott Mann?

  working with the KKA so that you have that, that capacity because they're the ones really doing the, the striking. So I'm thinking 5K. We could have maintained that for, you know, an indefinite period of time in Afghanistan and it would have held. Yeah. But no one brought that up. And the other thing that really bothers me about it is I don't think that our senior leaders in the military, they said it, but then when they said, the answer was no, okay. And I think personally, there should have been some stars on the table. Yeah. Resignations over that because that, any special operator worth their salt, who's senior in this game knows how this ends. Yeah.

• 1:12:25Shawn Ryan?

  Not to change the subject and right after this, we'll get into, we'll get into what you did. But on the topic of China, you know, it did come up. China was quick to,

• 1:12:38Shawn Ryan?

  it seemed to me that China was quick to pick up where we left off.

• 1:12:41Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Shawn Ryan?

  With the lithium. Do you think? I mean, with all the contacts that you still have over there, what does the influence look like? Are they, are the Chinese coming in and building major?

• 1:12:54Scott Mann?

  They sure are. They sure are. So talking to Legend and, and some of the other contacts, there, there's clearly a Chinese presence in the country. The, I've heard that they're all over Bagram. Um, I've heard that they're, you know, that their access and placement to minerals has gone even higher. Um, you know, they're, they are, they are certainly in, in, in, increasing their influence in that country, particularly around natural resources. Same with the Russians. The Russians are also trying to expand their influence. But here's the only thing I would say about that. Afghanistan is one of these countries that, you know, the Taliban may establish friendly relations with certain nation states that, that, that counter our goals like Russia or China.

• 1:13:38Scott Mann?

  But those entities still have to operate in the rural areas. And they're no better at it than we are. They're probably worse. You know, Russia, you know, they had plenty of years in Afghanistan to try their hand at it and they were terrible. They, they, they abused the local populations, killed over a million Afghans, like they were terrible. Um, and you know, you just had an explosion outside the Russian embassy that killed several Russians. You know, so I don't think any of these countries will have an easy go of it. However, I do think that the Taliban are giving favored status to the Iranians, the Russians and the Chinese. And if our reason for getting out of Afghanistan was to get into the near peer threat?

• 1:14:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Scott Mann?

  We left all the near peer opportunities on the Afghan battlefield.

• 1:14:27Shawn Ryan?

  What a disaster.

• 1:14:31Scott Mann?

  How that calculus works is beyond me. I just can't fathom how any politician, bureaucrat, or senior military officer or diplomat looks at that and says, "Well, that's okay. Let's just bail."

• 1:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  It's like there was not even so much of a thought that went into

• 1:14:48Scott Mann?

  I don't think there was.

• 1:14:49Shawn Ryan?

  The execution of the

• 1:14:50Scott Mann?

  In fact, in the book, I talk about this. On August 14th,

• 1:14:56Scott Mann?

  the National Security Council issued a memorandum for evacuation priority. On the 14th of August, one day before the collapse, was when the NSC actually issued a memorandum of evacuation priority. So you tell me.

• 1:15:15Shawn Ryan?

  Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

• 1:15:17Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take another quick break. When we come back, talk about how you got contacted.

• 1:15:29Shawn Ryan?

  I want to give a big thank you out right now to all the Vigilance Elite patrons out there that are watching the show right now. Just want to say thank you, guys. You are our top supporters and you're what makes this show actually happen. If you're not on Vigilance Elite Patreon, I want to tell you a little bit about what's going on in there. So, we do a little bit of everything. There's plenty of behind the scenes content from the actual Sean Ryan Show. On top of that, basically what I do is I take a lot of the questions that I get from you guys or the patrons, and then I turn them into videos. So we get, right now, there's a lot of concern about self-defense, home defense, crimes

• 1:16:13Shawn Ryan?

  on the rise, all throughout the country, actually all throughout the world. And so, we talk about everything from how to prep your home, how to clear your home, how to get familiar with a firearm, both rifle and pistol, for beginners and advanced. We talk about mindset. We talk about defensive driving. We have an end of the month live chat that I'm on at the end of every month where we can talk about whatever topics you guys have. It's actually done on Zoom. You might enjoy it. Check it out. And if Zoom's not your thing, or you don't like live chats, like I said, there's a library of well over 100 videos on where to start with prepping, all the firearm stuff, pretty

• 1:16:55Shawn Ryan?

  much anything you can think of, it's on there. So anyways, go to www.patreon.com/vigilanceelite, or just go on the link in the description, it'll take you right there. And if you don't want to, and you just want to continue to watch the show, that's fine too. I appreciate it either way. Love you all. Let's get back to the show.

• 1:17:25Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Scott, let's get into the actual Afghan withdrawal. When, when did you hear from?

• 1:17:34Scott Mann?

  Nazam?

• 1:17:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:37Scott Mann?

  So Nazam and I, you know, we stayed in touch. I retired in 2013. I met him in 2010. And I, I retired really earlier than I thought I would. I'd been selected for Battalion Command, but it wasn't in Special Forces. And honestly, I just did not like where things were going in Afghanistan. I had seen levels of careerism and the pullout of the village program that I'd helped put in place. We were, we were, we were now abandoning that program as a precursor to what would actually happen in the country. And all of those villagers we had worked with were being hunted, a lot of them, and killed. So I left and I, I pursued another direction in my life outside of Special Ops. And, and I really had no interest in

• 1:18:21Scott Mann?

  Afghanistan again, other than just moving on and, but, and the relationships that I had like Nazam. So we stayed in touch. We would call each other a couple of times a year, but it was really in the late spring, early summer of last year of 2021, that I started to hear from Nazam on a more frequent basis. And, you know, I'd been one of the guys, among several, who was helping him with his special immigration visa, or the SIV. He had left the Commandos, he'd left the ANA. We'd kind of talked him out of, you know, getting out, talked him into getting out because he had seen so much trauma. Seven years of non-stop fighting.

• 1:19:02Shawn Ryan?

  I want to go back for just a second because we had a conversation offline about that. You know, when we go in, whether it's an SF unit, SEAL unit, Rangers, conventional, whoever.

• 1:19:13Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13Shawn Ryan?

  We go in for a period of time.

• 1:19:15Scott Mann?

  Right.

• 1:19:16Shawn Ryan?

  Then we come home and we take a break. Even if that break is training, you're still

• 1:19:22Shawn Ryan?

  in a sovereign country with great amenities. These guys are there for seven years straight.

• 1:19:29Scott Mann?

  They never get a break.

• 1:19:30Shawn Ryan?

  You know, you could take a guy that has a 23 career, 23 year career like yourself. You know, at most, half of that, you know, was over there. For those guys, it's all, it would have been all 23 years, every single day in that environment, fighting.

• 1:19:47Scott Mann?

  Every day, and they just don't get a break. And that's true for our interpreters. It's certainly true for the Afghan special operators and the NMRG, the National Mine Reduction Group, the guys who kept us safe. All those cats, and they're a small fraction of the Afghan military, but they, they carried 98% of the load. Was the estimate with the last couple of years in the war. And, and, you know, we would rip in and rip out, as they call it, relief in place. Right? So you'd, you know, you'd have this hand over this high five between your unit and mine. No such thing for them. So you're running combat operations straight with no break, no leave. And you think about the toll that that takes on one's body, one's mental health. And that's where Nazan was.

• 1:20:31Scott Mann?

  He was, you know, he was at a place where the night terrors were getting so bad. And he would talk to me about him on the phone. And so we, a handful of us talked him into getting out, becoming a contractor. He was guarding infrastructure when all of this happened and trying to get his SIV. And it had been a year and there was no movement on it from the State Department, like so many other applicants. And he was texting me on Signal, which is how we communicated. And we would talk on the phone, some on Signal, and he was saying, something's really wrong. You know, by this time, the Biden administration was in charge. They were pretty much executing President Trump's Doha agreement.

• 1:21:11Scott Mann?

  And that excluded the Afghan government completely, that deal. So the Afghan government wasn't even in it. So what do you think they're doing? What was that deal? So the deal basically was a set of terms between the United States and the Taliban. Okay. Right, so this assumption that the Taliban are going to take over. But there were conditions that had to be met, right? And if they didn't meet those conditions, then we'd go back in or whatever. But President Biden's administration pretty much took that same deal and just went full bore. And, and, but the Afghan government was not included in the deal. So, you know, they're doing all of the self-preservation things that you would think that an already corrupt government was doing.

• 1:21:52Scott Mann?

  You know, they were pocketing the money, sending it to Dubai, sending their families out. And people like Nazam, you know, are carrying the load. Like, they're the ones that got it on their shoulders. And as their leaders are pulling money out and scamming and getting ready to make their play, including President Ghani.

• 1:22:11Scott Mann?

  The Afghan special operators, who have no pathway, other than what we're talking about, were carrying the load. So Nazam was texting me and he was basically saying, sir,

• 1:22:24Scott Mann?

  province after province is falling. I can go back and look at my Signal thread. And it was like one province after another. And what the Taliban were doing, Sean, it was brilliant. I mean, it was the ultimate psy-op. Is they knew that if they could go into the urban district centers and capture it for 24 hours, it would make CNN and Fox and it would look like the whole district was captured. They could send targeted text threads to certain individuals in the Afghan army, the police, pictures of their kids, and they'd drop their weapons and they're done. And that's what they were doing, these targeted campaigns leading up to the collapse. They were already psyopping the whole country. Nazam was getting text threads from the Taliban saying, we know exactly where you are.

• 1:23:07Scott Mann?

  We know who you are. We know you went to the Q course and we're coming for you. Holy shit.

• 1:23:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's fucking scary.

• 1:23:14Scott Mann?

  It is. It is. And they were saying, you're not gonna, you know, we're not giving you any sanctuary, pal. We're gonna cut your head off. You know, and, and so, and he told me, he said, he said, sir, I'm not afraid of dying. He goes, I just don't want to die alone. And everybody's gone. You know, and, and for him, it became just, he was isolated. He was, ended up hiding out in his uncle's house, like Anne Frank in Kabul. His uncle's getting ready to toss him because the Taliban appearing through the window, you know, trying to find out if he's in there. He's putting the uncle's family at risk. You know, this was after the country started to collapse. But it was just a slow lead up, starting in June, of province after province. And meanwhile, you've got people

• 1:23:57Scott Mann?

  in our government, Blinken, Biden, um, Milley, saying, no, it's, it's gonna halt. And Nazan is, and the others inside the country are saying, this thing flips in a month.

• 1:24:11Scott Mann?

  And so the special ops community, both active duty, I can't say enough about those guys. I can't. Like our brothers that were on active duty, NCOs and junior officers, that they really risked their careers to keep people alive, a lot of them. But they started mobilizing and the veterans started mobilizing. Like I started getting calls in June from Mark Newt, you know, from the horse soldiers and others saying, hey, man, are you hearing what I'm hearing? Cause something's wrong. Like, we gotta start moving. And so there was already some movement underway in the SOF community, because we saw it coming. We saw it coming.

• 1:24:52Shawn Ryan?

  What was that, what was that initial phone call, like with?

• 1:24:57Scott Mann?

  With, with Nazan?

• 1:24:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Scott Mann?

  I think for me, the, the phone call that really got me was that, was after the, after the collapse, you know, and I'm, and I don't really watch 24 hour news, but I was watching it on the, because my buddy called me Steve, who I served with in 7th Group, and he was like, turn the news on, man. So I turn it on and there's the Taliban, you know, strutting around Kabul in our gear, our kit.

• 1:25:28Scott Mann?

  Our M-Force with optics, driving our vehicles, Afghan vehicles that we had given to them. I mean, it was like, it was the most devastating, just, it was just, it was humiliating. Yeah. To watch that. So that coupled with the call that I knew was coming

• 1:25:49Scott Mann?

  from Nazam, and, and he said, sir, they're, they're looking in my window right now. And he's like, I'm not gonna make it. And

• 1:26:00Scott Mann?

  for me in that moment,

• 1:26:03Scott Mann?

  all I could think about were, you know, the 23 buddies that I'd lost over the years, over 20 years. Over my buddy, you know, Romy Camargo, who was a warrant officer in SF, who's paralyzed from the neck down, he's on a ventilator.

• 1:26:18Scott Mann?

  You know, so many of my friends have taken their lives, and I just thought, fuck, man.

• 1:26:26Scott Mann?

  You know, how, how?

• 1:26:30Scott Mann?

  Why, why does this kid have to die? Like, it's, it's not right. And, and everything in my life in that war came down to him. And whether he lived or died, that was it. I didn't give a fuck about anything else. I just didn't. It was like, he has to live, you know, he, there's somehow, he's got to make it through this. Because then maybe something good could happen out of all this. Yeah. What did you say to him after he told you that?

• 1:27:01Scott Mann?

  I felt like I just needed to say something that would, you know, kind of get his hopes up. And keep him, you know, in the game. Cause that was my biggest fear was that he was gonna, cause you could tell, man, he was starting to feel it. Yeah. I mean, who wouldn't? You know, like, you, you, you're completely abandoned. Like, everybody that you thought was your family is gone. And I said to him something to the effect of, look, you're not gonna die alone, you're not gonna die at all. Um, we're, we're gonna get you out, man. You're gonna get across that city. You're gonna get through the crowd, you're gonna get past the Taliban, you're gonna get past the Marines. You know, we're gonna get you on a plane, you're gonna come to the States. Um, you're gonna, you're gonna live next to me, we're gonna be neighbors. Holy shit, you said that.

• 1:27:46Scott Mann?

  I did. Because I just, I needed to say something that would just give him some kind of hope. But then, and, and he kind of laughed, he has this hyena-like laugh, this little high pitched laugh, and he, and he's like, okay, sir.

• 1:28:00Scott Mann?

  And we hung up the phone.

• 1:28:05Scott Mann?

  And I just looked at my wife.

• 1:28:09Scott Mann?

  And I was like, what did I just do?

• 1:28:13Scott Mann?

  I just, I just made him a promise that I don't, I don't know if I can keep it.

• 1:28:17Scott Mann?

  And my wife said, you'll keep it.

• 1:28:21Shawn Ryan?

  She backed you.

• 1:28:22Scott Mann?

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 1:28:24Scott Mann?

  And, you know, we had tried so hard to put the war behind us with our play and everything else that we had done. I didn't want to get involved in this thing. I just, I really didn't. But at that point, I knew I was, I was in, and I was in pretty deep. And, and, and so I just started calling buddies that knew Nizam, that had fought with Nizam, that knew him the way I knew him. Some of them were on active duty, some of them were retired.

• 1:28:50Scott Mann?

  Not that many, like five, you know? And we decided to do it. We decided, let's, let's try to get him out, you know, and that, there's no way we could get over there. That wasn't gonna happen. Plus, we'd just get in the way.

• 1:29:05Scott Mann?

  So we decided to, to, to just do it remote, you know? Could we leverage our networks? Could we leverage our relationships inside Kabul International Airport, you know? Could we, could we use the Jamiyat Islamic Network to get him a cab to move in through the city? Like, so we just started putting a plan together.

• 1:29:21Shawn Ryan?

  Where, where did you start?

• 1:29:23Scott Mann?

  I started by, um.

• 1:29:25Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, that's a, that's a huge, that's a lot of logistics.

• 1:29:30Scott Mann?

  Yeah, and I.

• 1:29:31Shawn Ryan?

  Play around the world.

• 1:29:32Scott Mann?

  It was overwhelming in the sense of like, you know, because here's the thing, it's like, you, you know, in, um, my role in special forces over the years, like, I did have the opportunity to, you know, obviously, work alongside commandos and, and, and, and tactical missions. But a lot of what I did in the latter years of my life in SF, in Afghanistan, was to command and control remote operations of special forces and SEALs and other groups. And I was pretty good at it. Like, that was what I did. I ran those operation centers. I planned, executed, controlled missions. And I lost a lot of friends doing that shit. That were on, that, that died doing what I asked them to do, or what they counted on me to help them do, you know? And, and, you know?

• 1:30:15Scott Mann?

  You don't get over that, right? You know, you never, you never forget that. And, and I didn't care if I ever did that again, because there's just something, because you're so, you're away from it, but yet you're hearing their voices over the, and it's the stuff that you're supposed, that medevac's supposed to be there, that aircraft's supposed to be there. Those enemy forces weren't supposed to be there, you know, and

• 1:30:39Scott Mann?

  it was right back at that again, except this time, no resources, no authority, no ISR, no access and placement, none of the things that you need to command and control a good operation. Yeah. You had none of it. You know, and this kid is putting everything in us. That, that almost got me. So I, like you said, I didn't know, really know where to start. I just know, I just needed to start. So I went to my office and I drew a course of action sketch on the board. You know, I started with a safe house, the map I had, just a rough map I kind of had of the area, you know, I, I indicated Taliban checkpoints along, trying to just think of what were the things, just at like a templated level that he was going to face from his safe house all the way to

• 1:31:24Scott Mann?

  the United States. And, and I, once I did that though, I actually felt better. Once I got it up on the board, I'm like, oh my God, like this is impossible, but at least I see what it is. And then I took a picture of it, sent it to the other guys and they're like, and we could start talking about something that was tangible at that point, even though it was extremely difficult. And we just started breaking it up into chunks. Like, okay, like, how are we going to move him across the city? And I was, and I was thinking, well, I've got a good set of relationships in Kabul, you know, the Jamiyat Islamic Network, the northern, old northern alliance network of Mujahideen fighters. Like, it's still strong. And, and I know people that are connected to that. We could get him a cab that'll move him with a Posh Dune driver that knows the area that has done the routes. And we did.

• 1:32:09Scott Mann?

  And then it just, we just took it chunk by chunk, you know, we were like, well, he can move through the crowd. He's a frigging commando, like he'll get, and he's little, you know, but what about how are we going to get him past the guards? You know, what, who do we need to talk to there? What are we going to do that he doesn't have a visa? Like, how are we going to get him manifested? And people just took different chunks of it. And you know, we do what we do. Was everybody? Special operations that was involved? No Congressman Mike Walz, who is special forces and is a friend of mine, we fought together in Afghanistan, I called him and he, he actually loaned us his, one of his staffers,

• 1:32:50Scott Mann?

  her name is Liv in the book, we changed her name, but she could, you know, I knew we were going to need to kind of breach some doors on the political side and come in with some juice. Wow. And Liv agreed at the time, now remember, all, a lot of Congress congressional officials were getting involved, they were getting calls from constituents, so there were all these little command centers, I mean, even in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the war room was silent, but the generals and admirals had little command centers running with their aides operating, it's the craziest thing, everybody was doing this on the down low, you know, trying to help their Afghan get out, and it was admirable, but it was chaotic. Yeah.

• 1:33:35Scott Mann?

  So we got access to, to Liv, one other reporter who was a Washington insider, who had different relationships, but also knew Nizam, named James, and that was our team, and then three SF dudes, Mullah Mike, who was a battalion commander in special forces, active duty, that had fought with Nizam, another guy, I called Charles, he was in, he was in an interagency task force up in DC, so he had good access and placement, and me, and that was our team starting out. Wow. Yeah. Wow. And it was super informal, like, we were all in different places, you know, we had, and it wasn't a task force or anything like that, it was just, it was just a group of guys trying to help a friend.

• 1:34:20Scott Mann?

  How fast was this all developing? Within minutes, I mean, it was going, it was, this was around the 15th, he got out on the 19th, so, you know, Kabul fell on the 15th and it fell hard. Mm-hmm. And then you had the rush to the airport, it became readily apparent to everybody in Kabul, that if you were getting, not just in Kabul, Afghanistan, if you were getting out, it was at Kabul International Airport, that was your only hope. Yeah. So you can imagine how the crowds, you know, they swelled really fast. Yeah. And so we had to, in fact, one of the things, Mullah Mike, who had been Nizam's kind of commander at one of the firebases. Mike and I had worked together for years and, and we were putting together this plan for Nazam

• 1:35:04Scott Mann?

  and Mike called me and he said, Scott, he's got to go now.

• 1:35:10Scott Mann?

  And I was like, what dude, we don't even have a plan yet. Like he's going to burn his safe house. It's broad daylight. And he said, Mike said, I've got a feeling, man. I'm watching the news. I'm watching how things are falling. The Taliban are actually going to be security partners. Yeah. With the Neo forces. Like if we don't get him in on the inside of that Taliban ring, they're going to check his credentials and he's dead. He's got to go now. I was like, fuck. Cause you know, we didn't have a full plan. We didn't have a way for him to get in. All we had really was a way to get him to the edges of the airfield.

• 1:35:46Scott Mann?

  And then we were going to have to figure out the rest as we went. And that was when it was like.

• 1:35:51Scott Mann?

  Shit. And so that's what we did. And we told him, brother, you're going to have to go. You're going to have to go now. And, and.

• 1:36:03Scott Mann?

  And he said, okay, sir.

• 1:36:09Scott Mann?

  And I don't know, man. I didn't know what was going to happen.

• 1:36:14Scott Mann?

  And I think that's probably the hardest thing about this whole thing is that so many of us, we had, we heard those words a lot and they didn't get out. You know, they died in the ISIS blast or they were executed or they're still there.

• 1:36:29Scott Mann?

  You know, it's one thing when you,

• 1:36:33Scott Mann?

  you have memories of brothers or things that happened and it was, it was bad. You know, like there was, but when they say, yes, sir.

• 1:36:43Scott Mann?

  Got it. Moving. And that's the last time you hear from them. And you never get over that. And, and that's what this was really, that's what this really came down to. Like, yeah, we got Nazam out and others, but there were thousands that were counting on us. Yeah. You know, and we just couldn't do it. It was just too big. You know, it's like my buddy Duke says, it was an Uncle Sam sized problem that we were trying to solve with our cell phones and checking accounts.

• 1:37:10Scott Mann?

  That's a hell of a thing to put on guys that fought for 20 years.

• 1:37:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's heavy. That is heavy.

• 1:37:15Scott Mann?

  Yeah. But, um, you know, we got in, we got into the airfield and, um, he is such a resilient guy.

• 1:37:25Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's, before we go into the airfield, let's talk about his, and what was, I mean, let's talk about his journey. How long did it take? What, what was, what did he do?

• 1:37:36Scott Mann?

  So, um, you know, the thing is about, here's another thing that was interesting is, we told him, take pictures of all your certificates, and, and, and your tabs, you know, he went to the Q corps, so he has like an SF tab,

• 1:37:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:50Scott Mann?

  and the certificate of completion. And we said, take pictures of all that, send it to us, we're gonna upload it on the cloud, wipe your phone and burn all that stuff.

• 1:38:04Scott Mann?

  So, he starts a fire out in the backyard, that's actually how my book starts, is him burning all his stuff. When he got to the SF tab and the certificate,

• 1:38:16Scott Mann?

  he couldn't burn it. So he stuffed it down in his gym bag. And the crazy thing is, I interviewed dozens of commandos, KKA, Afghan Special Forces. Not one of them burned their stuff when we told them to. They all carried it.

• 1:38:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:38:35Scott Mann?

  And, so that's, you know, there was, there was a lot of preparation that went in, but he, but he had to move pretty quick when we, when we decided to go. Um, it took him, it didn't take him that long to get to the, I mean, the traffic was terrible. But I think all in all, a couple hours, transit in the cab, to get to the airfield itself, and then-

• 1:38:54Shawn Ryan?

  With his, with family?

• 1:38:56Scott Mann?

  Well, so, turns out, he had family, we didn't know.

• 1:39:04Scott Mann?

  Yeah, but yes, with family and that became another adventure was and this happened a lot, actually, particularly in the special operations community, the even with as good as our trust was, they did not divulge to us that they had families or who their family members were. And I understand, you know, because they were highly targeted and the Taliban proved that they knew how to do that. So we would learn, the families would actually have discussions that the operator would make it out and then pull them through.

• 1:39:41Scott Mann?

  And that for Bashir, one of the guys in our book, he was an operator and his wife was nine months pregnant and went into labor in the crowd and ended up having to move them back to the safe house. He got through and she had the baby and then one of our shepherds moved her and the newborn and others overland to a third country and they're still there. He's still, he's a security guard at a grocery store in Texas and he still hasn't seen his baby girl. The family's still in that third country.

• 1:40:14Shawn Ryan?

  Are they, is he gonna see him again?

• 1:40:16Scott Mann?

  If I have anything to do with it, he will.

• 1:40:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that's good.

• 1:40:18Scott Mann?

  If pineapple has anything to do with it, he will. You know, we're still working it, but it's hard. I mean, there's so much bureaucracy and those are the, those are the true stories of what our brothers and sisters have gone through and are going through. You know, that's the, it's just, it's at a humanity level, it's just so heartbreaking.

• 1:40:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:38Scott Mann?

  You know, it's just one after the other. But, uh, you know, he's, he's got a good attitude. And we're talking about Bashir now in Texas. He's got a great attitude. But Nazan, we were actually able to get his family to him before he evacuated inside Kabul.

• 1:40:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's incredible. How many, how many of these guys did you guys, did Operation Pineapple help?

• 1:41:00Scott Mann?

  So.

• 1:41:03Scott Mann?

  It's always hard to put numbers on that, but we, we think somewhere between 750 and a thousand.

• 1:41:08Shawn Ryan?

  That many?

• 1:41:09Scott Mann?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Shawn Ryan?

  That many people?

• 1:41:10Scott Mann?

  I mean, directly. And I think more than that indirectly. And there were groups that did a lot more, that did a lot more than that. In fact, Mick Mulroy worked at the agency as well. And I think now he works at one of the news organizations. He told me in an interview, he said, he had a, like a, kind of a grand view of everything. He said that of the hundred thousand Afghans that made it here, a large chunk of them were, probably shouldn't have, were not vetted.

• 1:41:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Scott Mann?

  But the ones who were, a very large percentage of them were made possible by these volunteer groups. Because we knew who they were, we knew where they were, and they trusted us. And so if you're a Marine.

• 1:41:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing, but it's also pathetic that you guys were able to outdo the US government and, and, and, and helping these people. It's, it's, sorry.

• 1:42:00Scott Mann?

  Oh, it's, no, it's crazy, brother. And the thing was like, so after we got Nazam out, we realized that we were running out of time. You know, there was an imminent departure that had already been announced. We knew ISIS was in the crowd. Like there was all kinds of rumblings of an ISIS suicide bomber attack. And, and so we knew we were on borrowed time to get as many out as we could. And getting Nazam out the way that we did took four days of planning and execution. We hadn't slept. And I was like, there's no way, you know, we now, so when Nazam got out, people heard about it. SEALs like Jay Redmond and others were like, hey, I'm working this family. And so we just opened the aperture on the Signal chat room, called it Task Force Pineapple, because that was the code word that Nazam had to give to get through.

• 1:42:46Scott Mann?

  And that's how Task Force Pineapple was born. But, but it was just a Signal chat room of these various former special operators who had partners that were commandos that they were working or SF. And, and so we would collaborate in the main chat room. We would share information about which gate was open, closed, intel coming in. And then Jay, for example, would go to his Afghan family and say, okay, we're moving you here. And they were tactically trained, so they knew how to move tactically with their family. But we didn't have a mechanism, Sean, to get large numbers in. And that's what I was, I was asking the younger leaders in our group, like, does anybody have any ideas? This one guy named Zach Greenberay, former, former Green Beret turned Syracuse inner city school teacher.

• 1:43:32Scott Mann?

  That we met on LinkedIn, who was helping his SF partners. He goes, I have an idea. But I need somebody on the inside. And I was like, what's your idea? And he goes, well, in my classrooms, you know, I have a lot of inner city kids that are come from other countries and we talk a lot about Harriet Tubman. And Harriet Tubman, she settled in this area after she retired. And I think we could build an Underground Railroad to get these people out. He goes, there's a sewage system that, you know, open sewer right there. And if we had someone on the inside, we could use our shepherds, as we called them, guys like Jay Redman and others who were the volunteers working on their phones.

• 1:44:13Scott Mann?

  They could be the eyes and ears and guide their flocks of commandos and their families to a certain point, and then they could be pulled in. But we didn't have anybody on the inside until Congressman Walz's assistant connected us with Jesse and John from the 82nd Airborne, who had helped rescue a pregnant woman inside the airfield the day prior and said, we have a four foot hole in the fence that's been cut. And if we can do more and you guys can vet them on your side, you let us know. And so Liv offered that. And we were like, okay. So we put Captain John Falta from the 82nd on the phone with Zach.

• 1:44:56Scott Mann?

  They started talking and we decided they would become the conductors on the Underground Railroad. So the way it would work is if you were a commando, you would get instructions from your shepherd who would say, you are to report to this link up site at this point near Abbey Gate at this time, undercover of darkness. Then we would send all of the information on a baseball card, photos of the family, number and party names to John and Jesse in the 82nd. They would have those baseball cards on their phone. At designated time, when the Pineapple Express was open, they would walk out to the link up point with a green chem light on. And then the flock that was in the queue would get instructions to move into the link up mechanism.

• 1:45:39Scott Mann?

  They would drop down into an open sewage canal, move through that to the green chem light, and then they would show the pineapple on their phone, challenge and password, check the baseball card, get pulled through the four foot hole, driven across the airfield onto the aircraft.

• 1:45:55Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking amazing.

• 1:45:57Scott Mann?

  Amazing. And that was the Pineapple Express. And what I have to tell you is, like, I had nothing to do with that shit. That was these junior leaders, these like junior leaders, that's not the right term. Younger guys like Zach and John and Jesse, who they, they just came up with this stuff. And I found that in my old age, one of the things about leadership is knowing when to get out of the way. And, and these guys, they had a plan and it was a beautiful plan. And so that's what we did. We just turned the heat up on that. And for 96 hours, that's how the Pineapple Express rolled. And, uh, and we were able to move a lot of people through that thing. And there were other groups doing similar versions, but that was ours. And the stories that I tell in this

• 1:46:39Scott Mann?

  book are all about the, those people that went into that express, the ones that got out and the ones that didn't.

• 1:46:45Scott Mann?

  That is incredible. It was amazing to see it. Um, you know, one of the people that came through that, um, and we didn't even know at the time, like some of the people that were moving through the express, once it got going, we would have others that would come into the signal room saying, hey, um, one of the people was the Minister for Women's Affairs, Haseena Safi, the most hunted woman in Afghanistan. She couldn't get out through the State Department. She couldn't get out for any other mechanism. So we ended up moving her through that sewage canal with her family. And she got out. You know, the minute, one of the four female ministers in the country moved through this four foot hole in the fence. Damn. How, how long was the sewage canal?

• 1:47:30Scott Mann?

  It ran the, it ran a good chunk of the fence. Like, I mean, it was long. It was hundreds of meters long. Initially, you would go through the crowd and cross it. It was like just, it was an obstacle. It was a linear obstacle, but it was a great reference point. And it was a, the Taliban would not get down in that thing. It was so fetid and nasty. Yeah. Like, you know. Is this on the backside of the airport? Yep. Okay. On the Abbey Gate side.

• 1:47:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:57Scott Mann?

  Yeah. Um, and then, and Abbey Gate proper was really kind of closed. It, this four foot hole was what afforded us the opportunity. And the Marines and the 82nd, they are Charlie Company, they had a great working relationship. And, and so it was this private-public partnership, really, between these NCOs and junior officers on the side of the 82nd and the Marines and NATO troops in that area. And these veteran groups, or these veterans that were retired and some active duty guys that were, had the relationships with their flocks. So we knew who they were. We knew these were commandos. We knew these were KKA. They were highly vetted. And we could present them responsibly to the 82nd versus all these other people holding up their certificates

• 1:48:42Scott Mann?

  and phone calls from the president, you know, all trying to get my guy in. It was chaos for them. So this was an organized plan. But to, to your point, one other thing that I'll point out is the number of institutional leaders that started calling us the volunteers is really egregious. Like, I got a phone call from a special advisor to Kamala Harris asking us to get their favorite Afghan out. And I'm like, you got Delta sitting in a hangar, man, like a hundred meters away.

• 1:49:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Scott Mann?

  Why don't you just authorize them to do what they do? Like, and, and, but instead, like, you're, you're going to a 53-year-old storyteller, like, you know, to get your guy out. I'm like, I'm not exactly a top draft pick for personnel extraction.

• 1:49:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Scott Mann?

  You know, but that was what we had. You had these, a lot of guys and girls that just

• 1:49:33Scott Mann?

  had no intention of getting involved in this, but nobody else was coming.

• 1:49:39Shawn Ryan?

  That just, that just gave me goosebumps.

• 1:49:46Shawn Ryan?

  Top, wow, top level government positions.

• 1:49:50Scott Mann?

  Top West Wing.

• 1:49:52Shawn Ryan?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:49:53Scott Mann?

  Unbelievable. And, and that wasn't the only one. Chief of the Air Force, senior enlisted advisor to the chairman, like, I'm talking even more that I probably can't talk about because of the sensitivity of the people that got out. But we had the government coming to these groups, particularly Pineapple for sure, making requests to get their people out. And I think that's kind of what I have a problem with too with this thing, Sean, is that.

• 1:50:21Scott Mann?

  You had these institutional leaders who did not oppose the decision in any way, and went along with it, and then, under the table, used their personal cellphone to call veterans that they had worked with, or turn a blind eye to their NCOs to allow them to work it. But all you're really doing is you're shifting the moral responsibility onto the backs of veterans. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. And, and these are men and women who've already given plenty. Yeah. You know, and, and they're not gonna, they're not gonna say no. You know, and that's to me, like, how could you do that?

• 1:51:02Scott Mann?

  How could you ask these men and women, this, this noble, fragile class of people, who are truly the moral compass of our nation, how could you put this on them like that? Knowing that they can't hang up the phone. And a year later, you know, like, seventy-three percent of veterans feel hu- betrayed, sixty-seven percent feel humiliated, there's been an eighty-one percent spike in calls to the VA hotline since August. You know, and, and they've, there's friends of mine in Pineapple, like Perry Blackburn, who's lost his job, Duke, lost his job, he had a high-paying job, like, they've cashed in their, their, their savings accounts, their kids' education funds, to pay for safe

• 1:51:45Scott Mann?

  houses, food drops, we had twenty babies born in safe houses, in Operation Recovery, a group that was paying for our manifest to keep them alive through the winter. And all, all the money to do that, none of it came from the government, to keep these thousands of people alive that didn't get out over the winter, it came from donations, it came from private checking accounts, and no one talks about that. But you think about the, the, the level of stress and load that that puts on a Ranger NCO to try to keep his KKA partners alive when they're being hunted. Yeah. He can't hang up the phone, there's no release shift, he doesn't have the resources to do it, so he takes his own personal resources, he's re-traumatized, all the stuff that he

• 1:52:29Scott Mann?

  thought he had put behind him is now back, he's sitting at his breakfast table with his kids, looking at execution videos. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's serious. And I think we're on the edge of a moral injury nightmare in our veteran population if we don't address this at the public level.

• 1:52:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, definitely. It's, it's

• 1:52:52Shawn Ryan?

  unbelievable, the level of competence that is running this country right now.

• 1:52:57Scott Mann?

  It's staggering. But at the same time, you know, one of the things that I take hard in is that man, was it the best in America that stepped up?

• 1:53:05Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Scott Mann?

  You know, was it just absolute, and not all veterans, there were civilians in there, active duty people, but just to me, just the best in our country who saw that institutional leadership failed, nobody else is coming, I'll do it, you know, and, and, you know, there wasn't a day that went by that I didn't feel just completely out over my skis, you know, like I have no idea what I'm doing right now. I have no clue how we're gonna do this, you know, and

• 1:53:33Scott Mann?

  but yet

• 1:53:35Scott Mann?

  looking at the, the men and women that stepped forward is one of the proudest moments of my life.

• 1:53:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. How are they, how are they doing now?

• 1:53:43Scott Mann?

  They're hurting.

• 1:53:43Shawn Ryan?

  The, the ones that lost their jobs and

• 1:53:45Scott Mann?

  They're hurting bad, you know, they're really hurting bad. Um, we, we stay in touch, we formed a federation, um, because all of the volunteer groups were running out of steam. You know, they've been doing this for a year now. And these were people that had jobs, they had lives, they had, you know, most of them are retired. You know, they've left that world behind them and now they're back in it and the government is not picking up, you know? In many cases, we just want to responsibly hand off. There are manifests of commandos, KKA, special forces that are still in the game that could be mobilized into the resistance, that their families could at least be exfiltrated, you know, we just want to hand them off responsibly.

• 1:54:29Scott Mann?

  Nobody's picking it up, you know, and, and, and it's like no veteran is gonna let that go. We're taught not to do that. I interviewed, we interviewed, pineapple did, a guy named George recently from Fayetteville, North Carolina, who's a former Green Beret, and he's pulling people out. The only difference is George is 82 years old. He's a fifth group NCO from, uh, special forces in Vietnam, and he's pulling out mountain yards. He's pulled out thousands through his nonprofit and helps them resettle on a farm in the outskirts of, of Fort Bragg, and he's been doing this for 50 some years.

• 1:55:03Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:55:05Scott Mann?

  And he'll never stop. And that's, that's what is going on with these veterans. Like, they're never gonna stop. But they're approaching this, this culminating point where they're out of resources. Their mental health is in the toilet. Um, they are, they are experiencing suicidal ideations in many cases. I mean, let's just look at the suicide thing for a second. We had, we had 7,000 combat deaths post nine 11. You have 30,177 suicides with, uh, active duty and post nine 11 veterans. Most of those in the last few years, the worst. If 73% of our population feels betrayed and 63% feels humiliated, what's that gonna look like in two years?

• 1:55:50Shawn Ryan?

  It's not gonna look good. I mean, I was almost one of them.

• 1:55:57Scott Mann?

  Me too.

• 1:55:58Shawn Ryan?

  I get a phone call probably on average, once a week from somebody that I know who's thinking about pulling the trigger.

• 1:56:06Scott Mann?

  Same, same. And that's before all this.

• 1:56:09Shawn Ryan?

  It's been like that for years.

• 1:56:11Scott Mann?

  Yeah. Now you add this to the mix.

• 1:56:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:13Scott Mann?

  Where a large chunk of the veteran population, even the Vietnam population, is severely disturbed by this.

• 1:56:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Scott Mann?

  And our government, it's called, you know, I could, we call it a moral injury. Where what you believe in is violated by the people you serve. Right? You have to violate your own moral code. And I think it's one of the worst injuries a veteran can encounter. Because it's an injury on the soul. Right? And it's what those fifth group NCOs cry about. Leaving their Montin yards in their eighties, they weep. Right? We're doing that to this precious generation of veterans right now. Who stood with us for 20 years and volunteered and went again and again and again. And this moral injury, you know, what we know is that for a moral injury to actually be righted. You can actually address it, you can create moral recovery.

• 1:57:06Scott Mann?

  But it takes leadership, institutional leaders have to step up. And they have to get involved in this, they have to acknowledge what happened. They have to look for fixes, solutions to the systemic problem. So that the, the people that endured the injury see that it won't happen again. To their kids and to the people that follow. But let me ask you, where are the generals? Where are the admirals, right now, both past and present? Stepping up and leading the charge on this? What you see are retired oh fours, oh fives, E sevens. Addressing it in the public space? You see no flag officers in the public space addressing this problem.

• 1:57:47Scott Mann?

  That's a problem. Yep. And the dissonance between the leaders and the lead. The men and women who carry the load for 20 years on their shoulders. They're looking at their senior leaders right now. And the dissonance, the distance between them is striking. And I say this in my book, like, I think most of our senior leaders, they don't even see it. There was one senior leader heavily involved in the withdrawal, who was a special operator. At the flag officer level, when I explained to him what our community was going through, he said to me. I thought they would have been over this by now.

• 1:58:25Scott Mann?

  And I just said to him, sir, they'll never be over this. And they need you right now. And they're just, it's just, they're absent, you know, they're, they're just, they're just not present in the public space. There's a lot of flag officers doing things in private to help commandos. That's not what we need them for right now. You know, we need this flag, we need their voice. Exactly. Where is it? I don't see it. And I think most of the people I interviewed in this book, dozens are asking the same question. One iconic NCO, fifth group NCO named Donnie in the book, not his real name, saved hundreds in the final moments before the bomb went off.

• 1:59:07Scott Mann?

  Like his actions to get people out were just in keeping with the kind of solid team sergeant NCO he's always been. He told me, like, months later, we were talking, I interviewed him, and he had just lost a special operator that he was trying to keep alive had been executed. And he was just a wreck. How'd they execute him? They shot him. They shot him in front of his family. And I believe it was... Uh, I don't know the status of the family right now. A lot of times, you know, that family's screwed because like they have no patriarch at that point. If they're even still alive. Yeah. And in some cases, the entire family's wiped out, but the, the magnitude of loss on the

• 1:59:51Scott Mann?

  special operations community over the past winter for retribution is terrible. You know, again, no one's talking about it. But Donnie said to me, he goes, if I had known back then, what I know now of how we were going to treat our partners, I would never have walked down to the recruiter on nine 12 2001 and joined special forces. And he said, my kid wants to join the army and if I have anything to do with it, he will never see the NCO recruiting station.

• 2:00:20Scott Mann?

  And this is a guy who who literally was an SF his entire life. And then even as a contractor, he loved it. You know, this is what's happened. And I just, again, I don't want to sound all morbid, but like, this is our moral compass. These are, this, our special operators, our combat veterans, these are the men and women that, they are our conscience. You know, they represent everything that's good in the country, and we have literally run them into the ground.

• 2:00:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:48Scott Mann?

  And there's been no recognition of their, you know, Congress has not recognized what these volunteer groups have done. The president didn't talk about it in either of his talks since this has happened, made no mention of it, you know? And I don't know how we can do that. I don't know how we can ask that of these amazing men and women who stepped up when nobody else did, and then watch them go through the level of moral injury and mental anguish that they're going through right now. It's, it's unforgivable, and I'm, I'm never gonna stop talking about it, because it's wrong.

• 2:01:20Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, the government has obviously failed. Is there anything, a lot of people are gonna watch this. Is there anything that they can do?

• 2:01:30Scott Mann?

  Yeah, I, well, look, that's a great question. I, there's a couple, let's take it, you know, start local, because that's where I like to start on things as an SF guy, start local. Uh, one is, check in on the, the veterans that you know. Check in on the Gold Star families and the military families that you know. And, and just ask them how they're doing. Let them know, and not just thanking them for their service, let them know that what they did mattered. Let them know that you appreciate everything that they did, and if they ever need to talk, you're here. Like, I really think we need to check in. For veterans and the intelligence community, we have to check in on each other. More, more so than ever, because these numbers really worry me.

• 2:02:12Scott Mann?

  Seventy-three percent betrayed, sixty-seven percent humiliated, eighty-one percent spike on the VA hotline, that's unprecedented. So we gotta check in on each other. Um, fifty-six percent of veterans, of Afghan war veterans say that, no, I'm sorry, two-thirds say that resettlement of Afghans would help their mental health. So, how can we get involved in helping our veteran population see their partners?

• 2:02:36Scott Mann?

  Find safe passage and get resettled. A lot of this moral injury comes from that. The State Department could do this tomorrow. They have the authorization to do it now. So I believe pressure in this midterm election on our elected officials, both at the administration and congressional level. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is an American issue. But if we really want to fight for what our veterans did, particularly these volunteer groups in the war, is put pressure on our elected officials to help with safe passage for the most at-risk Afghans. Really double down on resettlement here and take a hard look at the overwhelmed resettlement agencies. Give some resources to that.

• 2:03:21Scott Mann?

  Open public hearings to go through what happened so that we can address this systemic problem of abandonment and fix it once and for all. I think there needs to be accountability to senior military officers, diplomats, and politicians that were involved in this. And then finally, I know I've got several, is I think it's time to start supporting the Afghan resistance. We need to support them at least to the level we're supporting Ukraine. They are fighting. They are pushing back. And they are our best antibody to an al-Qaeda that has completely reconstituted and has its sights set on us again.

• 2:03:58Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:59Scott Mann?

  Those are my thoughts. Very tangible. I mean, those are things that people could do at both. And if you know volunteer groups, help them. You know, whether volunteering your time. You know, Moral Compass Federation is a great one to get behind.

• 2:04:14Shawn Ryan?

  We'd spoken downstairs about how these guys that you saved, you and your team have saved. How are they doing here in the US now? How are... I mean, it's a culture shock coming from a country like that to a Western country. How are they integrating not just with the war trauma, but also just culture, regular culture?

• 2:04:37Scott Mann?

  It's really difficult. I mean, Hosina Safi, the Minister of Women's Affairs, has been living in a hotel in the United Kingdom for a year with her family. A year. She goes down to the job line every day to try to find work.

• 2:04:49Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:04:50Scott Mann?

  In the United States...

• 2:04:54Scott Mann?

  Most of the people that we helped get over are struggling. Bashir, who was separated from his family and that baby girl was born, you know, after he got out, he's a security guard at a Tom Thumb grocery store in Texas while his family's stuck in a third country right now and he's never seen his baby girl. A lot of our, but the cool thing too, man, I'm so proud of is like a lot of our shepherds in pineapple, like remember I was telling you about Matt Coburn, the retired Colonel that had worked with Afghan army since they were privates all the way until he was the Colonel they called at the end. He brought most of the Afghans, he got out to Pennsylvania where he lives, they live

• 2:05:38Scott Mann?

  all around him, Nizam lives near me, you know, Nizam's got his driver's license, you know, we, you know, we helped him get his GED. But Matt, he drives, he drove his Afghan partners to their job interviews, he would drive them to work every morning, he would have them over for dinner every night, and then most recently, most of them have gotten jobs and got their own car, they share a car between them, he helped them get a loan for a car. I mean, it's...

• 2:06:06Shawn Ryan?

  So they're coming around.

• 2:06:09Scott Mann?

  They're coming around, it's gonna take years.

• 2:06:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:11Scott Mann?

  You know, and, and the veterans, what I would leave you with on that is they're overwhelmed. They cannot, they cannot shoulder this load anymore. Like, they will continue to do it, but they're dropping like flies.

• 2:06:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:24Scott Mann?

  And whether it's resettlement, working that aspect of it here in the US, or the safe passage where these at-risk commandos, NMRG are surrounded and being hunted, they need the support of the American population behind them to put pressure on politicians to lead like our veterans have led and do the right thing. That's what we need.

• 2:06:47Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break. Thank you for listening to the Sean Ryan Show. If you haven't already, please take a minute, head over to iTunes and leave the Sean Ryan Show a review. We read every review that comes through and we really appreciate the support. Thank you. Let's get back to the show.

• 2:07:22Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Scott, I want to kind of wrap this thing up and, but to close it out, I want to know what your opinion is on, what is the effect of the Afghan withdrawal going to do to global terrorism?

• 2:07:35Scott Mann?

  Yeah, I think that's the right question to ask. I mean, there's, there's a lot in that, and I'll try to unpack it just as succinctly as I can. And, and, and here's some things I think that are worthy of considering as people make up their own mind of what, you know, does Afghanistan really matter in the scheme of things? This little, you know, dusty ass country in southwest Asia that no one has really heard about until 9/11? I think that it does. It matters to everyday Americans, it matters to people who are raising their kids, and if you have, whether you have memory of 9/11 or not, here's why I think it matters, and what, what the impact is going to be on global terrorism.

• 2:08:17Scott Mann?

  First of all, we may think that we're done with Al Qaeda and ISIS, but they're not done with us. You know, the enemy we're taught in special operations always has a vote in the outcome of the plan. You know, you may make the best plan in the world, but the enemy gets a vote on how that happens. And in this case, global terror groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS, they have a narrative that drives them to action that they follow for centuries. Right? We may come and go with political polarization and political administrations, our, our narrative changes, our goals change. It's not true for Al Qaeda and ISIS. They have a goal to re-establish the Islamic Caliphate.

• 2:09:01Scott Mann?

  They have a goal to unseat and destroy the apostate governments of the Middle East and the great Satan in the West. That does not change. Right? They may, they may get decimated and experience degradation like what happened with the 20 Year War in Afghanistan and the ISIS campaign in Syria, but they do not lose the focus on their narrative, and they are very patient and very committed. What you're seeing right now in Afghanistan is a complete return to where we were pre-9/11.

• 2:09:35Scott Mann?

  And I'm getting this firsthand from former Afghan special operators who fought Al Qaeda and ISIS for years. Also from legend, the Afghan-American intel NCO from our army, who's been in country reporting as well. They're all saying the same thing. Al Qaeda, Lieutenant General Sammy Sadat, the last commander of Afghan special operations before the country fell. I've had conversations with him. He's getting ready to go back into the country and try to mobilize the commandos as part of the resistance, which is encouraging to me. But, but he's saying the same things. Al Qaeda has completely reconstituted. The strike on Ayman Zawahiri, who was the number two under bin Laden and then the number one,

• 2:10:18Scott Mann?

  shows us that he was standing on the porch of a Kabul, an affluent Kabul neighborhood in broad daylight.

• 2:10:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:25Scott Mann?

  He is, he was there at the, as a guest of the Taliban. General, gosh darn it, another Afghan special operations general recently talked at a conference that I was at, and he said that the Afghans are, the Taliban are actually issuing passports and visas to foreign fighters to live comfortably in Afghanistan. We know for a fact that foreign fighters from Syria, Iraq, Al Qaeda, foreign fighters from North Africa, and even Southeast Asia are back in Afghanistan, training openly on former Afghan army bases in Helmand and Kandahar.

• 2:11:02Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think they're massing in Afghanistan from all these other countries?

• 2:11:06Scott Mann?

  Well, it's the perfect safe haven. You know, if you're going to have a global terror threat projection, if you're going to fulfill on that narrative of bringing unprecedented violence to the West like you saw on 9/11, 2001, you have to have a safe haven that gives you the ability in an unfettered, uninterrupted way to plan, prepare, project, train, and refit.

• 2:11:30Scott Mann?

  And Afghanistan is the ultimate safe haven in that regard because their government is an Islamist government. They have a soft spot in their heart for anything that is anti-American, that is terrorist in nature, they support it. And they're showing that openly right now. Now, even though we have a Doha agreement that says, if you do that, we're coming back in, that what we're seeing from this administration is no indication that that will happen at all, except these over the horizon strikes like we did with Zawahiri. Great, we got him. And kudos to the intelligence community for making that happen. But Sean, we saw over the horizon strikes when we were trying to get Bin Laden before 9/11. Like, there's

• 2:12:12Scott Mann?

  just no substitute for the ground intelligence network. You know this better than anybody. And there's no substitute for a partner force who can resist at a local level and be that antibody. Both of those were abandoned wholesale in Afghanistan on August 15th. And they're still somewhat intact. And these volunteer groups have manifests of Afghan commandos, KKA, intelligence officials, that, yes, want to get out of the country. But if they were extradited or brought out of the country, they could become huge assets for countering violent extremism. But the bottom line is, I think we are a couple of years out from a catastrophic attack that's going to come from this unfettered safe haven. And I'll

• 2:12:57Scott Mann?

  leave you with this scenario. Let's assume that two to three years from now, we suffer a strike in the US, and it's on par with 9/11. And I don't think that's a stretch, considering the level of freedom of action that Al Qaeda and ISIS-K are being afforded in Afghanistan. Right? So let's just assume that an attack happens here, and it is catastrophic. And out of the ashes, and when the dust clears, you have an America that is reminiscent of 9/12/2001. The country music songs are playing, the Budweiser commercials are going strong, the yellow ribbons are on the trees. Except this time, it's, you know, your son and mine

• 2:13:40Scott Mann?

  that are loaded up on these airplanes, on these C-17s, and are deployed for a retribution operation in Afghanistan. To seek vengeance and ousted this group that just did this. Now, last time, you had members of the special operations community that went in undercover of darkness and they linked up with resistance groups like the Northern Alliance and the Pashtun tribes in the South and the East. But what if this time, when our, when our youth are going over, laying in wait are dozens, if not hundreds, of former Afghan commandos, special forces, who are in ragtag clothing, but they still have the kit, they still have the M4s with optics and the night vision goggles,

• 2:14:25Scott Mann?

  and they're pissed off because they watched their kids starve to death over three years? They've been co-opted by ISIS or Al Qaeda, and they're ready for some payback. And the very partner force that we trained and supported and bled with could be the people that we're fighting the next time we go back in there.

• 2:14:52Shawn Ryan?

  That is not a pretty picture.

• 2:14:54Scott Mann?

  No, and I think, you know, what a, what a terrible post 9/11 testimony that would be to have to give.

• 2:15:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I want to bring up one more thing that was a perfect ending, but we're seeing these, this new alliance starting to form with China, Russia, Iran, Korea. Those countries are massing in Afghanistan right now and building relations with Taliban, Al Qaeda. We already know that China's very smart in how they play this game. Do you think there's a possibility that we might see another terrorist attack, but maybe it's not?

• 2:15:46Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe it was.

• 2:15:49Scott Mann?

  State-sponsored externally.

• 2:15:51Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly.

• 2:15:51Scott Mann?

  Yeah, I think it's very possible. I mean, think about terrorism is a technique that is very suitable for the kind of asymmetric world that we live in, particularly when you have, you know, great power competitions like what's happening right now. You've got a multipolar world, right? I mean, where these nation-states are all vying for, you know, some kind of impact on the US. They perceive the US as weak right now, and frankly, they see us as not being able to partner very well, you know? So we're pretty isolated. You take into fact also, Sean, that, you know, how did we treat our NATO partners with the abandonment of Afghanistan?

• 2:16:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:24Scott Mann?

  Pretty bad. They didn't get the memo on how we were going to go down with this, and they had to scramble in there and deal with that situation really on the receiving end, you know? So even our NATO alliances, which run so deep, I believe we have squandered those relationships in the last couple of years as well. I mean, really, the way that we've treated our friends, our partners, the people that should stand at our shoulder in the darkest of times, has been terrible. You know, it's been really bad. And our relationship, social capital, skill set for leading in this country is in disarray. And I think that countries like China, Russia, they see that. They factor that into their calculus. Would

• 2:17:06Scott Mann?

  they be willing to sponsor a surrogate attack on the US? Certainly. I think that certainly that there's the potential for that to happen. But by the same token, you know, what is our ability to work with partner forces to counter or butt up against what they're trying to do either in Taiwan, Afghanistan, and other places? I mean, if we don't regain

• 2:17:32Scott Mann?

  our partner capability and our trust in the world, I think we're putting the country at risk not just for terrorism, but for near-peer aggression. It all comes down to how you treat your friends, and it all comes down to how you treat your veterans and your citizens. And right now, our institutional leaders have dropped the ball in every regard, and they've been allowed to get away with it.

• 2:18:01Scott Mann?

  Hope that changes. Me too. And I hope that people, because you know, what I take away from pineapple in this whole experience was, you know, Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, he's a social scientist. He talks about how in the early 1900s, America was in these really dark times. You know, really dark times. You had polarized politics, crime was terrible, immigration was off the chain and unchecked, and people were screaming that America was on its last leg. And about that time, uh, two drunks in Akron, Ohio, who could not get sober, looked around and said, you know what, nobody's coming, let's have a meeting. Let's call it Alcoholics Anonymous. And it was Dr. Bob and Bill W.

• 2:18:46Scott Mann?

  And, and what started in that two-person meeting was one of the largest movements for recovery, including myself, where millions of people were affected. The Rotary Club, the Junior League, the NAACP, Future Farmers of America, all of the social capital groups and trust groups that we know and grew up with in our time, started during this downswing, and it began this upswing that lasted all the way until 1972. And it was citizens who stepped into the breach when nobody else was coming, and they addressed a systemic problem. Right? And they showed what leadership looked like, and the institutional leaders followed.

• 2:19:29Scott Mann?

  So there is massive meta-level precedent for this in the United States. I believe that what happened in Afghanistan, this is what I choose to believe, pineapple, sacred promise, Project Exodus Relief, those were the first shots across the bow of the next upswing. I think that people are tired of it. I think that citizens see the lack of leadership in our country, that nobody else is coming. And I, you know, what I tell people is, that was our pineapple express, what's yours? Because it's Tom.

• 2:20:03Shawn Ryan?

  That gives me a lot of hope.

• 2:20:05Scott Mann?

  Me too. Because that's what our brothers and sisters fought and bled for.

• 2:20:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 2:20:11Scott Mann?

  And they deserve that. And it's still in us. I'm absolutely convinced of it.

• 2:20:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, it is. Well, Scott, I just want to say it was a real honor, you know, to interview you. I hope you come back.

• 2:20:23Scott Mann?

  Absolutely.

• 2:20:23Shawn Ryan?

  I want to get your backstory another time. But for anybody listening, check out Operation Pineapple Express book. I'll link it in the description.

• 2:20:31Scott Mann?

  Wonderful.

• 2:20:32Shawn Ryan?

  You're an amazing human being and I'm just, it really was an honor. Thank you.

• 2:20:36Scott Mann?

  Thank you, bro. Appreciate you.

• 2:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  Cheers. Best of luck.

• 2:20:39Scott Mann?

  Thanks, man.