Scott Mann, a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the US Army, discusses his extensive military career, particularly his service in Special Forces and his time in Afghanistan. He emphasizes the importance of building rapport and understanding human nature, using metaphors like John Wick, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Verizon guy to illustrate the complex skills of Green Berets. Mann highlights the moral injury caused by the Afghanistan withdrawal, advocating for national security awareness and veteran support. He also discusses his nonprofit, Task Force Pineapple, focusing on storytelling, advocacy, and empowerment to address the challenges faced by veterans and the nation.
Ben Derrick 0:00
Music.
Welcome to the soldier fund podcast, the platform for untold stories from the National Guard Special Forces community join us as we delve into the lives of these elite warriors and the journey of our non profit dedicated to supporting their courageous mission to free the oppressed worldwide. I'm your host. Ben Derrick, let's dive in. Well, thanks for making the time to be with us today. This is a conversation I've very much been looking forward to the things that you have been involved with post career and during career, I think are going to be incredibly intriguing for our audience. So let's just start here, if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your military service, and then we'll get into what's happened post service. Yeah,
Speaker 1 0:57
thanks, Ben. I'm Scott Mann. I'm retired lieutenant colonel from the US Army. I spent almost 23 years in the Army, active duty, and then about 18 of that, just shy of 18 of that, I think, in seven Special Forces with a lot of that time in seven Special Forces Group, a lot of down range time in Central and South America prior to 911 and a little bit after. And then most of my time in and out of Afghanistan post 911 and then I retired in 2013
Ben Derrick 1:34
so your, um, your afghan experience was very formative. I think, you know, just reading about you experiencing a lot of your work. This experience made a huge impact on your life, and it's kind of been a central force, or a guiding force for what's occurred post career,
Speaker 1 1:50
I think so, I think that's very accurate. I would say the first thing is that special forces for me was just a dream. I mean, it was a dream I had from the time I was 14, and I was very, very obsessed with the with the life of the Green Beret. And then as I learned more about it and started to get into it, I was just super blessed to have these NCOs. I mean, even when I was a lieutenant, I was in a special ops Support Unit in Panama, and I was, you know, influenced by these seventh group NCOs then and I, I just learned, I think, at a pretty early age, Ben the importance of by with and through, yes, the importance of what it means to go bottom up and work locally. Because, you know, Latin America is such a foreign internal defense partner type approach anyway, and all of that shaped me going into Afghanistan. So I say all that because, you know, everybody that was in Afghanistan, I think, had formative experiences. I was already a major when the war started, or when we got deployed there. So I mean, I would have to say I was probably I saw less tactical combat than a lot of the guys listening or watching this podcast. I saw my share of it, but a lot of what I did was in operation centers, getting guys in and off targets, and then also being very involved with the village stability program.
Ben Derrick 3:15
Okay, yeah, so your your ability to engage with local populations. I mean, certainly this is something I've learned about the GBS over the years. Said, you know, the technical prowess is off the charts, but really, for you guys, that pales in comparison to being able to build relationships with indigenous people that are Facing insurmountable problems and circumstances and being Value Added to that.
Speaker 1 3:41
It's always been such a big deal to me, this, this, this notion of building rapport. I mean, it's almost a word that we throw around too much, I think, in the community, and we don't really know what it is. When I used to teach interpersonal skills and influence at the Q Course, I would have the candidates get their phones out and I'd say, Okay, look up the direct the definition of rapport. So I'll have you do it, like, take your phone if you have it handy, and if not, I'll do it. Okay, just type in, type in rapport, type in rapport, and your search engine there and see what it what comes up
Ben Derrick 4:12
a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well,
Speaker 1 4:22
yeah, and the looks on the faces of these young candidates when they see it's almost one of horror and frightening
Ben Derrick 4:30
definition,
Speaker 1 4:32
yeah. I mean, it's very touchy feely. It's very but, but I, but I, there's, you know, and, but that's why I have them look it up and read it, and because it's like, Look, man, whether you like that definition or not, it is irrelevant. It is the definition of rapport. And there's a biology to it. There's a science to it. And it doesn't mean you can't be a gunslinger. It doesn't mean that you can't get on a target and do bad things to bad people. But if you don't understand. At a human, biological level, what that definition means, then you're not truly a Green Beret, because that's what Green Berets do. If we say that, we build rapport, then that's what we do. And and it's hard, you know, the whole I think the reason that makes us so uncomfortable when we read that definition is that is close, harmonious, communicate well, like these are difficult things, man, it's much easier to just reach for your car Ben or your rifle, and that for me in Afghanistan, more than anything else, is what shaped me and changed me. Was when I saw these various teams and senior NCOs demonstrating that definition in real time in some of the most dangerous places on Earth. It changed me forever.
Ben Derrick 5:48
Well, it certainly bleeds through your work. There's no doubt about it. I mean this being our first time meeting each other through your work, I kind of already knew that about you, which is very interesting to me, for you to be that feelings forward and talking about rapport, that word in that definition, feelings is probably the most frightening word in the English language. Is feelings, right? But to be able to understand others feelings and your own, that's a pretty elite skill,
Speaker 1 6:16
boy, it is. And so what? So what I did to help soften the blow when I would teach this, and then I still, it's in my nobody's coming to save you book. It's in my game changers. Book is because the brain works in metaphor. I thought, all right, let's, let's kind of come up with some avatars to help modern Green Berets. Maybe think about how we have to deal with the environments we operate in. And what I tell what I say is a modern Green Beret is a combination of John Wick, Lawrence of Arabia, and the Verizon guy, or, let's work that out, or the sprint guy. Okay, all right, so let's work it out. Let's break it down, right. Okay. So, so John Wick, I mean that one, I think most people get intuitively. But I'll just go a little bit further and say, think about him as an avatar, right? He is, yes, very lethal, very skilled, but he's very surgical. You know, John Wick is a reluctant killer. He doesn't necessarily want to kill. He is pushed to kill, and he really does it with but once he starts, he's very good, but he's surgical, like, even, like, if they're in the hotel where they're not supposed to be fighting, like, he's only fighting that dude or that person, he's not destroying the hotel. It's surgical lethality. And I think that's a very, very important discerning factor of Green Berets is how surgically lethal they are, because you have to be right, because you're immersed in a civil population, you have to be surgical. Lawrence of Arabia, this one also somewhat intuitive. Te Lawrence, a British intelligence officer who was formerly a geologist, by the way, and prior to World War One, and then was dropped into modern day Syria and Iraq walked in and united the Bedouin Badu tribes, who could not sent in the same tent together without unsheathing their knives, and used interpersonal skills and storytelling to paint the image of Aqaba, the crown jewel of the Ottoman Empire, who were allied with the Germans, being liberated from the desert by Bedouins. And only bedouins who could pull that kind of crazy task off. And they bought into that story, and they did it because all the guns were pointing towards the sea. And so te Lawrence used what I call Lorentzian skills. He was a voracious fighter. He was decorated for valor, but he's not remembered for that. He's remembered for the flowing robes and the interpersonal skills that he used to bring those Bedouin tribes together. And then finally, the Verizon guy, the Verizon guy, you know, the little dude. Remember the commercials, he would pop out of a manhole cover. Can you hear me now, good. And then he would pop up in the jungle. Can you hear me now, good. And he had an obsession with connection. He could connect. He was obsessed with bringing a network together. And if you think about it, you know, think about the original horse soldiers that went into Afghanistan. Yes, they were doing local T E Lawrence and John Wick kind of stuff. But they were also sending out messages that were read by the Secretary of Defense. You know, think about 20th group and 19th group, NCOs, who go down range on a J sat, and by the time they're done, they've built an entire network inside the embassy. Right? They're the horizon guy, and so all three of those avatars are necessary ingredients of the modern day Green Beret, and it just depends on the percentages of the cocktail that you mix on where you are.
Ben Derrick 9:52
That is a fascinating theory. And I'm with I'm in line with you 100% having been embedded with and observing this population for years. Now I think it's a that is a great description. Also kind of leads me to this is a little bit off script, but I'm hoping we can spend some time there and how it's so difficult for the civilian population to understand the modern Green Beret. There's a little known because you guys are the silent professionals, not the quiet professionals, the silent professionals. This cocktail in the mixture, there could be the impetus for a lot of relational collateral damage, even within a family. It's just so complex. The man who is able to be this level of things to this many people, that's difficult to wrap your mind around.
Speaker 1 10:39
So much, even for families, even for families. Honestly, it's why I use storytelling. You know, one of the things I told myself after I went through a very dark transition myself and almost took my own life after I got out, one of the things that I found was storytelling as a modality to heal myself, Ben and what I found was I needed that storytelling, because the brain works in metaphor and story, so it makes sense of the world through storytelling. And so I could use storytelling, not only to help myself make sense of things I had lost touch with, but my family, my kids, my wife, and then I started explaining it to civilians, using, like, what I just did with those metaphors. And you would see the laughter, and they're like, Oh, I and I'm like, do you understand that there's a massive difference between a Green Beret and a Navy Seal, like massive and, and, and that's not taking anything away from the seal. They have a very special mandate that they do. It's very surgical. It's mostly direct action. But the Green Beret has a level of complexity that goes with him. That makes him a very complex human and and he has to be he is selected for that complexity, and then he has to apply that complexity through a range of ambiguous situations his whole life. Think about Operation just cause in Panama, where Green Berets from Third Battalion, seventh group actually conducted operation Ma Bell from the bottom up, where they talked a task force commander at the four star level to not going into the Panamanian countryside and hunting down the remaining PDF, but rather letting Green Berets go out and call them on pay phones and speak to them in Spanish to surrender. And it worked, and not a shot was fired. It was called Operation Ma Bell. So in that case, you know, the Lorentzian and the Verizon guy stuff carried the day, yes, and I will tell you, Green Berets have been doing that for decades. And I just, I like to call it out, because I'm fascinated by our community and how they operate. And I think it's time that we started examining ourselves and getting a better sense of who we are and what makes us who we are and celebrate it.
Ben Derrick 12:45
I couldn't agree more. I mean, this podcast, in a large part, is an effort to educate the civilian population on this dynamic, exactly because I would say, and I'm honored to be able to say this behind Mike, the Green Berets are the most elite human beings on earth because of their capability, because of their willingness to sacrifice, because their level of discipline. I mean, and as you just referenced, not to blip over this, but when that career ends, when the green suit is put on the hanger for the last time, there is a literal identity crisis that occurs nearly to a soldier because of the commitment to this way of life and the overall mission. I mean, when the when the mission is to free the oppressed, when is that mission ever done? Is, I think, a very valid question, and what I see as I'm getting to know more and more of you, even when the John Wick part is no longer being exercised, there are different ways to move into different populations, to free the oppressed. And it feels to me, and I don't want to get out over my skis here, but it feels to me, this is what your life and career is about. Now. It's about educating people about what is, what are best practices to push away the idea of oppression in your life and how to engage that. How do we communicate that message? Does that sound close to true? It
Speaker 1 14:11
does, and I don't think you're out over your skis at all. First of all, I would tell you that as a transition in Green Beret, the the individuals who had the most impact on my life, and who, frankly, saved my life and gave me insights into what was possible for the next phase of my life, were civilians. They were not Green Berets, they were not Rangers, they were not Delta Force. They were not Vietnam veterans. They were civilians who took the time to connect with me, who took the time to listen to my stories without judgment, and then who walked that path of transition with me at my shoulder, like, just like what you're doing right now? And so I think it's imperative that you call out things like this, because I think you're probably you and other civilian leaders are the only ones who can, because it is we're a very insular community, and we have a hard time because we are so close to the four. Just recognizing exactly what's happening. And I think that having the Civ mil interaction in our transition is absolutely essential. And you're right, this whole notion of to free the oppressed is deeply ingrained within us. And the only thing that I could say self discovery wise, that almost I had to figure out, because it almost killed me, was that there, you know, there is an investment in that way of life, but, but who we are, as a as a human, and what we are and how we operate and navigate the world is innately unique and not reserved for special forces. You know what? We went into special forces. If you think about it, we were selected to be Green Berets because I'm an innate set of attributes that we possessed, and those attributes don't stay in the team room. They come out with you. The army doesn't get to keep those right. But I thought that I had to surrender all of that to the army and then go be whatever civil society told me I was supposed to be. And it was a nightmare. It was a two year nightmare in my life, until I recognized that the same purpose and the same drive that I had as a Special Forces officer and what really fueled my tank of this whole notion of contributing to something bigger than myself and and human connection and just all that, just basically being an entrepreneurial in a crap show that was something that I that was something that I love, and I didn't want to surrender that, so I reclaimed it, and I think it's something in our own way each of us has to do.
Ben Derrick 16:40
Yeah, that is so beautifully spoken, because I know that there are soldiers listening in that are at that 15 plus year mark, yeah, and I have noticed that there's a real crisis that occurs like, Hey, I've got less career in front of me than I than I've got behind me. So what am I going to be? And then, you know, we often start having this HVAC conversation, well, maybe I'll go into this, or maybe I'll go into that, and it feels like, Man, why would you leave all of these skill sets and tools on the cutting room floor that the world needs, you know? And while we're on it, talking about soldiers taking their own lives and getting that place of desperation feeling so alien. This is something that I think the civilian population needs to circle around and understand. We are losing elite, valuable contributors to our society at too rapid of a pace to not pay attention to. Yeah, well, there's
Speaker 1 17:39
a lot in what you just said. It's so important, and I don't want to miss any of it. So any of it. So I want to back up to something you said about purpose, and this is in my book, nobody's coming to save you that i i talk about. You know, one of the things as Green Berets Ben, that we have an innate ability to do is we understand human nature, I think, instinctively, better than a lot of people do. We understand how human nature works, and what I encourage all of us to do, as we think about transition and coming home, is to recognize that there's a certain biology to us as humans, that we're still just well dressed in neanderthals. You know, we are very, very similar to how we operated 250,000 years ago, like there's not a lot of change. And one of the primary elements of this, and Dr Ivan Tyrrell talks about it in the human Givens, is that we are meaning, seeking, meaning assigning creatures. We're the only mammals that do that we seek, and we assign meaning to every single thing we do. And without purpose, we perish, right? And and this is not like that's not a kumbaya thing, that is biological hardwiring. We seek and assign meaning to everything that we do in Special Forces, that's much easier because, because it drives us right. There's an overarching purpose that we came in for, and we follow it, but then when we transition to that different planet of the civilian world, it is easy to Eclipse or lose sight on what that purpose or what that thing is, and it can, it can almost fade away. And that's very dangerous thing. So one of the things that I think we all should do, I don't want to sound overly prescriptive here, but is we have to continue to seek and assign meaning as we make that transition, and one of the best ways that I've found to do that for our community is storytelling, is to figure out a way to use narrative in your life as you transition, to bridge that gap, right? Because stories are what give us a sense of ourselves and figuring out what your backstory is. Man, what is it that you know brought you into the military? What is it that you know, what's a pivotal moment in your life that defines you, but just doing kind of that work, that deep work, as we transition out, and really getting a sense of what our. Our overarching purposes beyond the military, or at least trying to define it before we leave, is really critical, because if not, then we just seek out and we take on these transactional like you said, I'm not knocking the HVAC thing. The HVAC thing is cool. I know several guys that do it, but it's got to fill your cup or something does the most diabolical thing in the world is to live a purpose based life and then stop immediately. It's not a healthy move.
Ben Derrick 20:30
So if I could play devil's advocate for just a moment, because I feel like you're very prepared for that, what do we say to the man listening whose retort is, no one understands my narrative. No one understands my stories. So why should I tell them? These are conversations that I have in team rooms with odas today. Yeah, first
Speaker 1 20:52
of all, I don't, I don't think you're wrong in the sense that I would, I would, I would adjust it as a narrative coach. And I would say, I mean, that's not entirely true. The guys in your team room understand your story. Guys who served in Special Forces understand your story. And frankly, you know what I found that people that didn't even serve in SF, but that are veterans, understand a lot of your story. The question I would answer back is, do you understand your story? Right? Because when you say something that like that, that tells me almost instinctively that you're uncomfortable with your story, that there's something about your story that, because you feel like the rest of the world doesn't understand it, you're not owning your story right now, your story is owning you. And when our narrative owns us, it's very, very difficult to connect with other humans. It's very, very difficult to look like we even trust ourselves. And it's understandable, right? Because what that probably means is there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make any sense right now. There's a there's a lot of loss, there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of grief, there's a lot of struggle. There's a lot of trauma, you know, there's combat, and the type of work we do as Green Berets, by definition, is a very caustic, corrosive line of work, and same way with first responders, but just please hear me when I'm telling you this. I've been coaching first responders, gold star widows, survivors of trauma, survivors of rape, combat veterans for almost a decade in storytelling, and so I've worked a lot around this world, and I hear that a lot, and what I will tell you is the first step in storytelling that I that we do in our nonprofit is is helping war fighters and their Families just locate themselves in their own story. Who cares if anybody else understands it in the beginning? It doesn't matter. It's for you. Anyway. Stories are how we make sense of the world. We tell ourselves stories all the time. We're the protagonist our own narrative all the time. That's how the brain works. It works in metaphor. So I think the first step is dismiss that, because that's just resistance and self sabotage telling you that. Dismiss that and just say, All right, you know what? I'm just going to work on my own backstory. I'm going to develop my own narrative about my journey that I've been on and and for right now, just me having it's enough.
Ben Derrick 23:15
Well, I'm sold on that answer for sure. And part of my goal here and us having a conversation, it's twofold, just to be as transparent as possible, to have people who might not know about your book to pick up your book and to engage with the work that you're doing. So can we talk a little bit about the the title is just it grabs you instantly. No one's coming to save you. Feels very true, also very accountability driven at the same time.
Speaker 1 23:42
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate that it was, I mean, I'm sure a lot of the guys listening this will just kind of laugh when they hear the title, because it was SF. NCOs that gave me that title. I can't tell you how many times as a junior officer, Team sergeant or a senior, NCOs a sir, nobody's coming. It's just us. So let's get to work, you know. And whether that was looking at medical capability, or whether that was looking at QRF or, you know, just even just resupply, you know. And there's a certain again, SF guys are weird, like, there's a certain liberating reality to that, once you realize that you're like, okay, and then you realize that it's the organic capacity of your team and then your own agency right to get big stuff done, because that's the subtitle a Green Berets guide to getting big stuff done. And there's nothing in this book that I've written, I've been working on it for six years, that an SF guy would look at and find it to be striking or new, you know, like, they'd be like, Yeah, but at the same time, what I will say that I think it offers to SF guys and their families is that I've spent over a decade practicing this interpersonal approach and bringing science to the art of connection, to the art of storytelling, to the art of listening, to the art of rapport, building where most. Green Berets. And you look at the Q Course, we're evaluated on our ability to build and maintain rapport, but there's very little science to it, like that definition of rapport. I've looked throughout the Q Course, and it's very seldom that you find Green Berets actually introduced to the definition of rapport or held to that grading standard. So there is a science to this, and in that book, there's a lot of science as well as stories about meaning and emotion and social capital and struggle and storytelling. Those are the main increments in the story. And what I would ask folks, if they I do think it could be a good transition book, or even if you're already out, it's a quick read, and particularly the last two chapters on storytelling and struggle. I would invite anybody watching or listening to this podcast to check that out, because not only does it explain, like an answer to the question you retorted with about nobody understands it's actually, it's built around struggle, and there's a real element to understanding how struggle works in our lives, but also that stories, what I call the generosity of scars, repurposing your struggles through narrative in the service of other people is actually one of the most liberating, empowering things we can do in transition, when we realize that our scars, our struggles, are actually a gift that we can put into the service of others as we bridge that civil, military gap, no matter What our industry, we can take those things that scuffed us up and actually put them into play. It's a very, very powerful, you know, approach, and that's my thing for Green Berets and our community, is I want them back in the game, leading us here at home. Because, like you said, you know, they are a national treasure, and I think tools like my book and a few other things, particularly just getting back to storytelling and reconnecting to who we are as humans is a big part of doing that. You brought
Ben Derrick 26:55
up one word that I'd like to focus on, if that's okay, because it completely parallels my experience over the past 20 to 30 months around this population, trust is hard to come by. For my first year, I only answer two questions, who are you and what are you doing here? That was it. Yeah. So it took an extended period of time to build trust, to build rapport. And I think in some ways those words are a little bit interchangeable, like one has to be present for the other to be present. So trusting things that are new or feel a little bit off the map, which I think narrative and storytelling, that's not a lot of language that I hear inside of the pop SF population. You know what? What leads a listener right now to say, look, trust me, this is something worth investing in.
Speaker 1 27:45
Yeah, no, that's a fair question. And so what I would say is, first of all, that's, that's a very fair statement, trust is a major thing. And so what I would what I would say is that everything that I write and what I teach today, what I talk about from the stage is derived from a lot of years of both executing and teaching old school interpersonal skills and just about every crap hole environment on Earth, and then coming back and and digging into it and really saying, Okay, what's the science to this. I mean, like, if I looked at listeners right now and I said, Okay, if you take what I'm telling you and you apply it immediately in the shoot house, I'm gonna improve your time on target, response time and your accuracy by 60% would you do it right? And the answer is, probably unequivocally, I'll try it, and if it works, I'll sure do it. Well, I would say the same thing with with what I teach and train on human connection and interpersonal skills in you know, the narrative approach to influence. I can pretty much tell you that if you apply this and you rep it the way you do a Green Beret reps a new skill, you will own about 95 to 98% of every room you walk into and by own the room. Here's what I mean. I want to be really clear. I don't mean that it's easy. Hey, what's going on everybody? Like a salesy kind of way you're going to be more relatable to the pain and more relevant to the goals of the people that you serve, whether those are clients, your family, your travel ball team, your congregation at church, relatable to pain, relevant to goals. What I've found in my years and years of work in this field of work around interpersonal skills. That's what people follow. That's what people followed with the village stability program. That's what people follow in unconventional warfare. We don't have formal authority over the indigenous people that we work with. We don't so why do they follow us? Why do they go up on rooftops and risk their lives for us? You know? Why do they call us? In Afghanistan collapses, and nobody else. It's because of the trust, and that trust is derived from being relatable to pain and relevant to goals of the other party, and demonstrating that on a daily basis. So what I would just say is that's how I've approached this body of work. I have no use for theory. I have no use for academics. I'm a terrible academic. I'm a practitioner. And what I've, what I've, what I've tried to do for 30 years, is apply this in the arena of trust and rapport. And so that would be my answer. And then the other thing that I would say is, read the book, go to, you know, my listen to my podcast, whatever, come to the workshop and try it in a low risk environment, like try it in a conversation with your spouse or your kid, and notice what happens, right? And see if you see a shift, and see if you if your your influence increases, and if it does, keep going, keep wrapping it. It's iterative, but there's definitely upside and capital left on the table. If we don't,
Ben Derrick 31:06
it's a great answer. Part of what I love about what you're doing is it feels very pop tart and soccer ball to me. You know, we're gonna a war fighter having Pop Tarts in his pocket. Well, that doesn't make sense unless you understand he's going to need those when he gets where he's going and when I'm trying to describe to civilians what's a Green Beret, and almost to a person I say, Have you ever seen a picture of an American war fighter handing a piece of candy to a kid in a village? That's a Green Beret, right? What I love about what you're doing, though, is you're turning that approach back towards the soldier and the people that are important to that soldier in his life, and saying that same skill set that you've been pointing out to the people that are oppressed, so you're interrupting their lives around the world, those same sort of strategies, and this is a big word I want to focus on, between the two of us today, are transferable into your own life. They don't have to stop in your military career. They're transferable into your own life. So,
Speaker 1 32:07
yeah, no, that's really good. Ben, one other thing I'd like to offer to that is, you know, it just to kind of go to our grammar for a minute, our language in SF. And I'd say the first special ops imperative is to understand your operational environment, right? We have self imperatives. The first one is to understand your operational environment. If I heard that from the senior NCO and SF, I heard it a million times. If I heard it once, and it's absolutely true, right? Like and you won't ever find a Green Beret that disagrees with that. Understand your operational environment. Well, when we transition, we have to understand our operational environment, right? If you just look at the anthropological social conditions of where you're going in SF, where you're leaving, you're leaving that world, and you're going to the civilian world, right? By definition, you are in a status honor based society as a team guy. You are in an honor based primal society where the currency is honor and shame full stop, because that's how the military works, but it's certainly how SF works. Everything that you do in life is a 250,000 year old system based on status, trust and honor, okay, and and at the center of all of that, like any tribal society, is the group, the team, the tribe, the clan, the qualm. It is at the epicenter, right? And so your status as a team guy is derived directly within the contextual standing you have with your team, your tribe. It's that's where you derive your status and your worth the moment you leave that honor based society of the team world into the civilian world, you have not just changed arenas. You've changed planets. You are walking onto a planet now that is a contract society, not a status society. It is not based on honor and shame, right? It is based on credit and guilt. It is based on the individual, not the group, right, not the team, not the tribe, not the clan. It is based on individualism, right? Our whole civil society in America is built on what life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, of the individual, and so we've spent our entire adult life living a life of group focused behavior around honor, and all of a sudden you're stepping into a world now that is all about the individual and achievement and guilt, right individual stuff, and that alone can set us into a tailspin, because we don't have a language for it, a grammar for it, we have not defined our operational environment. And so what I tell folks is, look, this is no different than stepping into an indigenous society where you have an inherent obligation to understand your operational environment. You are now in a society where the individual is at the epicenter. It doesn't mean you have to adopt it. It just. Just means you have to know the environment you're operating in,
Ben Derrick 35:04
understand it, but you don't have to adopt it.
Speaker 1 35:07
I think that's right. I think that hanging on to a lot of our collective integrity and ways of navigating the world, it's important. But if you just kind of like, well, nobody understands it, and you rage against it, and you withdraw, then it's going to be very, very difficult to, you know, influence and navigate that world. You know, it's about, it's about, it's about understanding how folks tick and then bringing them over to your side over time, right? And a lot of that. That's why I'm so adamant about old school interpersonal skills, storytelling, narrative competence, active listening. These are the things that we're good at, right? So why would we not employ those at a Herculean level when we come into this new arena? Exactly?
Ben Derrick 35:53
I think it's those skill sets that probably matter most acutely in that transition time. And I can say, from my point of view, certainly, I've always been enamored with with men who are willing to do sacrificial, heroic things. But if you were to ask me, what is the major part of this community that attracts me to it, it is the team dynamic. It is the loyalty to the man, to the people who are beside me, to the people who have done the things that we have done together. That's something I believe our culture is missing. And if that goes dark or dormant when a Green Beret enters into the civilian population, I think even with the Green Berets that I'm working with, as you well know, there are national guardsmen that are spending time in both camps talking about an identity crisis. If I'm not AGR, then I'm spending a lot of my time in the civilian world. And these two things feel very disparate, but what you're pointing out today just really gets me fired up to have more GBS understanding the skills that they have spent years developing and employing, as you as you said, in some of the most worst crap holes on earth, to bring those into our current cultural climate and to be change agents. What an incredible call to purpose that is,
Speaker 1 37:18
I agree, and I think I'll go a step further, and I will say, you know, like in nobody's coming to save you. I talk about this. The antagonist in that book is what I call the churn, right? And the churn is this unique and novel set of social conditions where there's an unprecedented level of distraction with the people around us. They're almost in a trance, like stay, to fight, flight and freeze. There's a disengagement, where they lack purpose in themselves and in their business and in their organization. There's disconnection. People are disconnected from their families. They're disconnected from themselves. They're in these things all the time. And then there's a distrust, right? There's a distrust. If you look at trust in America right now, two thirds of Americans say they don't trust their neighbor, right? It's I would encourage Green Berets to look at that for a second. Think about those four DS and and ask yourself, isn't that what you dealt with in Afghanistan? Isn't that what you dealt with in Iraq? In fact, isn't that what you dealt with in the Robin Sage and the Q Course, I mean what you experienced as a Green Beret in the operational environment of the churn. You've been dealing with the churn your whole life, right? It's natural for you, and when you look around America today, it's not natural for our civilian counterparts. This is new to them. This evolution of the churn that has happened in our civil society is less than five years old. I mean, we are facing unprecedented social conditions where we are far more tribal than we are communal. We are tearing each other apart from the inside out, and there's such a low level of trust and such an overreach on transactions and repurposed communications through a digital world that we've lost our authentic, authentic connection ability. Well, guess who has that? SF guys. SF guys understand that churn. They understand what it takes to navigate it, it's, it's, it's the most compelling reason that I think we need to bring that part forward, and whether you're a small business owner, whether you whether you're in academia, whether you go into corporate America a podcast or whatever nonprofit, the reality is that churn is kicking everybody's butt around us, but you know how to navigate it. And so these skill sets that we're talking about and what you spent years developing are so relevant to the world we live in today, and most people around you don't even know what the hell it is that they're facing. And you can help them figure it out, if you want to see an example of it in real time, look at how veterans went and helped our Afghan allies, and look at how veterans went into western North Carolina. Yeah, and turned around a completely horrific situation that the government couldn't handle, and most of those guys were Green Berets.
Ben Derrick 40:08
Okay, let's, let's talk about this, because I've been, I've been waiting to get to it. I know you were a central figure in this. Let's talk about Afghanistan and the mobilization, what I would call rescue efforts. You were right in the center of that. I would love for our listeners to be able to hear firsthand what that was like, the motivations, challenges, key challenges, even retrospectively, things that you're, you know, in an AAR view, just things that went right, things that went wrong. I would love to hear your point of view, if you're willing to share that.
Speaker 1 40:42
Yeah, no, I'm happy to you know I was just looking at on my on my phone, a 20th group buddy of mine named Brad Ben, who was, what was, was found dead in a hotel room in Mississippi. And his wife, Dana, and I are good friends. And Brad and I were deployed together, and Brad was texting me as Afghanistan started to collapse, you know. And he reached out to me as it was all falling apart, you know. And he was talking about his former interpreter and what they had done to him. And he was just asking, you know, can we talk? You know, he was talking about a veteran he was helping out just recently, just drank himself to death or OD, and you could just see things coming off the wheels, the wheels coming off the bus with Brad, as I read this and, I say that because it's really important as we examine the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the way that we systemically abandoned a 20 year ally, is to understand that this was a horrific moral injury on our veteran population, particularly our SF guys, because by this, everything we've talked about So far, we've talked about rapport building and interpersonal skills and how focused we have to be on our partners. Well, we left our partners in the dirt to be executed. And the definition of a moral injury, at least from where I sit, is violation of what one knows to be, right, right, and it can be even further exacerbated when it's conducted by the leaders we trust. And that is exactly what went down in August of 2021 we allowed a 20 year ally to be left in the dirt with no plan of over 30,000 Commandos, Afghan interpreters, Afghan Special Forces were left behind, and a whole host of veterans from 20th group, 19th group, seventh group, said, I'm not good with this. I'm not good with this. Some were on, you know, some were still in the guard as they did it. And they did they used these things and their networks and signal to try to get people out. And Task Force pineapple was just one of many of those groups. We didn't do anything that was unique in the sense of what the other groups did. I think we told the story pretty heavily, but at the end of the day, man, a lot more Afghans were left behind than made it out. And I think it's really important that we recognize that not only did we create a national security nightmare, because now Afghanistan is regenerating al Qaeda at a rapid rate that will 10x Eclipse what we saw pre 911, but we, we heaped this horrible moral injury on all of these SF guys who who are just scratching their heads, going, what the hell man like you held me to a certain standard of by with and through all these years, and then you just bail on these allies, yeah, you know. And a lot of these, a lot of I talk to them all the time, when we toured around the country with our play last out, and they would tell me, they would confide to me in tears and just falling apart, like, I don't understand, like, how could we do this? You know, my son will never join. My daughter will never join. And so I just think it's important. I'm not trying to be negative, but I think we need to understand that the human cost of this on our SF population has been massive, and until our senior leaders, our senior leaders current oh six and above, both active duty National Guard and retired, come out of the shadows and start calling this out for what it is, and taking work and actions to go from moral injury to moral recovery, we're going to have A massive segment of the Special Operations population who is extremely damaged by this and who is going to have trouble moving past it. Because I know I am, and I don't know if that's the evaluation you are looking for, but it's what's on my heart right now, knowing the number of SF guys that are dialed in, and I just feel compelled to start there, you know, because I think that we need to acknowledge that it's not the way you do business as a Green Beret, and it's not the fault of the teams, but our policy makers and flag officers need to step the hell up and start right in this ship.
Ben Derrick 44:56
Yeah, well, I think you know your honesty is certainly welcome. Involved, and your up close perspective on this, and your willingness to get in and don't bring me problems, bring me solutions, your willingness to get in there and bring solutions, both to the Afghan side and also to those that served, I feel like, only heightens and adds to your credibility. So no apologies needed there for that answer, I can certainly respect and appreciate your position on that and to draw attention to the fact that you're not sitting on your hands, which I think follows in line with exactly what your book is saying. You're not sitting on your hands waiting for someone else to do something. You're doing something, and your nonprofit is doing something we all like to we are, yeah, I'd like to discuss some of that work, because I know that our listeners are eager to figure out how to engage with that.
Speaker 1 45:49
Yeah, I appreciate that. So what we did Ben we for the longest time, our nonprofit was called the hero's journey, and we were focused on storytelling as a modality for healing, helping warriors find their voice and tell their story. And that's what I was doing when Afghanistan collapsed. And then we, you know, this task force pineapple came about, where it was really just a conglomerate of veterans who jumped in a signal room and, you know, did the best they could. And then it kind of stood down, it went away. And we went back to doing the last out play with Gary Sinise and telling the story of Afghanistan from the stage, and then our storytelling workshops that we teach around the country. And that was it. And then, but as what I started to see was, and this is really important, because of the way our veterans answered the phone on August 15, 2021 when the government did not with our allies. These were highly skilled Afghan intelligence operatives, special operators who were left behind. And the the intelligence agencies left behind 99% of their human intelligence or sources. And the Department of Defense left behind 100% of its Special Operations partner force that did 95% of the fighting. They were left behind. And so these veterans answered the phone, and after the abbey gate explosion, and they knocked off the evacuation. We didn't hang up the phone. We stayed on the phone, and we then we started to pay for safe houses and food drops and medical supplies, because we could not, in good conscience, abandon these allies who we were, their only lifeline. They couldn't show their face in public. And as a result of that, again, you want to go back to how trust really works, the reciprocity that came from that was these Afghan individuals started embedding themselves in certain areas, or just resurfacing as sources who are close to the Taliban, who are close to al Qaeda, who are close to ISIS. And they started rendering information back to these veterans saying, hey, the bases are being occupied by 20 plus Afghan or foreign fighters. Bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden, is not dead. The Trump administration did not kill him in 2008 in Ghazni. He is in Afghanistan, and the button Bin Laden brand is back, and he's screaming for us to take the battlefield to the west. Haqqani, the father of suicide bombers, is the Minister of Interior. On Thursdays, the passport office in Kabul is close to everybody except foreign fighters to get legitimate passports. Like, this was the stuff that started emanating back to these veterans, and they're like, holy shit. Like, what do we do with this? You know, meanwhile, the three letter agencies that we know and trust and Special Operations Command are legitimizing the Taliban. They're giving us tax dollars to the Taliban in humanitarian aid and intelligence dollars. They are taking Intel reporting from the Taliban and passing it into their traffic, and completely ignoring the Afghan resistance, who are comprised of what mostly commandos and Afghan Special Forces. They're not even recognizing them. The State Department doesn't recognize them. So now you've got this group of veterans who, I guarantee you some people watching this are part of that. They're getting this high fidelity information about what's happening with a growing threat against the homeland, and several of these veterans groups have uncovered a plot against the homeland that's going to make 911 look like a dress rehearsal. And the worst part is that most of those individuals are already here in the United States, and they trained in the same camps that we worked in, and it's going to look much more like October 7 than it did the World Trade Center. Now I tell you all that because for three years, we have been asleep at the switch, and we're not tracking this. And we decided in our nonprofit that, you know what, we're going to re rebrand ourselves as Task Force pineapple. We're coming back out with that, with that moniker, because it's known, and we're going to start telling the story, and we're going to focus on advocating for national security. We're going to start advocating for our veterans who are experiencing moral injury. We're going to push for accountability, for leaders who have been asleep at the switch and not done it right. And we're going to focus on empowerment. Empowerment with the storytelling and the play and making sure we never forget what our Green Berets and others did for this nation and what the cost of modern war is, and we mostly use storytelling for that. So we're coming back with pineapple in a pretty heavy hitting way. And I spoke to the I spoke to the Special Forces Association at our crews, and everybody seemed pretty jazzed about it. You know about the fact that there's going to be a non profit of 501, c3, that's going to try to fill the gaps, to address the national security issue, the moral injury on our own community, and then helping our guys get back in the game through interpersonal skills and storytelling. And so that's where we're going, Task Force pineapple. We're renaming it now. And I hope folks watching this will be a part of what we do, because there's going to be a lot of work to be done. And if we don't, I don't know how this is going to end, but I don't think it's going
Ben Derrick 50:57
to be good. So let's if we, I know we're running a little short on time, and I appreciate being in the conversation this long. But if you could describe optimum glide path over the next five years for your initiatives preferred in states, what does that look like on
Speaker 1 51:14
the for profit side? I'm trying to bring the old school interpersonal skills that we used as Green Berets into our communities. My book, nobody is coming to save you is all about a bottom up approach, a community engagement approach that is built around purpose and old school interpersonal skills. And I want to try to defeat the churn across America by teaching our leaders the Green Beret approach to influence full stop like you know, and I call that rooftop leadership, getting people to go up on their rooftops and make a stand like the tribes did with our Green Berets in Afghanistan, right? Because they were connected as social capital level. Restoring social capital and bridging trust in America through old school interpersonal skills,
Ben Derrick 52:00
that is no small goal, sir, I was
Speaker 1 52:03
gonna say, yeah. So in all my free time, and then on the nonprofit side, it's, it's, it's gotten much more ambitious, I think, because of of this emanating threat that's coming to the homeland. There's really three programs that we're focused on at pineapple. One is what we call The Gathering Storm. And what we're doing is we're working with Intel alumni who are talking to sources inside Afghanistan. We're working with lessons learned experts, and we're basically writing this project, and we're going to brief it at state, local and federal levels of examining what's coming out of Afghanistan. What are we not paying attention to as a government. What do individuals, citizens and communities, need to know about this? State and local need to know about this. And then we're actually studying the attacks on Mumbai by al Qaeda, the Russian theater and October 7 in Israel, where these locally distributed complex attacks across multiple nodes. What are the lessons learned that individuals at the state, local and community level should be paying attention to, and we're putting that into a written product. And we're going to go brief, hopefully Mike waltz, who is, you know, now, the National Security Advisor to President Trump and Green Beret. We're going to be hopefully briefing. We've been asked to come brief the Homeland Security folks in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Virginia, and so we're gonna, we're gonna really put it out there of what this threat looks like. And we call it The Gathering Storm. The other two things is last out as a play that tells the story of a Green Beret sergeant and his family. We're touring that around the country right now in 2025 to help civilians understand the cost of war and help veterans watch it and with their families and maybe communicate what's going on with them. And then lastly, our storytelling workshops. We're putting these out all over the country, and we're using storytelling as a modality for healing and connection and bridging within the veteran community. And those are free. We put those on all over the country, and I just want to get that those three things, those three programs out there, in a big way. It's not going to solve everything, but I think it'll help a lot, and it'll, it'll, it'll allow us to really mobilize around advocacy, accountability and empowerment in a way that is reflective and relevant Ben to a post Afghanistan world. I think most of the 501, C threes that are still out there operating, and there's like 50,000 veteran URLs, they're still operating with this G watt Global War on Terror mentality. The G watts over. I mean, I'm sorry to say it, but that G watt that we knew and understood, it's over, and so we need to be looking at the new set of conditions that we face with those 1.8 million veterans that fought that war and the one that's still brewing. How do we posture ourselves as a veteran service organization to tell that story? And I think we're going to need a lot of SF guys to help us do it. And. And I'm excited about, I mean, I wish it weren't this way, but I'm excited to at least have a pathway, a runway, as you said, to play a significant role in this from the SF community,
Ben Derrick 55:11
yeah. Well, your goals are very SF, sir. I can tell you that there's nothing small about that, but also, I think they're, they're large because they're coupled with they're necessary. These are things that are necessary. So that's why I have such a tremendous amount of respect for your work, and I always want to take the time when I'm talking with Green Beret to say thank you for the life that you have led as an adult, the choices you have made, the sacrifices that we certainly haven't talked about behind microphones today as a civilian voice, I want to say thank you for who you have been and what you have done for our country and for people around the world. I'm sure it has come at great cost to you that you would never want to celebrate or highlight. So I'm doing that for you. Thank you for the life that you've led, a life of honor and of service. It is respected and we are grateful.
Speaker 1 56:09
Thank you. Ben, that means a lot, man, and I love the mission of this podcast and your organization and what you're doing, I want to say to the to my brothers and sisters from 19th and 20th man like, I love you guys, and I've worked with you a lot of years. And, you know, I've always felt like the load that you carry is uniquely challenging. Because not only did you fight the longest war in our nation's history, just like every other SF group, but you know, you didn't necessarily have the support mechanisms that a lot of the groups did, and your families didn't necessarily have the robust support structure that a lot of the active duty groups did, but yet you still did it. And the cost, you know, there was a cost to that. So I hope that, I hope that this podcast continues to help people understand that, and to anybody listening or watching this, please, that did not serve in 19th or 20th group, is to understand that these individuals are a national treasure. They play a role in allowing the Special Forces mission to happen globally. That, frankly, would not happen. If it were not for these two groups, wouldn't happen, and we would be at much greater risk at a national security level. But that is not an entitlement to a civil society that comes with it an inherent responsibility to take care of these people and to honor them and to help them come home that is not on them alone, and it's really important that our communities understand that, and it is an inherent obligation. It is a covenant, a promise that we made with them long ago and that we need to honor. And I just I commend you, Ben for this podcast, because you're helping remind folks of that, and it's going to be important, man, because our kids are watching right now. They're watching how we honor and treat these men from 19th and 20th group and their families, and they're going to make decisions on what they do with service off that, and if we don't tell the story, and if we don't help people understand, my God, what it meant to fight a 20 year war as a SF guardsman, then we failed them. So I appreciate you. Appreciate what you're doing, and thanks for letting me be a small part of it. Yeah.
Ben Derrick 58:36
Thank you, sir. I couldn't agree more. We've adopted, speaking of adopting SF, language we've adopted in this podcast and our nonprofit that's attached that two is one and one is none. So every Green Beret should have someone linked with them, if not multiple people linked with them, helping them understand these things just their inherent value in society, their value as people who are highly trained to make the largest impact in a society that so desperately needs it these days. And you're you're one of those men. So thank you for leading the charge and being a beacon, an example of what it can look like to take that sense of purpose and point it in a proper direction. I'm excited to see long term where your work takes you, and if you're willing to come back to interview you again and get the update on how things are going,
Speaker 1 59:27
Yeah, thanks. Ben, I appreciate it, man. I appreciate you, and I absolutely will.
Ben Derrick 59:33
Thank you for tuning in to the soldier fund podcast. If you're inspired by the stories of these elite citizen warriors and want to support their mission. Visit us at the soldier fund.org your contributions help us to continue to back the Special Forces soldiers of the National Guard as they fight around the world. Until next time, stay committed to stand with those who serve you.