185: Scott Mann, Life After Afghanistan

Please welcome Retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. 

As a Green Beret, Scott designed and led the local village stability operations program in Afghanistan.

After leaving the military, he began to focus on using his experience with the struggle of transitioning from a fast-paced and high-risk lifestyle to build a healthy transition to the civilian world of work and family. As a result, he launched "Heroes Journey" to help servicemembers, first responders, and their families cope with post-crisis trauma through storytelling.

Scott also wrote and featured in the play and film "Last Man Out," which portrays the impacts of war on our Veterans and their families

Additionally, after Kabul fell to the Taliban, Scott and others launched Task Force Pineapple Express to help Afghan partners leave the country. 

Lastly, Scott has made three appearances on TEDx to discuss his work with veterans and first responders and is announcing his new book, "No One is Coming to Save You," which will be released in October. 

This discussion is split into two separate episodes. 

The first one is to discuss Scott's work prior to the book "No One is Coming to Save You," which airs in October. The Second episode releases in September and is a discussion and the book.

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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail.com 

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

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Special thanks to Ahimsaz for the sample of “Shahamat." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmoH-fHhwQ

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Transcript

00:00:03    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:40    JACK GAINES
Please welcome retired Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann. As a Green Beret, Scott designed and led the local village stability operations program in Afghanistan. After leaving the military, he began to focus on using his experience with the struggle of transition from a fast -paced, high -risk lifestyle to the civilian world of work and family. As a result, he launched Hero's Journey to help other service members, first responders, and their families cope with post -crisis trauma through storytelling. Scott also wrote and featured in the play and film Last Man Out, which portrays the impacts of war on our veterans and their families. Additionally, after Kabul fell to the Taliban, Scott and others launched Task Force Pineapple Express to help Afghan partners leave the country. Lastly, Scott has made three appearances on TEDx to discuss his work with veterans and first responders and is now announcing his new book, No One is Coming to Save You, which will be released in October. This discussion is split into two separate episodes. The first one is to discuss Scott's work leading up to the book, and the second is a follow -up discussion and the book. So enjoy.

00:01:48    SCOTT MANN
We run really, really hard and we've got a lot going on in our family and stuff, you know, just with my parents' help. And so getting time to just recharge and recover is, it's a long game, right? You got to play the long game.

00:02:01    JACK GAINES
Well, I don't want to get too deep into your persona. Oh, no, no, it's fine. Or your family or anything, but you're finding balance in that to where it's not killing you or anything. Well, I think so.

00:02:08    SCOTT MANN
or anything. Well, I think so. Balance is something I find myself pursuing, never achieving, but I think as best we can. My dad and I are very similar in the sense that we both, believe that when we leave this world, we will get the car in sideways with a yeehaw and roll out the door. So it's hard to turn that off, but I think you have to manage that because it's just not everybody runs at that rate.

00:02:31    JACK GAINES
Right. And also sometimes you don't know if you're going 70 or 90. Yeah. And you might be actually driving harder, faster to that skidding sideways. Yeah. Great. You know where you could have a fruitful, happy life if you pace.

00:02:36    SCOTT MANN
And you

00:02:46    JACK GAINES
Or if I just built the habit of running at this pace and I can't know how to stop?

00:02:50    SCOTT MANN
That's very well said. And, you know, you have to ask yourself sometimes, why am I running this hard or going this fast? Is it something I'm running towards or something I'm running from? That's the other thing.

00:03:01    JACK GAINES
Now that you've come full circle, you've done your time in the military, you've gotten out, you've got kids coming into the military. My audience are either diplomats or military or aid or field agents. They're in the mix right now. How do we help them to come to a better transition? Should they be working the same strategies and tactics they are with Partner Nation, with their families? Do you see them needing more space? They come home and transition. Do you support counseling? What are your thoughts on that?

00:03:34    SCOTT MANN
What makes that question even more profound is how contextually relevant to the audience that you just described to me. And you actually provided some answers in that as you asked the question, which is great. I feel like I learned more after I got out of the military about what it means to be more engaging, more effective as a father, as a husband, as a leader in the military. And I think the reason was because I went through a really, really bad transition. I went from... This place where I felt like I was very high performing as a Green Beret in Afghanistan, doing village stability operations, working very, very heavily in the interagency environment. Then all of a sudden you're out and you're walking around your house in your flip -flops, showering every other day. No one's calling. Yeah. No one's emailing you. It's like changing planets. The other part of it for me was coming back to a country that was so divided and just so different than what I had remembered. So all of that conspired to create an environment for me where it just got very dark, very disconnected, very isolated. And it caused me to really reevaluate everything about myself, everything, and question everything about myself, from my manhood to my abilities as a father, as a husband, my relevance on this earth, which was very scary. And I almost didn't come back from. But I did. And in that process, through the help of some very, very skunkum civilian mentors, was a way to kind of reconnect at the most basic primal visceral level to my own nature, to those around me, and really through old school interpersonal skills like storytelling to make meaning out of things that I had assumed that I understood. And I know that's a long way around, but what I'm getting at here is that my journey to even answer that question was really ugly and clunky, and it was post -military. And then it was reacquainting myself with the real primal realities of the human operating system and how humans navigate the world, regardless of our industry. And once I kind of reconnected with that, I found a lot of answers, I think, that I wish I had had when I was. engaging partner nations when I was in the interagency environment, when I was a father and a husband in a high stress environment. And so what I would say to maybe kick things off is I believe in the definition of leadership that Professor James Clawson puts forward out at Darden University. He says that humans are mostly energy and that leadership is the management of energy, yours and those around you. And I don't distinguish between the management of that energy with my sons. My wife, an ambassador, client at Capital One that I'm trying to work with, or an employee who's had a terrible family experience and is distraught. All of that is the management of energy in real time. Both parties trying to meet their goals. And only the context changes. And I think it's our ability to have a process for managing energy with human engagement that's so important. And I don't think there's a way of negotiating with ambassadors and a way of negotiating with your children. I think leadership is leadership and it really comes with how we lead ourselves.

00:07:02    JACK GAINES
That's interesting. You say it was an ugly transition, but it's a transition that, as you know, many veterans struggle with every day and that you actually broke through the wall. Yes, those are the first to break through any wall are going to get bloodied, but you have found a vision of expanding that voice so that others can see it. And I've kind of seen your efforts in plays and the books and the talks and the podcasts. as you trying to say, hey, yeah, it was hard. It was real hard for me. Let me help you avoid some of those things so you don't have to go that dark and you don't have to get banged up like this so that we can all come out and prosper together. Yeah.

00:07:40    SCOTT MANN
I asked myself a very troubling question, but actually a question that probably saved my life in those dark times was, do I still have relevance on this earth? Do I still have something to say? Because I felt like maybe I didn't. But as I started to really explore that question, I realized that I did. I had a lot to say. I had learned a lot as a Green Beret working in low -trust, high -stakes environments, in particular with village stability operations, because I had been gifted the opportunity as a field -grade officer to really be the program manager for Green Berets back out into the rural areas of Afghanistan, working very closely with civil affairs and SIOP, but also state department, development workers. Even the academic weeks that we would run before every deployment, it was my opportunity to put those things together. And I got to meet this amazing community of practitioners from all these different realms that would never sit in the same room together, yet they were looking at the same wicked problem. And when you brought their functionality of understanding, really, the human operating system, as I call it, this ancient creature that is hundreds of thousands of years old and how it's trying to make sense of a modern world. It was the synthesis of all these wonderful points of view from these various disciplines and agencies that helped me craft a methodology that I still teach today. I call it rooftop leadership, but it really is this ability to understand our innate realities as humans, what makes us tick at a practitioner level, well, not a clinical level, and then use those as filters in how we see ourselves and how we see the world that most people don't take the time to do in this churn that we're in. but also as levers for authentic influence, storytelling, active listening, nonverbal physicality, breath. And that actually informed the answer to my question because I said to myself, man, if I could share that, that I learned at the latter part of my career on how to go into these really dynamic environments and manage the energy in the room through the science, not just the art, but the science of old school interpersonal skills. What could that do in this time of low trust and churn here in the country? So for me, that was a real profound answer because then once I learned how to use storytelling to do that, storytelling became the modality by which I could bridge this gap. And then once that emotional breach was done, then come in with the things about the human operating system that we've ignored, we've forgotten, that can really address a lot of today's ills. And that started to give me purpose again. It started to give me meaning again. And frankly, it allowed me to evolve into, I consider myself an artist. I consider myself a catalyst. I consider myself a person who was put on this earth to leave tracks for others, as my dad says. So yeah, it's been a really cool ride, but I do view the rest of my life as one where I try to pour myself into other people. and really hold space for them while they figure out how they're going to have that strategic impact through human connection. And the interesting thing is that sense of purpose is universal in a lot of ways.

00:10:49    JACK GAINES
interesting thing is that sense of purpose is universal in a lot of ways. It's not just soldiers that struggle with that. Yeah. And they struggle with, is this all I am? Is this what my goal is? And it takes working with these folks and trying to find out what their vision is and the challenge of overcoming all the obstacles to achieve. Some sense who they are and why they are a part of this earth. It's a tough one, especially if people are really ambitious. That's a hunger. That's a beast to feed.

00:11:19    SCOTT MANN
feed. And we're taught to be that way in the line of work that most of your listeners are in. We're conditioned that way at a subconscious level. We already have drivers to pursue that, or you probably wouldn't be in that line of work. But here's the thing. You just gave a perfect example that I'd like to just back up and pull the thread on a little bit when you talk about purpose and meaning. So in my book, Nobody's Coming to Save You, that I've got coming out this fall, that is one of the areas where we go deep. And so purpose and meaning, we talk about it all the time. But to me, it was always kind of nebulous. Even when Simon Sinek talks about people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. I love that statement, but I couldn't help but wonder, yeah, but why is that? And I'm like a little five -year -old. Because I need to know why that is. The Green Beret in me wants to understand the science of it. This just I'm OK, you're OK kind of thing. This just good self -talk and I should do it because you said so. There was so much skepticism coursing through my veins. I needed to understand at a visceral fundamental level why meaning and purpose is so profoundly important. And so one of the things in this community of practice is that we're all in. Why is meaning so important? Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning is a classic, but. Even more recently, the applications of neuroscience have opened up all kinds of levels of understanding of why we can't ignore this stuff like purpose and meaning. And one of the best I've seen is a guy named Dr. Ivan Tyrrell. He's from the UK and he wrote a book called The Human Givens. He's a psychiatrist and he runs an institute called The Human Givens Institute. Here's the basic premise of it. Every human on the planet has innate physiological and emotional needs that must be met. They are non -negotiable, and they are standard across all humans. Ethnicity, culture, language, they're the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline are these innate physiological and emotional needs that we as humans use to navigate the world. And if those needs are met, we're good. We can even move towards self -actualization on that same pyramid. But if they're not met, then we are going to find ways to meet them, oftentimes unhealthy. Purpose and meaning. is one of the most profound and important human givens inside of us. We are meaning -seeking creatures. We are meaning -assigning creatures. We seek meaning and we assign meaning in everything that we do. So if you come out of civil affairs or you come out of the diplomacy core and you do not pursue with rigor, the same rigor that you did in your former life, the elements of meaning and purpose, then the body, the spirit, it is going to fight it on its own or it's going to revolt. There's going to be a lack of alignment and it is as needed as water and air and shelter, meaning and purpose. It's not an optional thing for us. It's necessary at a fundamental level. So that's the kind of thing where I spend a lot of my time developing this methodology to help high performers see that meaning and purpose is not a casual thing. It is a necessity. And you must feed that beast. And if you don't, it will eat anyway. And it's a very ugly thing when it does.

00:14:39    JACK GAINES
Right. An interesting add -on is that most humans also need a sense of community, which is what I see you doing with your work through the talks, through podcasts, is you're building camaraderie through your work so that people see that need is being fulfilled. There are options. You don't have to drink your way through it. There are people that can help you. We are a team still, even though you've got a five -inch beard hanging off your chin and you're a civilian now. It's fine. We're still a team. We're still people. And we need to work together.

00:15:11    SCOTT MANN
Yeah, well said. And that was where I was really gifted the opportunity to learn firsthand. I mean, I grew up in a small community in Arkansas. My father and mother come from small communities. So I've always been aware of the power of community. I certainly understood that as a Green Beret. go local or go home. The power of community and bottom -up is so important. But it was really towards the end of my career, Jack, when we were doing disability operations, we were building communities of practice inside and outside Afghanistan where you would work with functional practitioners in the realm of low -tech agriculture, dispute resolution, good governance that was around restoration of relationships, tribal dynamics. The point is, There were all these amazing people who were working the same problem, but from a different subculture or a different lens. And we built communities of practice around these wicked problems. And it never left me. It just affected me in such positive ways. I left the military not encouraged about what was going on in Afghanistan, but very encouraged with how these communities of practice could form in a starfish and spider kind of way that Brofman and Beckstrom write about. And I still use that today. I still believe in that today. Younger says in tribes that it is probably communities that will determine whether we live or die as a civil society. And we can create them. People are starving for connection. Human connection is another human given. And if we can help create in a healthy way environments by which communities can be built, particularly around wicked problems, because that then assigns meaning and purpose without a lot of effort. and it unifies us in a very focused way. So yeah, I'm a huge believer in communities. It's one of the pillars that we do at Scott Mann and Rooftop Leadership. And we've built it around the play. We've built it around storytelling. We've built it around getting Afghans out of Afghanistan and helping them out. So yeah, I'm a big believer in it.

00:17:16    JACK GAINES
Matter of fact, when people research longevity, they usually go to the Italian Bulldites and say, oh, everyone there's 106, 105. And they're like, how do you do it? And they're like, When they're out walking everywhere, they're exercising, they have a sense of community. Yeah. They all work together in that community to help each other. Sure, they have food, water, everything. And so it builds cohesion within them. So I don't know if you've seen those reports, but I've always found that to be interesting.

00:17:42    SCOTT MANN
Yeah. I always say that if we just think of ourselves as meaning -seeking, emotional, social storytellers who struggle. In other words, we're a mess. Three S's there. But you accept the best. Yeah. We are social creatures. We are wired to be social. It's our superpower. We don't have fur fangs or claws, right? But yet we still sit on top of the food chain. How is that? Well, we are wired to build teams better than any mammal on the planet. And in my assessment, we have gone down a dangerous path in the last 50 years of getting away from human connection. We are actually more divided, more isolated than we've ever been. Our technology, while on the surface, appears to connect us. I believe we're more divided and isolated than we've ever been. And two plus years of COVID didn't help either. So we've got some work to do in our ability to build communities and our ability to build families and our abilities to build strong team places, strong nations. All of the fabric of these social institutions is under stress. Right.

00:18:43    JACK GAINES
I wanted to bring up village stability operations, if you don't mind. You worked that program from 2010 through 13? Yeah, I worked that program from its inception with Seth Jones and Dr.

00:18:52    SCOTT MANN
Yeah, I worked that program from its inception with Seth Jones and Dr. Arturo Munoz, Ed Reeder, all the way through when it really stood down. And then I wrote a book called Game Changers about it going local to defeat violent extremists with the cooperation of Scott Miller when he was in command over in Afghanistan and put that out as via primer. of lessons learned and what we got right and what we got wrong and if we ever had to do it again. Village stability is remote area for an internal defense. It was very similar to what was done with the Montagnards, with the CIDG program that the Marines did and the CAP program that we did in Guatemala. It's not new, but the Vietnam veteran SF mentors that I had who helped us put it together were adamant that when it was done to capture what happened. in the form of kind of a methodology. And we did. And so I was with that program in various capacities all the way through.

00:19:51    JACK GAINES
I was in Afghanistan in 2013 at the embassy running the Taliban counter -influence program. I was brought in to review it and then rewrite it because it wasn't working at the state level. And I wrote the plan very similarly. It was all about... having people out in the field who were reporting on what's going on with the Taliban, whether they're working in the markets, if they're working with local elders, and then reporting into the provincial leaders what those efforts were, and then giving them recommendations on how to engage, to build a better police force, how to take the things that the Taliban did that the population liked, like having kids read the Quran on the radio, but also bringing in the things that the Taliban could not compete in. It was hard. There was a lot of politics, a lot of fighting over how policy should run. But I felt like the program worked because we got a lot of good feedback from the population. I think the key indicator that something was effective was when an advisor to a provincial leader said that some village elders from his hometown came up, visited him, and they said, hey, the Taliban came to talk to us. And they said that we want for you to leave your posts and stop what you're doing. Come back with us. Explain why you were doing it to the Taliban. Apologize. Never do it again. Everything will be okay. And so he wrote up that note and I sent it up to the chain and it went all the way up to the White House to show that, hey, we are making a difference. That created a lot of heat. It didn't really create a lot of light on the program, as usual.

00:21:24    SCOTT MANN
Yeah, it's unfortunate.

00:21:25    JACK GAINES
Yeah, but I left it in a good place and then it was a one -year deployment. I handed it off and took off, but it never felt like... the whole of government understood that Afghanistan is about people and local councils, local jurgas, local leaders. And once you start there, you allow the government to build from there, it would be successful. I felt like it was just a rush to place a national government, a national law system. You're right.

00:21:52    SCOTT MANN
It was trying to fit a square peg and a round. It really was. And we tried to replicate our own civil society in a civil society that was radically different. That was probably far more status and honor -based than anything that we have at our individualistic contract society here in the West. So it was very flawed from the outset. And then when you look at our government and how it operates, I mean, they're far more tribal than any Pashtun. And, you know, it's hard to get to even sit in a room on anything. I do believe that there were, again, at the execution level, for example, USAIDOTI. Very impressed with those folks overall and the work that they did. And we did a lot of collaboration, most of it in formal, but there was some programmatic collaboration within, as well as other expeditionary diplomats, Department of Agriculture. Again, in my mind, everybody that was really having the impacts were the ones out there at the local areas. And then they were rendering status back to the higher levels of command and control and governance and programatics. And that's where the break was. bottom -up meets top -down. And that has always been a historic problem, yes, in Afghanistan, but also in any formal, informal arrangement. And we'd better figure that out. That is not an excuse to do as poorly as we did and to get it as wrong as we did. It's certainly to pull the trigger on a systemic ally abandonment. that will go down in the annals of history as probably the most wholesale cataclysmic abandonment in American history. That will far surpass Saigon in my assessment. And that could have been avoided if our governmental processes and our ability to talk to one another had been stronger and we could have gone out of the way of our own egos. But that's probably a whole different podcast. But I do struggle with all of that. But I think that what's important is One, we need to recognize that there is still a re -emerging threat in that country right now that is very, very dangerous and that we have lost 98 % of our human intelligence capability. So we don't really even know what's going on in that country except from left behind commandos and interpreters and the national resistance. And we're not working with any of it, only the veterans that are still on the phone with them. In some weird way, it's almost like veteran groups have more actionable intel. than the formal lettering agencies because they're not talking to the people who are actually trained to observe and report and deal with these things. Those people were left behind and we never hung up the phone with them. So it's really bizarre. I was telling somebody this the other day that stuff coming off the battlefield in Afghanistan about what al -Qaeda is doing, what ISIS is doing, what they're doing up in the Panjshir, bin Laden's sons being back in the country. Somebody kind of rolled their eyes that it was a veterans group that put that information out. And I'm thinking, well, hold on. They've got more fidelity on actually what's happening than most people because they're still talking to the people who know how to observe and report. And so my point here is big threat coming out of Afghanistan that we are in danger of ignoring again in a pre -911 kind of way. And then the other thing is there's been a tremendous moral injury, I believe, heaped upon. Not just the veteran population of Afghanistan, but our diplomats, our development experts, and were put in a position where they had to violate what they did. And moral injuries are nasty critters. And even if they are not diagnosed as a clinical thing, they're very much real. And we have done some damage to the men and women who we asked for 20 years to go take care of a very hard problem. We have abandoned them. We have turned the page on them. We didn't just abandon the Afghans. We abandoned my assessment, the men and women who did what we asked them to do day after day, month after month, year after year, and just turned the page on them. That's why I actually wrote Last Out. That's why we do the play, because there's a whole lot of restoration, accountability, healing that we need to do for our own folks around the way this war ended and ensure that it doesn't happen again to our kids, right, who are serving now. So it's not just a lessons learned thing with Afghanistan and just shaking our head and moving on. There's still a lot of active work that the veteran, diplomacy, and expeditionary diplomat and development community need to do. If we don't, as I testify to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it is going to visit us tenfold in the coming years.

00:26:34    JACK GAINES
So we have nothing right now except for ISR. We got photos from space. This over -the -horizon crap.

00:26:37    SCOTT MANN
-the -horizon crap. It didn't work pre -9 -11, and it didn't work when we killed 10 innocent people in Kabul, and it's not going to work to stop another attack. Anybody who believes that, I would love to debate them. I would love for them to explain to me how if we lived on these built -up fire bases for the first 10 years of the war, and we had zero fidelity on what the Taliban and al -Qaeda were doing, how in the hell are we going to have fidelity from an ISR platform 10 ,000 feet in the air? on what's going on in a former ANA camp in Helmut Province. Right. There's no way anybody that's been there at a local level is going to believe that. And we're setting ourselves up for something really, really nasty, in my opinion. And I really hope that we figure this out sooner than later because I'm afraid to attack planning. In fact, I'm pretty certain attack planning is already underway.

00:27:34    Close
Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. I'll have the email and CA Association website in the show notes. And now, most importantly, to those currently out in the field working with a partner nation's people or leadership to forward U .S. relations, thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes. 1CA Podcast.