2026 is packed with anniversary events that will ask Americans to reflect on some of the seminal moments that shaped our nation. We mark not only the 250th year since we began our monumental fight for independence, but also the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that permanently changed American life and thrust us into the multi-front, two-decade Global War on Terror. We also face another milestone that many GWOT veterans, including retired Green Beret Scott Mann, hope is given similar attention and gravity: the five-year anniversary of the U.S. departure from Afghanistan.
During the chaotic days of the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, Mann was one of many veterans and advocates to band together from the U.S. to help guide Afghans to safety as the U.S. pulled its troops, and a portion of its allies, out of Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA). Mann detailed his group’s valiant efforts in 2023 memoir Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan. Now, Mann has turned that story into a one-man show, 11 Days: The Story of Operation Pineapple Express, which asks its audience one simple question: How far would you go to honor a promise?
Mann is no stranger to the stage. In 2019, he began touring Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret, a play that brought audiences face-to-face with the many battles that special operations forces personnel, veterans of the Afghanistan war, and their families have faced during overseas service and after returning home. 11 Days was born from talk-backs with Last Out audiences eager to hear more about the final days of our Afghanistan war, Mann told the Special Operations Association of America (SOAA).
Mann adapted 11 Days with his longtime writing partner, Jason Cannon. The play “builds on my frustration after the House Foreign Affairs Committee testimony on Afghanistan, and what I thought was, frankly, mostly political theater.” To start the play, Mann stands “in the rubble of Abbey Gate,” where 13 U.S. service members were killed on August 26, 2021, and promises “to testify about the parts of the withdrawal that the committee didn’t ask about.”
In the course of about 100 minutes, Mann says that he plays 24 different characters, including Afghans moving through the crowds outside HKIA, Green Berets and veterans providing support “at the breakfast table” in the U.S., and the soldiers and Marines guarding the HKIA gates.
Though he wants the audience to understand that the Operation Pineapple Express effort “was unexpected” and “not what we were looking to do,” Mann said that he devotes no time to denigrating the political and military figureheads who garnered so much attention and blame in the aftermath of the withdrawal. His goal is not to provoke rage, but to build bridges that help audiences who may be unfamiliar with the events on the ground in Afghanistan to gain a new understanding of what happened, and why it matters.
Already, performances of 11 Days have been impactful for viewers, including Gold Star mother Paula Knauss-Selph, who Mann says screamed aloud when a timer on stage began counting down in the leadup to the Abbey Gate bombing. After the show, Knauss-Selph explained that it was the first time she had experienced the countdown to son Ryan’s death “outside of [her] own sequence of events.” Mann said that Knauss-Selph urged him to “keep telling this story.”
“We feel like this play helps people feel seen and heard,” Mann said, expecting that it can help bring healing for Gold Star families and can “eliminate and close the gap of moral injury” for the veteran community that continues to be impacted by the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan. Mann also says he hopes it demonstrates that “you shouldn’t turn the page on a 20-year war like it was a Servpro commercial, like it never even happened.”
Mann said that the play is by no means intended for a solely military audience. “If you’re a civilian and you’ve never served in the military, I think if you come to this show, you’re going to get a fundamental understanding of what happened in those 11 days of the withdrawal that you did not get in the news, that you didn’t get from politicians, and you’re going to understand why Afghanistan matters so much to our veterans.”
After each show, Mann hosts a talk back that allows the audience to voice their feelings about what they have witnessed. He explained that storytelling is an “emotional breaching tool. It gets us ready to listen to one another. It creates an environment where shared perspective is actually possible.” Through theater, a very diverse audience gets “access to some of the deeper elements of this issue,” allowing for “hard conversations about modern war, to include the way we leave our allies, the way we end wars, [and] the promises that we make.”
In acknowledgement of how impactful the play might be for viewers, Mann’s show travels with a trauma counselor, who Mann says helps audience members integrate what they see on stage and experience during talk-backs.
For the Gold Star families who lost a loved one during the Afghanistan war or the Abbey Gate attack, for veterans and advocates who devoted sleepless nights to helping America’s allies find their way out of a country in chaos, and for all who continue to support allies left behind, the five-year withdrawal is bound to be an emotional moment in time. 11 Days can provide a launching point for confronting the wounds that linger five years on.
Mann will be performing 11 Days throughout the summer at locations around the country. He has announced that he will contribute the full proceeds from his next two shows, on June 18 and June 19 at the Tally Ho Theater in Leesburg, Virginia, to SOAA founder and Afghanistan veteran Daniel Elkins, whose wife Lauren is battling an aggressive terminal cancer.
