The cast of “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” from left, Bryan Bachman, Heather Corrigan, Scott Mann, Lenny Bruce, Chris Vetzel and Cooper Mann, onstage at a performance of the play in San Diego in May 2023. The play, written by former Green Beret Scott Mann, tells the story of a Green Beret who is trapped between his family obligations and his mission in Afghanistan as he struggles to ascend to the mythical warrior afterlife of Valhalla after getting hit with a roadside bomb. (The Heroes Journey)
Storytelling helped Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann deal with post-traumatic stress after serving in the Afghanistan War and retiring in 2012. A decade later, it’s helping him — and others — deal with the fallout of that war all over again.
In August 2021, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan and the U.S. scrambled to evacuate its allies and citizens, former Green Beret Mann was busy launching the film version of his play, “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret,” on Amazon. The play, written by and starring Mann, tells the story of a Green Beret who is trapped between his family obligations and his mission in Afghanistan as he struggles to ascend to the mythical warrior afterlife of Valhalla after getting hit with a roadside bomb.
But Mann soon switched gears, founding Task Force Pineapple with other veterans to help more than 1,000 Afghan refugees escape Kabul.
“It was all-consuming until my wife had my best friends stage an intervention somewhere around October after the collapse, and I stepped away from it and got myself healthy again,” Mann said recently from his home in Tampa, Fla. “I was not in a good place … coming out of the Pineapple experience, and even writing the book (“Operation Pineapple Express,” published in 2022) because interviewing all of those folks that made it, those folks that didn’t, the veterans. I have interviewed just hundreds of veterans — iconic special operators — and watching them weep in front of me and telling me that they’re never gonna let their son join the Army, and just the moral injury that I felt and so many of my peers who fought this war for 20 years felt and the families. So there was a lot of just heaviness coming out of that.”
Around this time, Mann got a call from actor, musician and veterans advocate Gary Sinise. Sinise had seen the film version of “Last Out” through mutual friend and songwriter John Ondrasik, better known as soft-rock piano balladeer Five for Fighting.
“He was struggling, Scott, with … what did we do and why did we do it, and he was losing friends who were committing suicide, and terrible different things were happening,” Sinise told Stars and Stripes in May. “Much like the guys back in Vietnam — the veterans that I met back in the ’80s who wrote a play called ‘Tracers’ because they were struggling with their own service and coming home from that war to a divided nation and a nation really that had abandoned them. The healing play that they’d made was very, very positive for them, and Scott did the exact same thing.”
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Scott Mann as Master Sgt. Danny Patton and Lenny Bruce as Kenny Suggins perform a scene from “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret” in San Diego in May 2023. (The Heroes Journey)
The partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation has led to a summer tour for “Last Out” that kicked off with performances in San Diego and Phoenix, and continues through October with stops in Sioux Falls, S.D.; Franklin, Tenn.; Milwaukee and Topeka, Kan. Along with a preview show at Sinise’s Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago — where Sinise presented the Vietnam-era play “Tracers” in the early ’80s — these are the first performances of the play since COVID, and more significantly, since the end of the war in Afghanistan.
“When Gary called me and said, ‘You know, Scott, this reminds me a lot of Vietnam,’ I was walking in the driveway … and I just kind of fell apart on him,” Mann said. “And I’m like, ‘Gary, it is a lot like that. And if we don’t do something, we’re on the front end of a mental-health tsunami.’ I mean, I told Congress this when I testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about Pineapple. I was like, you guys don’t understand; I mean, you’re talking about 73% of the Afghan War population feels betrayed. This is really bad, and on top of all, the suicide rate. So coming back to the play, when Gary brought that up, we both agreed that this was a preexisting asset that could be put into play right now to help veterans make meaning out of their lived experience while simultaneously showing politicians and civilians the impact.”
Mann wrote the play over several years and premiered it in Tampa in November 2018. At the time, Mann and his team of actors and crew — all veterans and military family members with little to no theater experience — “thought it was a one-time thing,” according to the play’s website. But audience reaction led Mann to mount a 16-city, 28,000-mile tour out of a U-Haul van in 2019 through his nonprofit, The Heroes Journey.
“Last Out” was originally developed as a one-man show with Mann starring as career Green Beret, Master Sgt. Danny Patton. But as the story progressed, Mann knew he had to involve other characters — namely, Patton’s best friend and fellow Green Beret Kenny Suggins (portrayed by Lenny Bruce, also a former Green Beret who served in Afghanistan with Mann), wife Lynn (Heather Corrigan) and son Kaiden (Cooper Mann, Mann’s son).
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Cooper Mann and his father, Scott Mann, backstage at a show in San Diego in May 2023. (The Heroes Journey)
While not directly autobiographical, much of the play is based on Mann’s own experiences. Suggins is based on Clifford Patterson, one of Mann’s closest friends who was killed on 9/11 at the Pentagon. And Lynn Patton takes inspiration from Mann’s wife, Monty Mann, and her experiences at home while Mann was in Afghanistan.
“I started asking my wife questions about what happened when I was gone, what happened when I was deployed, and at first she was resistant — almost agitated about it,” Mann said. “At this point I’d been retired for seven years, and she’s like, ‘Why are you bringing this stuff up? I don’t want to talk about this.’ And there were times when we would kind of go at it. And then finally she told me, ‘Babe, I had to keep all this from you to keep you alive; I really don’t want to do this.’ And I said, ‘Well I think if we can put this out there, it’s going to validate what you and a lot of other family members did.’ ”
That seems to be exactly what has happened. Audiences, often made up of veterans and family members not just from the recent Middle East wars, but stretching back to Vietnam, Korea and World War II, participate in “talkbacks” at the end of the show, sharing their own experiences with Mann and each other.
“We had the sister of a Green Beret sergeant major, she stood up and she said, ‘You guys told me in two hours what my baby brother has been trying to tell me for five years,’ ” Mann said. “And so you see these families sitting together looking at the war from each other’s perspective, because the way the play works is the protagonist, Danny the Green Beret, he’s stuck between his living room and his fire base after being severely wounded, and so he can’t ascend. And so you see both, and the audience is affected by that in a very profound way because a lot of the home front stuff, no one really understands or knows.”
Scott Mann performs as Master Sgt. Danny Patton in “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret.” “My vision was that I could tell a story kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with body armor, in a way that the audience could really go for the ride and feel what it’s like to say goodbye to your wife at the airfield, to feel what it’s like to hold your buddy in your arms in his final moments because he did what you asked him to do,” Mann said. (The Heroes Journey)
But the play also was written for civilians to help them understand “the holistic horror of war,” as Mann describes it.
“I’m a father of three boys. My oldest son a few years ago told me he was gonna join the Army and he wanted to be a Special Forces guy, and that just hit me right between the running lights,” Mann said. “Because at that point we were over there, we were in this war that — most people didn’t even know that we were there. … I can’t tell you how many times people would say to me in airports, ‘We’re still in Afghanistan?’ And now my son’s gonna go fight a war that I didn’t finish. That for me became something that I felt like that had to be fixed, that had to be adjusted.
“… My vision was that I could tell a story kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ with body armor, in a way that the audience could really go for the ride and feel what it’s like to say goodbye to your wife at the airfield, to feel what it’s like to hold your buddy in your arms in his final moments because he did what you asked him to do,” he continued. “The things that go with combat that most people don’t know. To see a military spouse watch a news report with no dialogue in a scene, and just fall to her knees and scream — I mean, it rocks the civilians to the core.”
That mission seems even more important now with veterans struggling with how the Afghanistan War ended. Mann hopes to continue touring the show in partnership with the Gary Sinise Foundation, and plans to film the show in a live setting, a la the filmed version of “Hamilton.”
“The irony in all of this is that we’ve been telling stories — warrior storytelling — since we’ve been fighting wars,” Mann said. “I mean, if you look at most of Shakespeare’s plays, that’s what they do. And civil society has used storytelling as the primary way to bring veterans home from war, in every civil society on the planet, and we’ve lost that.”
The cast and crew of “Last Out: Elegy of a Green Beret” huddle before a show in San Diego in May 2023. (The Heroes Journey)
