Scott Mann

He said, nobody's coming.

Like, we gotta go.

We gotta get up there.

Those guys, you know, they could still be alive.

And at some point, we did a bottom-up con op and convinced the powers that be up in Bagram to let Mark's team go.

And they did.

But it took like four days, I think, for them to finally get up there with all the bureaucracy and everything.

And they finally got up on the side of the mountain.

And everybody was dead at the top of the mountain.

But they stayed up there, they extracted the black box, they got every stuff, mail even, off the plane.

When they finally came back to the operations center, Mark walked into my office and he laid down a couple of pictures.

And I remember he just had tears in his eyes.

And it was one of the soldiers halfway in his sleeping bag, urine stains in the snow.

a couple of cigarette butts, you know?

And he just looked at me, you know?

And he's since passed on, but I never forgot that, you know, because it was, I could have moved faster, I could have pushed harder, I could have done a lot more, you know?

And he was crystal clear nobody was coming, that we needed to go.

And I just promised myself, that will not happen to me again in my lifetime.

That will not happen again.

And I've tried to live that life, where if it's clear that there's an institutional shortfall, if it's the right thing, you step in the arena anyway.