REVIEW: Operation Pineapple Express: The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan by Scott Mann
An edge-of-your-seat thriller about a group of retired Green Berets who come together to save a former comrade—and 500 other Afghans—being targeted by the Taliban in the chaos of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In April, an urgent call was placed from a Special Forces operator serving overseas. The message: Get Nezam out of Afghanistan now. Nezam was part of the Afghan National Army’s first group of American-trained commandos. He passed through Fort Bragg’s legendary Q course and served alongside the US Special Forces for over a decade. But Afghanistan’s government and army are collapsing, and Nezam is getting threatening texts from the Taliban. The message reached Nezam’s former commanding officer, retired Lt. Col. Scott Mann, who can’t face the idea of losing another soldier in the long War on Terror. He sends out an SOS to a group of Afghan vets (Navy SEALs, Green Berets, CIA officers, USAID advisors). They all answer the call for one last mission.
Operating out of basements and garages, Task Force Pineapple organizes an escape route for Nezam and gets him into hiding in Taliban-controlled Kabul. After many tense days, he braves the enemy checkpoints and the crowds of thousands blocking the airport gates. He finally makes it through the wire and into the American-held airport thanks to the frantic efforts of the Pineapple express, a relentless Congressional aide, and a US embassy official. Nezam is safe, but calls are coming in from all directions requesting help for other Afghan soldiers, interpreters, and at-risk women and children. Task Force Pineapple begins all over again—and ends up rescuing 500 more Afghans from Kabul in the three chaotic days before the ISIS-K suicide bombing. Operation Pineapple Express is a thrilling, suspenseful tale of service and loyalty amidst the chaos of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
CW – violence, violent deaths including children
Review
Like many others, I sat glued to the news in the second half of August 2021 as world military forces and diplomats evacuated their citizens and over a hundred thousand Afghans from Kabul. As the city descended into chaos, retired US military vets began to get desperate texts and phone calls from Afghans with whom they had worked and, in many cases, to whom they owed their lives. This is the story of how one group, among many, worked to get as many of these men and women and their families through the gauntlet of the streets, to the airport, and through the barriers surrounding it as they could.
Written by Scott Mann, one of the founding members of the group, it incorporates the experiences of several people who were in the US or on the ground in Afghanistan. In the US, a lot were former Green Beret, SEAL, or Special Forces vets who used their military operational skills and contacts to facilitate the formation of Operation Pineapple Express – so called because of the text image (shone on their phones) used to identify people for the US Airborne forces who were pulling them out of the sewage filled trench beside the airport and sending them through a hole cut in the fence.
The book is hard to read in places as it describes (not in too horrific a detail but there nonetheless) the beatings being meted out by the Taliban to those trying to reach the airport as well as the deaths by trampling, gunfire, and the explosion that signified the end and took the lives of hundreds of Afghans and thirteen US service personnel. Mann and other US vets felt themselves slipping back into the dark places that had, and still did, haunt many of them but they also believed that they had made promises to the Afghans and they meant to keep them. Here we can see how they, the volunteers, stepped forward and desperately tried. B
~Jayne
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