This month marks one year since the United States withdrew troops from Afghanistan.

For many veterans, this time brings a lot of mixed emotions.

For retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Scott Mann, sharing stories and writing books has always been an outlet.

Many of the stories he shares are about lessons learned in Afghanistan. At least one is a play turned movie, and some books are for kids.

He served 23 years in Special Forces and 15 as a Green Beret. He shared how he was feeling about the one year anniversary of the end of the 20-year war.

“I also feel this profound sadness and anger that so many of us who gave our entire youth, some of our friends gave their lives, Gold Star family members gave their loved ones. And yet, we were able to abandon our partners in the blink of an eye and then turn the page on this so quickly that we don’t even seem to believe that it happened,” he said.

Mann says there are stories that need to be told.

“The new book is called 'Operation Pineapple Express' and the subtitle is 'The Incredible Story of a Group of Americans Who Undertook One Last Mission and Honored a Promise in Afghanistan’,” he said.

It took six weeks of interviews and 90 days of intense writing to complete the book.

It focuses around a man named Nezam.

He was part of the Afghan National Army’s first group of American-trained commandos and served with U.S. Special Forces for over a decade.

“Nezam and I knew one another in 2010, we’ve been friends ever since and reached a point of duress when Kabul started to collapse in the summer of 2021 that he was hiding in his uncle’s house like Anne Frank. He had no other options. Nowhere to go,” Mann said.

When Mann got word, he reached out to a tight knit group of veterans to get Nezam out.

Working in basements and garages, the group answered one last call to service.

“The mechanism that we helped build that was almost an Underground Railroad for other Afghans to follow Nezam, became known as the Pineapple Express. It was one of hundreds of volunteer efforts that were happening across the country,” he said.

Task Force Pineapple ended up rescuing 500 more Afghans in the three days before the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport.

“When you read the book you’ll see, I’m the storyteller. I'm the old dude that maybe got people together and gave them a single direction that we might try, but at the end of the day the real heroes in this story are the Afghan people and the veterans who stood at their shoulder,” he said.

The book 'Operation Pineapple Express’ is set to be released on Aug. 30.