David Mann's life started going downhill soon after he left the army in 1992. A veteran of the Gulf War, David suffered from chronic depression that he thought was brought on by unauthorised experiments he suffered during the attack on Iraq. Experiments, he claimed, that were conducted by the CIA in an attempt to make a select group of men into "super soldiers."

Mann was the leading officer of a squad that was part of a larger group of special forces soldiers whose job it was to infiltrate Iraq before the invasion and access enemy troop strength and strongholds in the desert terrain. It was during this exercise that David received special training that neither he nor the other men in his unit had asked for.

[In a rambling letter to the New Orleans Times-Herald, Mann stated that after his squad met with a CIA operative named "Red One" they were lead to a cave complex in the Iraq desert where he was subjected to a battery of tests and "mind control devices".