American Heroes: Serving on the Front Line

Destara's first pregnancy was terminated when she was 15 years old.

She didn't understand what was happening. After three more abortions, she finally learned the truth. I heard it from Focus on the Family and they were talking about pro-life being a baby, a human being in your stomach. And I was like, wow, that's pro-life. Today, Destara has six children who represent God's love and forgiveness in her life. And today, Destara is a pro-life advocate. So Focus on the Family has definitely sharpened me and I'm looking forward to continuing to being sharp. I'm not embarrassed anymore about the choices that I've made. I'm wanting to help. I'm Jim Daly. Working together, we can rescue preborn babies and their moms, giving these families hope.

Donate at focusonthefamily.com slash gift and your gift will be doubled. I've been speaking this message on fear lately and that was scary. We had to go help.

We had the ability to and I believe we were all prompted to do things, but when God opens the doors for you to go do things, the only thing that's keeping you back is the whispering in your ear from Satan saying, you're not good enough, this is dangerous. We had to and we did. That's Chad Robichaud and he's our guest today on Focus on the Family talking about his service to America and Afghanistan. He's going to inspire you to support those you know who are veterans and military members, so stay with us.

This is Focus on the Family with your host, Focus President and author Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller. John, tomorrow's Veterans Day and veterans deserve so much respect as they have sacrificed so much so we can live in a free country and it should never become trite for us to hear that we need to think about what that means. Many of them have a difficult transition out of the service, which Chad experienced and we're going to talk about that today and he's now doing a lot of great work to help those veterans being a veteran himself. And he'll share today how we can participate in supporting veterans as well. Chad also has incredible stories of his time working to rescue people during the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. We've had Chad on the broadcast before, but it's always interesting and a pleasure to have him here.

He showed radical courage, that's a good description of it, so that we can all learn from his commitment to defending what is right and we're going to get into that. And Chad Robichaud is a veteran Marine. He's an expert in veteran care and issues and he and his wife Kathy have an adult daughter and two grown sons. The boys are also Marines and a newborn daughter as well. He's written a book called Saving Aziz, how the mission to help one became a calling to rescue thousands from the Taliban. This is an incredible book and we've got it at our website. Check the show notes for the details. And then as we begin, please note that we're discussing some graphic and mature themes here today.

Keep that in mind. Chad, welcome back to Focus. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. It's so good to have you and congratulations on this newborn. Now there's a bit of a twist to this.

What happened? Well, Kathy and I have been married 28 years. Our adult children are 26, 25 and 23. We have three granddaughters through that. All our kids are married, we have three granddaughters. We had always prayed, especially Kathy, we always prayed that we would have the chance to be parents again because we made the decision really early on.

I ended up getting a vasectomy when I was 24 years old, which was probably way too young. And so through the years, we just longed to be parents again. So when we had grandchildren, we thought, okay, this is it. But God brought an opportunity through our niece who was just not in a great situation. She became pregnant. Kathy's kind of talked through her, maybe mentored her a little bit about not aborting. And then if she needed help with the baby when the baby was born to call us. And about three and a half months into that summer being here with her mom, she called us and she said, does that offer still stand? And we stepped in and God just created an amazing opportunity for us to adopt summer.

Well, and that's not the theme we're going to talk about. But what a great example of what it means to be for life, right? Yeah, in every way. I mean, this is not something that is negative at all.

This is a great situation. Well, first of all, empty nesting is overrated. We were empty nesting for like five years.

You don't look like the golfing type. Yeah, empty nesting was like five years of it. And I just I longed for that chaos in the home and laughter. And I just felt like we had more to give as parents. And God really blessed us and put us in a position to be able to do it. So we thought naively that we were blessing her.

Turns out the other way around, she's been just blessing us. Well, you know, again, it's such a great definition of what you have fought for your adult life, you know, becoming special forces and doing what you do. And we'll get into that. But isn't it interesting even in that it's a demonstration of being for life.

And all of it fighting in the battlefield for life as well. Yeah, I think I think a lot of times, especially those of us, you know, who are Christians and believers and believe that, you know, God created us at conception. That's that's life. That's what that's what I believe.

I'm an abolitionist when it comes to abortion unapologetically. And we could say that. But action means more than just speaking that like, it means stepping in when we can to actually not just see that birth, but see someone raised in life. And so it to me and Kathy, it wasn't even a question.

No, she was just telling you this wasn't even a question between us. Like we were just like, we have the opportunity to do this. God's equipped us to be able to do this. We were blessed and privileged to be able to provide a home and love this little girl.

And we're gonna do it. To both of you again. Congratulations. What a great thing and to your niece. Congratulations to her for making a hard choice, but a good choice.

Absolutely. Let's turn to the book Saving Aziz. Who is Aziz?

Well, Aziz was my say he's an interpreter is an understatement, but I got to start there. I was I was a force recon Marine. I was very privileged to try out for what's called the JSOC Joint Special Operations Command Task Force. If people weren't familiar with JSOC, JSOCs were the premier special operations units are housed CO Team 6, Delta Force, old organization called Task Force Orange. It's got a new name now that I can't I don't think I can say, but all these amazing, you know, our premier special operations units are there. I tried out, got accepted and represent the Marine Corps in that capacity of the unit. And I did eight deployments to Afghanistan. Eight deployments?

Yeah. Well, my job was a little different. So most people might imagine, big military unit, you know, uniform. I was what's called an AFO, advanced force operator, which meant it's the closest thing to describe to be an undercover in the military.

So you work in a singleton capacity, meaning by yourself, you partner with a local national, and you go ahead of your unit in non permissive areas, meaning areas where the conventional military is not allowed to go. I go ahead of my unit and build all the clandestine infrastructure to get our soldiers on target to capture kill bad guys. And the unit I was at was looking for whoever the top 10 was, you know, from mid Latin to number one, to number 10. And so Aziz was my interpreter for that. And for continuity purposes, he stayed my interpreter for all eight of those deployments. He, he saved my life numerous times. He went from being not just my interpreter, but my teammate, and ultimately my friend.

And, like, I could name several times that he saved my life, but he probably saved my life every day. Like, don't walk there. Don't eat that. Don't talk to the person.

If you talk right now, they're gonna kill us. We were not operating those mountains. I didn't go back to base. He went home. I went to his home. I lived in his home.

His wife, Hotra, made our first warm meal after coming out of those frozen mountains. And, and I held my shoot, his oldest son in my shootout when they were babies. I held them as babies.

So I have family to me. And, and so, Aziz also took you to a place that made a deep impact on you. I think it was the Killing Pool was its name. What was that? And how did it impact you? Well, it started, we were, we were watching the, I was in his home for the 2004 election with Bush and Kerry. And, and it was like Super Bowl party. And I'm like, what is going on here?

Like, why did they care more about this election than we do back home? And it really showed me America's impact in the world and how our decisions impact people that don't even, there aren't even citizens here. And so I really wanted to understand that. And so Aziz took me on this tour of showing me some of this history. And he took me to several places, one of them being the Killing Pool. And it was an Olympic pool that the Russians had built during the Russian invasion, the train at high altitude. And, and it had been drained and the Taliban had used that pool as execution pit. And so it was just, you know, riddled with thousands of holes from 7.62 caliber bullets where they would execute people.

And, and, you know, I even pulled some of those casings out with my Leatherman and kept them as a reminder, but, you know, just a very morbid, but very real sense of what actually happened there. And why the Afghan people were fighting for democracy and freedom that they never even seen before, most of them never seen that kind of democracy and freedom before, why they were so thankful for America being there and why they were so resilient to fight alongside of us against the Taliban. You know, in that context, though, how did Aziz spur you into a rescue mission, a rescue mentality? Describe what was going on.

This is during or right before the US military pulled out of Afghanistan. What were the circumstances? And again, how did Aziz become the, I guess, the reason that you decided to do something? Can I share one story of him saving my life?

Sure, because that ties to this, just to say who he is. We were, he and I were in a place called Batakut, Afghanistan. And in 2005, the command we're working for was going after number six on the top 10 list. And so we went ahead to build all the infrastructure to get our command on target to capture or kill that guy. We get out this truck, we're walking across this open field. It's muddy, it's snowy, the wind's glowing. I remember being mad at Aziz, drag, walk through this sloshy mud, which ended up saving our life later. We get through this muddy field and on the other side was this farmer, and he told us that the Taliban was there and looking for a foreigner, which is me.

And so Aziz is like, hey, brother, we have to go. And so we start walking back across this open field to get to our truck, which now is a large open danger area. We're about 100 yards away from the road, which is behind us, and three trucks, boldly enough flying Taliban flags drove past us. They hit the brakes, they backed up, about 20 to 30 guys jump out and they began yelling, yelling at us.

And we talked about what we would do if they did attack us, the immediate action drill we would do. And so as we were talking, and we were just going to ignore them, but I heard the sound. I don't know if I heard first the sound of the rifle fire, or if you've ever, hopefully you haven't ever heard a bullet fly over your head. You hear that, the pop of the air over your head went, and I knew that shot at us.

And at the moment, you can either run and probably die because you're in this open field or stop and you're going to be captured and or killed or fight. Aziz saw something that it didn't. He saw a Taliban fighter pop up with an RPG, a rocket propelled grenade launcher, and that fire would have been drawn to me. And he stopped in the middle of being covered by me.

And he shot that guy and dropped it before he launched that RPG. And that rocket never went off. At that point, I just yelled run because we broke our rhythm with our drill. We ran into the woods and got back to our safe house.

They couldn't drive across the field to us. We reported to our command. They asked if we were compromised.

I said, I don't think we are. They said, hey, it's up to you guys if we stay. And Aziz was like, we're staying. We're finishing this.

Yeah. Well, what a heart pounding story. That's Chad Robichaud on today's Focus on the Family. And he's talking about the book he's written, Saving Aziz, and all the experiences that went into the making of this story, this real life story. And there's so much here. We're glad you've joined us. If you want to learn more about Chad and Mighty Oaks Foundation, his outreach, and this great book, Saving Aziz, stop by our website.

We've got all the details in the show notes. Chad, let's talk about saving your friend Aziz. You were back home in the States. You saw the news about this withdrawal from Afghanistan taking place. And you decide, okay, I've got to make sure my friend and my interpreter who worked with me somehow gets out of this mess.

So what did you do? Well, the one thing I knew is there's no way I could live with myself if I sat on the couch and watched Fox News and just was mad, knowing that I have the ability to do stuff like this. I'm a veteran. I'm not in the military anymore, but I still have the connections.

I have the ability. I've been part of other stuff like this before. I have to go get my friend. And so luckily, I have a lot of great friends in the veteran community, particularly in the special operations community. And I called in some favors and said, hey, will you come help me go get Aziz?

I owe him my life and we can't leave him behind. How many men are you talking about? Twelve men and one woman. Twelve special operations veterans and one woman, Sarah Verardo, that came together to make this team. And so when I say I knew Aziz was in danger, we had to go get him. It wasn't just because he was an interpreter.

It was specifically because he was targeted. And so, again, my friend said, yes, we put together his team as we were preparing this operation. Very incredible group of people. Four Shriikhan Marines, Navy SEALs, Green Berets, guys from the CIA ground branch was our paramilitary unit. Very experienced individuals. We're putting together this team and one of our teammates say, hey, it's great we're going to get Aziz, but there's 3,000 orphan kids that were just abandoned because people were survival mode.

Yeah, running. And we have to get these kids, too. In that moment, we kind of all stopped. Everybody, people of faith. And, you know, the Bible has a verse, Isaiah 6-8, hear my sin be. We all felt our heart's burden for that calling. And that's why I called it Save Our Allies Coalition was called Task Force 6-8 from Isaiah 6-8. And we all just in a moment said, let's get as many Americans, women, children, interpreters, Christians, let's get as many people as we can.

Let's just see what God does. And we leaned forward and said yes. We've got a lot of credit for this. Like, we're awarded for a lot, nominated for a lot of big awards.

I got the Bonhoeffer Achievement Award. But the truth is, Jim, I'm not smart enough or capable enough to pull off what happened. Maybe courageous enough. That's the point.

Some people would say stupid enough. I mean, because it was bold. And we just knew we were being obedient to what God put in our heart. But what happened, the only way I know how to explain it, I've been asked a lot how we did it, is to point to God. Because what happened was an orchestrated miracle, a modern day miracle that God did.

Describe some of those orchestrated points. Well, I mean, first of all, we're civilians. We're the only civilians allowed to do that. And I called some congressmen, some senators, got an audience with the Royal Family. We all got to put a conference call together. We briefed them and they were quiet over an hour long call.

I'm thinking these people think we're crazy. But in that call, they said, yes, you could bring them here. We'll open up our humanitarian center, doctors, food, like care for the children, everything, the red carpet.

In addition to that, we'll give you a C-17 plane, which is the large military planes and pilots. And if you filled that one up, we'll give you another one. So that was like miracle number two.

The next miracle, I believe, was only in day three. I get an unsolicited call from Glenn Beck, who I've done a lot of work with at Mercury One. And Glenn Beck called me and said, Chad, I went on the radio, much like you with your voice here, to inspire people to help. I went on the radio to get people to help.

I wanted to do something. I thought I'd raise a few thousand dollars. In three days, he'd already raised $21 million. Over $40 million total. He's like, what do I do with it? I'm like, I need to start chartering planes. Because we were thinking, how are we going to pay for this? It's going to be millions of dollars.

And it was just incredible to watch so many people come together just for nothing else to come together in a moment where, you know, a wrong injustice was done and people did the right thing. Yeah. And I guess the question everybody's asking right now is, what happened to Aziz? He's here. He's in Texas.

We hired him at Mighty Oaks Foundation. And one of the things that was really on my heart was I wanted to see this through. I didn't just want to get people out. Because you got to think, these people did, you know, most of them fought for 20 years, then they lost everything. They left with their family in a backpack. And many of them, their families were broken. People were killed.

They lost family members behind. So when an SIV that served the West for 20 years makes it to America, they don't get access to VA care. They don't get, they can't get care for what they, so how are they supposed to assimilate and reintegrate into society? The VA won't care, our government won't care for them. They won't treat them any different than anyone else. In fact, they treat them less being a legal process than those who are coming in illegally.

And so they really get, you know, the short end of the stick. So we felt as a ministry at Mighty Oaks, we felt burden to say, we need to create a program for them, even though they may be Muslims at the time, like we're not going to hide who we are. We're going to tell them we're a Christian program. We're going to teach them biblical principles. And we're going to come together with them and show them the love of Jesus and help them and their families get back on their feet. So we put Aziz in charge of that. And so for the last year, by the way, Aziz is a Christian, he's been baptized.

And so we just completed the first SIV program at Mighty Oaks Foundation at Scott Rose Ranch in California. We had over 20 of those who served with us and fought alongside of us for 20 years, just get shown the love of God and biblical principles to work past the issues they have, not only fighting for their freedoms, but losing their country and losing many of the family members. And it's just incredible to see Aziz's leadership. You know, Chad, for those of us that sit and watch the news, it's hard sometimes to humanize what's going on when you're there and you're with their families, you're fighting alongside them. They're saving your life, you're saving their life. I mean, that's a bond that most people don't have the experience of. But it certainly does create a friendship that is probably deeper than family in many ways. Well, I mean, if you ever go on a 10 hour car ride with someone, you probably either love that person or hate them at the end of that car ride. Like me and Aziz did a lot of those car rides together. We spent weeks, months by ourselves, just the two of us sleeping on the side of mountains at night, just staring, talking. I was so interested in him talking about democracy and the freedom for his daughters and sons that he hadn't even had yet, like to learn about who he was and him learn about who I was and see him risk his life for me, for us. For us to be sitting here doing this podcast and for all of us to go to church on Sunday and protect the freedoms in America.

He was willing to do that. And so, yeah, the bond that you get from that and the bond that other U.S. service members have with their interpreters is just something that's hard to explain. At the same time, I mean, just that thirst that you're describing for freedom.

I mean, this is the great battle. My heart breaks most for the Afghan people and people might not share with me. And I get it. You don't have that same personal connection.

But how could you? I think it's hard to be human and not have your heart break for these 20 million women and little girls are left behind. Women, as young as little girls, as young as nine years old, being drug away until they're discarded. If you can't have compassion for that and know that America played in part in that from the decisions we made, then, you know, I don't know if there's any human in you.

Like, I mean, how could you heart not break for that? I remember the last part of the evacuation. And I don't know if you want to go into how the stages we did in the evacuation. But the last part of the evacuation was me and Dennis Price. We were going into Tajikistan and we would spend 10 days swimming across it.

The two of us swim 10 days swimming across the Pangea River to help women and little girls get out. And Taliban was there. The Chinese military were there. The Russians were there.

The Tajikistan border was there. And it was super scary. And as Kathy was driving me to the airport and, you know, I don't know if anybody's ever drove in that airport for a long trip before and to get in a fight with their spouse. But me and Kathy didn't have a good conversation because she was upset at me for going through that. She's like, got Aziz already.

Aziz had already been rescued. We had already got 17,000 people out. Like, why are you doing this?

What are you trying to prove? And I just felt so convicted to go and I was trying to explain to her, like, why it was so important. And the only way I really knew how to put words into it was to say, what if it was us? Like, what if our sons would be there forced to be pushing the madrasas to become terrorists? Wouldn't we be praying that someone somewhere would come help us?

I know I would be. And I just felt in my heart that somewhere over there was a dad, was a mom praying that someone would come get their daughter. That's what compelled us to go back that last time and go into Tajikistan and swim across the river every night for 10 days to help.

Like, you know, I've been speaking this message on fear lately. And that was scary. But on the other side of that river was way something way more important than my fear or the danger of it was to go. We had to go help. We had the ability to. And I believe we're all prompted to do things. But when God opens the doors for you to go do things and, you know, the only thing that's keeping you back is the, you know, the whispering in your ear from Satan saying you're not good enough.

You're not good. This is dangerous. We had to.

And we did. And Chad, I'm just I mean, I mean, it's I'm in awe because it is such an amazing thing. And, you know, it can go to your head.

It hasn't. And that's a good thing. But when you're capable of doing something like that, when you're capable of taking somebody's life in the military or that kind of situation, that's a lot of power that you have. And but to hear you speak about using it for good, I think that's what God's heart is.

Man, does he have the power? Of course. Yeah, of course.

We hung the heavens and earth. Right. But he restrains himself so that more could be saved. And that's what you're describing it to me. I mean, even with all of the combat description and all the, you know, attributes of war, there is something in there that is godlike to go into that kind of danger and put it on the line and save someone, save a woman, save a little girl from the torment of what you're talking about. And wow. I mean, it's just I wish I could go back and do it with you.

That's what it makes me feel like. I want to do that. I want to be that. Well, as I select it, it's really humbling you say that, first of all, and it speaks to who I pick to go. I want to mature men who are capable of violence, but willing to put that violence on a shelf to do a humanitarian need that was that was that was in front of us at that time. Yeah, that was very important.

Such an amazing description. In fact, we had a little discussion before we went to air on this. But when you look at the word meek in the New Testament, where the Beatitudes, the meek shall inherit the earth, meek there, that word is interpreted to mean you have the capacity to bring force, to bring harm, to bring bodily injury, but you choose not to.

For the better good. That's a very different description than what we have come to understand in terms of meek being effeminate or rolling over. That's not what that's talking about. And you so embody that, you know, you could choose to kill somebody standing in front of you. But you restrain that for the greater good.

That's a very different description. Well, I think it's the men that God wants in his kingdom, because you're not really meek if you're not capable. If you're not capable of doing violence, you're not really meek. You're passive and you're kind of a participant in life.

You're not really, you don't really have the choice. You're meek by because that's who you've chosen to be. Not that decision you're making at the time, whether you're gonna stand up and fight for good or evil. Like, I think that the men that God wants in his kingdom are men that are capable of violence, but able to keep that under his strength. Because then you have you have strength behind that meekness. There's a strength that you could bring forward in times that you need to. And Jordan Peterson talks about this in an incredible interview.

He talks about the necessity for that in this world. And I think I personally believe that's why the church is in so much trouble right now, because you have passive, weak men in the church that can't stand up against culture. They don't even have the courage to stand in a pulpit or stand in front of their congregation or community to speak for the children. And if you're a pastor, and it may sound harsh, but if you're a pastor, you stand in a pulpit, you can't speak to that issue because you think it's political, then you are weak. And you probably should step down off that pulpit and leave it to someone that can speak to that.

That's a hard charge, but I hear exactly what you're saying. And, you know, again, I think everything we're seeing here is how to rescue people. This is the Lord's heart for all of humanity. That's why you sent Jesus to rescue us, to save us. There was nothing weak about Jesus, by the way.

I don't think so. I mean, you're talking about a guy that walked, you know, thousands and thousands of miles and some rough sandals his whole life. Well, and then went to the cross. Went to the cross, yeah. He died for us. Knowing what he was going to face.

Yeah. And, Chad, you're, you know, doing so much in the name of Christ to help people. Mighty Oaks, what is it all about? Describe the ministry and some people I'm sure might say, I'd like to help you in that.

Yeah, well, I mean, Mighty Oaks has been around for 12 years. It came out of me coming back from those eight deployments. And, you know, Aziz and I obviously heard some of the hard things we went through. I came home and dealt with debilitating panic attacks, anxiety, depression, diagnosed with PTSD.

Shame from that because I thought that was beyond ever dealing with something like that. That led to a downward spiral that ended in me separating from my family, facing divorce in an affair, just totally treating my family like the enemy. A lot of people came around me to help bring restoration in my life, and they did a lot of things, but nothing more instrumental than the restoration of my life through encounter with Jesus. Surrendering my life to Christ, being discipled for a year by a man named Steve Toth. And the end of that discipleship led to me having a deep burden on my heart to pay that forward to others.

And God just not only burdened me, but equipped me to start the Mighty Oaks Foundation. That was 12 years ago. And through that last 12 years, we've done, we do four things really. We do resiliency programs based around the world. So we have access to active duty troops. And then on the recovery side, we have five ranches around our country, California, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas. And we do recovery programs that are six days long.

And active duty, all four active duty branches send people in orders to us. We pay for everything. We do about $8 million a year in programming to where we bring active duty service members, veterans, spouses, and first responders to these programs tied into ongoing aftercare and biblical counseling. And it's just been incredible.

We had almost 6000 graduates now, but we're doing about 1000 per year moving forward. And again, it's all free to them. And Chad, thank you so much. Thank you for your courage. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for writing Saving Aziz. And when you see him, which hopefully will be probably tomorrow or the next day, tell him hello, give him a big hug.

And I hope someday I can meet him. Yeah. And again, on Veterans Day here, let me say thank you. And to your sons, too, who are serving now in the Marine Corps. Thank you so much for what your family has done. And from me and myself and Mighty Oaks as well, thanks to all our veterans out there.

Yeah. Amen. Well, what a remarkable conversation with Chad Robichaux. And we can't encourage you enough to get a copy of this book, Saving Aziz, how the mission to help one became a calling to rescue thousands from the Taliban. It is a fascinating read, and I know you'll want to get a copy of that. Contact us to learn how. Also, we mentioned Mighty Oaks Foundation. We'll have a link in the description for the show so you can learn more about what Chad's doing and some of the great work they're achieving. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family.

And again, we've got details in the description below. And John, like we often do, if you can make a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy of the book Saving Aziz as our way of saying thank you for getting involved in the Focus Ministry. When you donate to Focus, you give families hope. And right now, through a special matching opportunity, your gift will be double dollar for dollar. So your gift can bring healing and redemption to twice as many families. Your donation will help us create programs like this, shine a light on life, and offer help to families, particularly veterans' families, as we're observing that holiday this weekend. So donate as you can. Our number is 800, the letter A in the word family.

And when you do, just request that book Saving Aziz by Chad Robichaux. Hey, Chad, again, thank you so much for being with us. Always good to see you. Anytime. I love being here. And thank you for joining us today for Focus on the Family. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team, I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time, as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. And face them together. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.