#412 - “Mercy!” - JSOC Tier 1 Operator: Taking a Life, Shadow Gov & Bin Laden Debate | Chad Robichaux

Summary

Julian Dorey Podcast #412 - “Mercy!” | JSOC Tier 1 Operator Chad Robichaux

Date: April 21, 2026
Host: Julian Dorey
Guest: Chad Robichaux (Marine, JSOC Contractor, Author, Humanitarian)

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Overview

This episode features an in-depth, multifaceted conversation between host Julian Dorey and Chad Robichaux—a Marine Corps veteran, former JSOC Tier 1 contractor, and founder of the Mighty Oaks Foundation. The dialogue traverses Chad’s operational experience in Afghanistan, the corruption and moral gray zones of American and global policy, the atrocities of war (with special attention to Ukraine and Afghanistan), the controversies around government funding of enemies, and Chad’s personal story of trauma, resilience, faith, and redemption. The tone is raw, opinionated, and challenging, addressing uncomfortable truths around U.S. foreign policy, shadow government influence, the military-industrial complex, and the psychological burdens borne by those on the front lines.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Are We the Good Guys? (00:34 – 03:27)

• Chad's deep-rooted patriotism, family military legacy, and initial belief in the "good guy" narrative of U.S. military interventions.

• Growing realization of geopolitics’ complexity, corruption, and mixed motives—even doubting the official story of 9/11 over time.

  “Do I believe that jihadist terrorists were on those planes? Yeah. Do I believe there is no way possible there was complicity in our own government or that we knew things we could have prevented? I can't say that anymore.”
  —Chad Robichaux, 01:56

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2. Ukraine: Humanitarian Action & War Profiteering (06:26 – 13:22)

• Chad’s ten trips to Ukraine as a humanitarian—a week after the invasion to evacuate Americans left stranded.
• First-hand accounts of atrocity: mass graves, civilian casualties, and the horror of modern warfare in a first-world setting.
• Critique of U.S. and Western powers for retreating embassies/forces, indirectly giving Russia a “green light.”
• Highlight on corruption, massive war profiteering, and, per Chad, how 80% of appropriated funds stay with U.S. defense companies.
• Motivation for aiding Ukraine: for “people that can't help themselves,” not politicians or regimes—"if you ever let your politics get in the way of your compassion... you should probably change your politics" (09:29).

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3. Afghanistan: Betrayal and the Withdrawal Catastrophe (13:43 – 21:10)

• Detailed breakdown of the failed evacuation, the strategic disaster of giving up Bagram Air Force Base and shifting to a civilian airport.
• Stories of rescuing Americans and allies while U.S. policy left tens of thousands behind.
• “H-Kaya was treated like an embassy” (18:46), with the White House relegating evacuation to State Dept. control—Taliban controlling the perimeter as Americans/allies were executed in the streets.

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4. Funding the Taliban & the "Martyr Fund" (22:11 – 27:36)

• Kirk-jerking segment on ongoing bipartisan U.S. payments to the Taliban—$40m/week for “humanitarian aid,” another $40m in cash for “counterterrorism,” with much siphoned by top Taliban wanted by the FBI.

• American taxpayer money funneled to a "martyr fund" for families of Taliban killed by U.S. troops—“no Gold Star family in the U.S. gets that” (24:53).

• Flagrant lawbreaking (“criminal activity by the letter of the law,” 22:54), hidden from the public, with limited political will to stop it.

  “Forty million dollars in cash a week...all four locations, the people that run those four locations are all on the FBI's top ten most wanted list.”
  —Chad Robichaux, 22:59

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5. Systemic Corruption, the Military-Industrial Complex & Shadow Government (27:36 – 52:55)

• Political dysfunction and the deep influence of lobbying; Chad calls for a ban on lobbying to break the corrupt feedback loop.

• American involvement in war almost unbroken ("out of 250 years, only about 16 out of war").

• Reflections on the futility of expecting the system to fix itself: the only way to break Congressional incentives for power/money would be near-impossible mass action or radical reform.

• Discussion of the "fixer class," shadow government concepts (fixers like Epstein as middlemen for globalist interests), and the impossibility of rooting out all corruption without risking destroying the fabric of functioning society in the process.

  “I think it's a system that's been misused...our founding fathers would never have predicted this level of corruption from within.”
  —Chad Robichaux, 43:34

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6. Are 'Bankers’ and Technocrats Running Global Conflict? (69:46 – 73:15)

• Host Julian raises the increasingly plausible idea that world conflicts are "bankers' wars," fueled by a global network above elected governments.
• Chad agrees: “I think it's real”—and observes the same dynamic, fueled by “fixers” and “technocrats.”

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7. Clandestine Operations – Moral Dilemmas & Taking Life (72:54 – 80:54)

• Chad’s job: clandestine logistics for Tier 1 direct action, involving deep undercover integration with Taliban leaders—often child molesters and murderers.
• The profound moral burden of collaborating with evil actors for "greater good" missions; compared to the moral gray of intelligence agencies allegedly working with "fixers" like Epstein.
• Most personally traumatic experiences: exposing mass graves of women and children in Ukraine, proximity killings as a police officer, the psychic toll of action and inaction.

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8. Personal Trauma, Resilience and Recovery (91:24 – 189:27)

• Chad’s background: Southern Louisiana upbringing marked by military legacy, poverty, broken family, and the tragic murder of his stepbrother.

• Early police work (inc. wild undercover "21 Jump Street"-style narcotics cases), then into military and Tier 1 contractor roles.

• Chad’s shooting of an armed suspect as a young cop: the trauma, aftermath, and enduring psychological scars.

• The cumulative effect: undiagnosed PTSD, panic attacks, the impossible transition from war to civilian life, eventually leading to a suicide attempt.

• Assisted by his wife’s brutal honesty ("how can you do all this but quit on your family?"), and the mentorship of a faith leader, Chad finds new meaning in service to others.

• Founding of Mighty Oaks Foundation—impacting 500,000+ warriors in recovery programs, focus on faith, brotherhood, and purpose.

  “…what keeps me up at night is how do we turn around and save something that's been hijacked?”
  —Chad Robichaux, 44:28

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9. War Crimes, Atrocity, and Indelible Memories (80:21 – 87:38)

• Details of mass graves in Ukraine: “1,400 bodies...mostly women and children, bound, partially burned” (83:07).
• The cruelty of conscription and lost young men—on both sides.

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10. The Afghanistan Bin Laden Hunt & Government Secrecy (151:32 – 153:19)

• Chad confirms his and his unit’s direct involvement in Bin Laden pursuit; notes credible anecdotes that U.S. forces knew Bin Laden’s location several times but were ordered not to act.
• Opines that sealing Bin Laden’s fate, even with conspiracy questions, was a strategic and emotional victory for many who served.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On Betrayal:
  “It stings to know we are used at times as pawns of bigger things: political power... sheeer greed and profit.” (04:03)
• On Ukraine’s Atrocities:
  “Everything I’ve seen in my life, the worst has been the atrocities in Ukraine... you see first world, kinetic war, ballistic missiles the size of telephone poles in apartment buildings.” (06:41)
• On Humanitarian Motivation Over Politics:
  “If you ever let your politics get in the way of your compassion for people, you should probably change your politics.” (09:29)
• On Government-Empowered Taliban:
  "I couldn't do that [pay Taliban at checkpoint] to evacuate Americans, but we could send them $80M a week and have been doing it for three years now." (22:18)
• On Systemic Dysfunction:
  “Our presence doesn’t start wars. It prevents wars. So taking our troops out of the most strategic place in the globe...had no personal interest for us.” (14:31)
• On War for Profit:
  “You remove the consequences from him. You take away the consequences that he’s going to have and you give him the green light—and I think that was very deliberate.” (11:45)
• On Political Solutions:
  “One of the greatest things that this country could do to fix ninety— I believe it’d fix ninety percent—of the problems we have: term limits.” (35:13)
• On Self-Reflection and Recovery:
  “All these things that happened to me—as bad as they were—didn’t put me in that spot with a pistol to my head. I ended up there because of choices I made in response to those things.” (185:50)

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• 00:34–03:27 — Chad’s view on American morality, realization of government deception.
• 06:26–10:10 — Chad’s Ukraine humanitarian missions and personal observation of modern atrocity.
• 13:43–21:05 — Detailed recounting of Afghanistan’s withdrawal/disaster.
• 22:11–26:01 — Taliban payments, U.S. hypocrisy, and the Martyr Fund.
• 27:36–44:40 — Systemic corruption, term limits, shadow government, and the policy/lobbying cycle.
• 72:54–80:54 — Clandestine operations, moral dilemmas, and working with “necessary evil.”
• 83:07–87:20 — Discovery of mass graves in Ukraine.
• 151:32–153:19 — Bin Laden pursuit, missed operations, and government intervention.
• 170:16–173:03 — Return to civilian life; struggle with PTSD and suicide attempt.
• 185:50–188:11 — Finding faith, the role of choice, and creation of Mighty Oaks Foundation.

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Closing Thoughts

• The episode skillfully blends granular, boots-on-the-ground experience with high-level analysis of American foreign policy, government corruption, and personal resilience. Chad’s candor about trauma, the moral gray of policy and covert work, and the imperative to find purpose and faith gives the conversation unusual emotional depth.
• The dialogue is frank and consistently patriotic, but never naïve: both men agree that America is exceptional, yet wracked by self-inflicted wounds from profiteering, secret agendas, and moral compromise. The solution, to them, is public awareness, institutional reform, and personal responsibility—and above all, to privilege compassion and truth over tribalism and inertia.

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Books Mentioned:

• Saving Aziz (memoir of Afghanistan evacuations)
• Mission Without Borders (Ukraine humanitarian work)
• Silent Horizons (fiction, Book 1 of a series)

Chad’s Foundation:

• Mighty Oaks Foundation – recovery programs for warriors & their families

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Contact/Follow:

• Julian Dorey Podcast – YouTube
• Chad Robichaux – Instagram | Books & Foundation

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For anyone seeking a clear-eyed, inside look at the realities of war, power, and recovery—this is essential listening.

Transcript

[Julian Dorey]

foreign you know you and i were just talking off camera we've been having a nice conversation today thank you so much for having me on your show by the way that was pretty cool yes i don't know if i've done where we both do each other's shows the same day at the same time really this might be a first which

[Chad Robichaux]

is pretty cool that's pretty cool thank you for doing it by the way i mean you know definitely in in your in your footsteps trying to get to you know build our audience up to where reach as many people as

[Julian Dorey]

you're reaching well you're doing a great job and obviously like the show took off pretty quickly as well when you started a couple years ago i've been seeing you for a long time so just keep doing what you're doing but you know we're going to get into your story today which i think is obviously really important for people to hear but because of your background working so many years in the military going to some of the most dangerous places and being like a true blue american patriot as i as i would certainly refer to you you know we were just talking off air do you ever wonder nowadays or did you even wonder back in the day if it's like are we the good guys or are we

[Chad Robichaux]

the bad guys no man i i i mean i i come from a long history of military my family like i'm from very southern louisiana super you know i wouldn't say blue cup blue collar is not the right word like white rubber boots like fishermen shrimpers like i i grew up hunting fishing and in the swamps of lou but my family has always served not career military people but went and served their their time world war one world war two korea my father's first mariner family served in vietnam i was a i was a marine both my sons are marines so like just always had this real sense of patriotism so when i joined the military at seventeen years old in nineteen ninety three like like man i i i believe that was signing up for something special and by the way i do believe it is still something something special but i never understood geopolitics in in the intricate web of like corruption and influence and and things that are done for with alternate agendas yes that we that i've come to learn and it's was very disturbing to me it makes me really i mean when i went to afghanistan you know i i was a force recovery and then i i ended up on a contract it was a contractor on a jsoc task force and i went to afghanistan eight times and my son went to afghanistan after me in the same war but when i first went to afghanistan i believed that when those powers fell and president george bush made a vow to make that right that wrong to america right man i was all in like completely all within i never thought for a minute during my eight times in afghanistan that i would ever question the intent of why we went there and if you had told me just two years ago when i seen this stuff about the twin towers and the conspiracies these guys are freaking crazy like like we we were attacked on our own soil and that's what i spent my life i lost friends for this i would have never thought in a million years that i would question that and here we are sitting here today you know not far away from when the twin towers fell right and you know do i believe that that jihadist terrorists were on those planes yeah do i believe that that there is no way possible that there was complicity in our own government or that we knew things that we that we could have prevented it i can't say that anymore that's right and i never thought in a million years that i would sit here especially on a podcast and admit that i wouldn't i wouldn't admit that if i didn't if i went deeply to serve by it what does that

[Julian Dorey]

feel like to come to at least the realization that you know what it's not what they told us it was when you dedicated so many years of your life to fighting in the very theaters that we got sent to after that and your own sons did yeah as well hey guys three quick things number one if you haven't subscribed please subscribe huge huge help number two if you'd like to join my patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes you can join via the link in my description or in the pin comment below and number three if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make content from the show and make money you can join via the discord link in my description below

[Chad Robichaux]

it's a deep sense of betrayal i i don't feel like i don't what i don't feel is like the american dream is lost that it was all a lie that i i've i've my patriotism was fake and and that i don't believe that i still believe in america good i i still am a extremely powered patriot i don't i'm still very proud of my service and i'm proud of my son's service i'm proud of all my friends of service proud of every the service of every man and woman that's done the uniform since seventeen seventy five and fought bled and died for this country and are doing it right now while we sit here over in iran regardless of what politician either made the right choice or made the wrong choice for alternative reasons regardless of that our men and women in uniform haven't always and always will i believe do the right thing for the defense of freedom for america and defend people around the world who can't defend themselves so i'll never let them take away that from me or from our troops but it stings to know that we are we are used at times at pawns of bigger things of political power of of and and of just sheer greed and profit i mean when you think about things like by the way you might hear me sometimes bashed a military industrial complex but i am proud of our military industrial complex because i want america to have the biggest baddest weapons on the planet that way anybody that snaps up to us we have the ability to destroy destroy them so the military industrial complex is good but it also creates opportunity for misuse and abuse and that military industrial complex has been misused and wars have been stored it over profiteering and ukraine is their latest the latest example you know putin put one hundred thousand troops into border he flexed and and president biden made the decision to remove our our u s consulate our embassy and our troops out of out of ukraine which allowed for the article fifty violation not to be there the rest of the western world followed suit and putin came across the border and now hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on this war hundreds of billions of dollars and and and millions of innocent civilians not politicians not service members innocent civilians have been killed i would say well over a million civilians have been killed i don't know the exact number now

[Julian Dorey]

i can look it up but i i don't think we probably wouldn't be

[Chad Robichaux]

it probably wouldn't even be reported correctly but i've been to the front line of ukraine ten times as a humanitarian and rescue i've seen the bodies i've seen mass graves or i leaked mass

[Julian Dorey]

graves to wait you've been to ukraine

[Chad Robichaux]

ten times ten times yeah i was there the week after the the invasion

[Julian Dorey]

whoa what were you doing there a

[Chad Robichaux]

week after to pull americans out after our white house abandoned americans there and i mean that's what did that look

[Julian Dorey]

like man hold on i didn't know

[Chad Robichaux]

everything i've seen in my life the worst thing that i've ever seen has been the atrocities of ukraine that's why i'm so passionate about this because i looking at it from that side from and most of my time i spent on the other side of the russian like in russian occupied territory seeing the war seeing the front line troops and seeing the atrocities there so i could say from that side and then this side being in dc that billions of dollars that we that we've spent those you know probably close to three hundred billion dollars only eighty percent of it i mean eighty of it stayed back here twenty of it has went to ukraine and so we talk about supporting ukraine eighty of it stays here for weapons manufacturing the people in dc that have the power and influence to end that war and i'm going to say dc zawinski biden and now even this administration right and i know president trump has really pushed for this credit to president trump and jd vance for really pushing for peace on this but the people that pull those levers are the same ones making the profits and and and staying at office because of those who are making profits because of the lobbying and so war is a business and and that business cost lives and i've gotten a lot of heat by the way of because i run a christian ministry and and conservative and christians are like what are you doing like asking me what are you doing in ukraine like we have you know we have a border and we have all this stuff there and and by like i never went to ukraine because you know they like to whisky's corrupt and i'm like yeah corrupt surprise the politician is corrupt right like read a history book right and so so is people in washington dc but i would never go do something like that because it's a winski or biden or anybody else i go i go to do these things for people people that can't help themselves and and if as a conservative or as a christian like me like if you ever let your politics get in the way your compassion for people you should probably change your politics like we we went there to help people and we've you know my team and i could say right now like my buddy dennis price for street con marine runs heroes for humanity like my buddy seaspray all these guys are still out there all the time like rescuing people and stuff like that in ukraine in ukraine all over the world and they don't they don't ever do it for none of them care about the all these but guys that i know that are in this space humanitarian risk they could care less about the politics of it they just care about humans and and and yeah i probably care more about the politics of than any any of the guys i work with because i'm just kind of tapped into both worlds but those guys care less like my buddy c spray i don't even think he votes like i mean he probably should but i don't think he votes he just all he cares about is people and these guys risk their lives every day for people and and ukraine man it was just it was just horrific because you're not looking at in ukraine you weren't looking at i think all of us that had served have been used to third world iraq afghanistan africa we've seen like third world atrocities but when you roll across that border in ukraine it's it's like here i mean kiev's not different much different than we're right now you it's a first world country pizza parlors ice cream shops movie theaters plays daycares pe it's every it's people like us war kinetic first world uniform military firing ballistic missiles the size of telephone poles in apartment buildings that's what you see in in i mean i've stayed in the i've stayed overnight in the in the shelters with families that have lost everything family members their house everything and they're just it's it's i wrote a book about it called mission without borders and it's because the book's kind of about me and my son doing it together because my son oh he came with you he came with me so to take your son into a war like that is was a pretty crazy thing wow but and you were there a week

[Julian Dorey]

in so you're seeing it when yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

we went there right because we knew it was gonna happen i mean we were watching it my buddy seaspray was on top of it the most he was there before he actually went there a few weeks before kind of staged and we were watching what does that look like well we you're just like okay like the white house is starting to you know close embassy embassy and and and they're moving troops out and you just have to know how this works right i mean russia's not going to come across and attack ukraine while they have the western you know you and the the united nations there i mean not the united nations the nato nato there yeah because because of article article five violation and you know they're not going to indiscriminately hit a u s troop so when you move out start moving out the western world you're giving putin a green light and and that and that's what we knew was happening but we were watching them do that just like we watched we watched the biden administration do several times they did it in sudan they did it in in afghanistan obviously the afghanistan evacuation which i was heavily involved in ukraine they move people out they move the the government people out but they don't move the savans out first and so now you're leaving americans behind and you're gonna you know that border is going to be just like gridlock to get

[Julian Dorey]

out i never heard someone put it that way though and i don't you know you're just putting the visual on it but yeah the context and deeper meaning of what you just said is pretty wild giving putin the green light and it makes sense yeah because if you're pulling out all your people you're pulling out other allied government people who would be involved in protecting ukraine you are essentially creating the inevitable instead of say leaving them there and saying i dare you to attack while people are

[Chad Robichaux]

here our presence is always a deterrent around the world and so you you remove the consequence you remove the consequences from him like you take away the consequences that he's going to have and you give him the green light and i think that was very deliberate by

[Julian Dorey]

the way i that's what i'm getting at yeah that feels extremely yeah most dress shirts make you choose between looking polished or being comfortable mizzen and mane is the first shirt i've worn that actually does both these are clothes you actually can't wait to keep on from a full day on the job to after work plans mizzen and main makes classic menswear with performance fabrics so you can look sharp and feel great all day long with no compromises they actually invented the performance fabric dress shirt over ten years ago and since then they've perfected it with modern fabrics mizzen and mane's shirts and pants look refined yet they're stretchy lightweight moisture wicking wrinkle resistant and completely completely machine washable no ironing no dry cleaning when you put their clothes on you feel the difference instantly you can wear them literally anywhere from the office to the golf course from yard work to backyard barbecues and also something i really like about mizzen and maine is that this is a veteran led organization they offer a year round military discount and proudly give back to veteran organizations and right now missing a main is offering our listeners twenty off your first purchase at mizzeninmain dot com link in my description below promo code julian twenty that's mizzen spelled m i z z n and maine m a i n dot com promo code julian twenty for twenty percent off your order missing in main dot com promo code julian twenty link in description below and if you'd rather shop in person you can find missing and main stores in select states but better yet use that link in the description below so you

[Chad Robichaux]

can support the show oh that feels

[Julian Dorey]

w god see i'm looking at the world a whole different way these days if you know what i mean well

[Chad Robichaux]

i mean feels that's one example but you could go around the world and

[Julian Dorey]

look at scenarios like that exactly exactly and we know there's been corruption done in these and in in in countries that people decide not to care about that's a really that's another you know

[Chad Robichaux]

afghanistan's the same thing yeah it's an important afghanistan afghanistan you know the the white house is in the in the mainstream media has given this big narrative in twenty twenty twenty twenty one our troops have been there twenty years endless war by the way president trump made a mistake he should declared the war was over in a victory in twenty eighteen because he did he just didn't declare it he should have i mean we went to we shifted in twenty eighteen to support an advisory role and we didn't lose any more troops we were supporting and advising we was down at little as two thousand troops but then president trump didn't take that win he should have biden comes in and he's going to he's going to take the win but what he says is we've had this endless war american sons and daughters are dying there we have two thousand troops bro i can name ten places around the world that we have two thousand troops we still have eighty thousand troops in japan since world war two we have forty eight thousand troops in germany since world war two we have thirty thousand troops in south korea those numbers might not be exactly right since since the korean war like our presence doesn't start wars it it prevents wars right so taking our troops out of the most strategic place in the globe bagram air force base between iraq iran russia and china had no personal interest for us because there was only two isis training camps there at the time now there's probably about sixty and and you got pakistan having a a war this week started there because because of that the the the terrorist training camps going on there and in the jihad that's going to launch out of there around the world include the west and and and why so why would the us do that well why would be china china wanted to be able to move sanctioned oil from iran across the across afghanistan to china how could they do that with the us military there they can't so need to us military leave china wanted access to the mineral rights in the hindu kush mountains li the lithium mineral rights is worth they say hundreds of trillions of dollars but probably infinite amount of money and and i got called the conspiracist when i said it on a week before the withdrawal but we left in we left in august thirty first and and by the first week of september china had the mineral rights mineral rights

[Julian Dorey]

you think we were given that you the conspiracy is that the bad forces evil forces in the us government were trying to give that to china i

[Chad Robichaux]

think they were i think i think i think well i think it was back i mean i think if my personal very speculative by the way i don't have any proof of this i think i think we owed we owe china a debt to the biden family for personal business and for the election i think i think they're involved in

[Julian Dorey]

one hundred trillion dollars worth of lithium for a ten million dollar debt maybe if that's what it was yeah or

[Chad Robichaux]

the you know the election right they helped they probably helped with the election interference in in in in in twenty

[Julian Dorey]

twenty the lith the lithium that's a

[Chad Robichaux]

big jump the lithium alone the lithium's

[Julian Dorey]

a bit you i mean we've seen people do less for having you know pictures and videos of them kids with

[Chad Robichaux]

the epstein files you business deals that they're keeping quiet right and between the biden family i e hunter and and and the big guy and you have and then you have the the oil from iran to china you have the you have the lithium but you can't discount the milit the strategic military positioning of bogam air force base who took over bogam air force base when we left not the taliban the chinese did and we we left you know upwards of the number is very contested but up to eighty billion dollars in us equipment and technology behind it's insane so i mean the whole thing was just a complete mess but again we left we took our we took out our military closed our bases before we moved out our us citizens which was the

[Julian Dorey]

afghanistan withdrawal was from my civilian ass looking in the worst executed and not the military's fault by the way the worst administratively executed thing i think i've ever seen as it pertains to the united states military definitely in my lifetime

[Chad Robichaux]

but probably ever i was very involved in it because you know i led the evacuation of i i got my my old interpreter out and then we my team stayed and we ended up getting seventeen zero zero zero people out

[Julian Dorey]

seventeen zero zero zero yeah so how'd

[Chad Robichaux]

you do that it was it was very coordinated logistical operation between multiple you know a number of ngo's and and efforts i mean honestly i can't take credit for it i think it was a modern day miracle by the grace of god to be like to be complete frank because i'm not smart enough or capable enough to pull off what happened but but originally i went to get my interpreter you know aziz was i wrote a book called saving aziz it's actually being made into a film right now wow but but i mean aziz was my i did eight deployments to afghanistan with him he was my because i worked in like this kind of undercover capacity as a singleton operator aziz was not only my interpreter but he was my teammate my friend and and i lived with him i i was there when i held his kids when they were born he saved my life multiple times and so when the evacuation the withdrawal was happening i i made a decision to go back and get my my friend and his wife and his six kids and how you

[Julian Dorey]

get into the country well we had

[Chad Robichaux]

to get permission from the joint chiefs which i'm not a big fan of general millie but but we got permission from general mill's office so i got to give him credit for giving us permission to go there with only ngo they allowed to go to bagram air force base and then but then getting there was one thing now i had to now i had to get i had to get the the base to allow us to move people onto the on the base from outside the wire which i'll take a step back the the neo operation it's called the non combatant evacuation operation that's typically run by the department of defense so now the department of war right that's that's the knock about an evacuation operation anytime something bad happens in a country and we have to evacuate civilians that is a duty of the department of defense the white house took it from the dod and gave it to secretary blanken in the state department so essentially h kaya i mean cars at international airport was treated like an embassy if you if you think how the state department treats the embassy they use the military the marines the marine the marines they they use them as security and so that pretty much is how they ran that that that that facility which how many cars that international airport which we had already shut down bagram air force base which would have been the best place to do ev because it was a military base to a to a they we gave up that and shifted to a civilian airport run by the afghans which is crazy to me mind blowing but so we moved there and then the state department coordinates with the taliban our enemy of twenty years and gives them the outer perimeter of of of kabul airport so now you have civilians trying to get you have our allies innocent women and children you have american civilian expats expats there trying to get to the base and the white house saying if you want to leave all you got to do is get to himy cars at an international airport well the military wasn't allowed to go out and get them they formed this inner circle security they gave the outer security to the taliban now the taliban are literally executing people in the street that's not rumor by the way they were executing people in the street so some twenty year old girl that came from here in new jersey didn't want to go there teach english or work in a medical aid center or an orphanage or or christian chris yeah she's supposed to go there and show her blue passport to the taliban who she told who that she need to be safe from all these times that she was there and and and the u s military and international security assistance forces were protecting her from now she's supposed to go show a blue passport them while they're executing people in the street it was atrocious that the white house was given that that advice and that why

[Julian Dorey]

so our mutual friend sean ryan has done a lot of work on the funding that goes from america to the taliban that's been going on for a while yeah and i remember when he was first looking at this my reaction even with sean who's plugged in was like no fucking way no way and then he proved it forty million ways to sunday that it's true it's had it's been brought up by some brave people in congress who have actually tried to help out now but like i

[Chad Robichaux]

interviewed burchette last week it's not out it's not out yet but that's one of the questions asked him where we're

[Julian Dorey]

at with that still because he's working on it yeah so he's one name i've heard working on it but it's like i try to look at like the sixty chest and i know the world's a weird place but what the fuck why are why because it's been it's been all kinds of administrations by the way left and right why are what possible reason could they have for having any business ties whatsoever in any way for anything to the taliban so

[Chad Robichaux]

during the evacuation i had to move people across checkpoints stuff like that right we had to move people americans allies innocent people if i were to pay five hundred us dollars to tell to the taliban to get them through a checkpoint right i would i would have been i would be in prison right now the us the department of justice would prosecute me for paying paying to a ter a terrorist organization i'm not allowed to do that even as humanitarian but we could send them i couldn't do that to evacuate americans but we could send them eighty million dollars a week and have been doing it for for three years now more than that so i'm going to really if you don't know this it's going to really piss you off that money by the way is is forty million of it is is is for humanitarian aid so they send forty million dollars a week through to the taliban and that money is supposed to be for them to to distribute to ngo's but just like in africa any anytime someone's in a dictator position to use it that money and food and resources and medical aid as power how can you keep doing that when they're not even they a woman can't even see a doctor because a woman can't be a doctor but a woman can't see a male doctor so there's no women's health care right for anyone over the age of like nine years old but you're still giving them money how about put some rules on it if you could give it which by the way i don't believe you should give it but people are still starving to death people are still freezing to death but we're going to continue to give forty million in any business world you're in if you don't deliver you don't keep getting the funds the other forty million is for get this the other forty million is in cash and it's for counterterrorism that counterterrorism that cash is delivered to four locations in all four locations the people that that run those four locations are all on the fbi's top ten most wanted lists one of them has housed prison american prisoners that whole time and one of them is is bin laden's bin laden's son that's where that cash is going forty million dollars in cash a week when we first left where we had two terrorist camps now we have sixty terrorist training camps but we're giving them six forty million dollars a week in cash these guys are in the fbi most one this is this is not this is this is criminal activity i'm not saying i'm not saying it's like legitimately by the law yeah the criminal activity for us to be giving this money to them but it's but it's happening every week so sean and i broke this a while back we put we did a had a signature campaign to get this exposed and because it was hiding it and and congressman burchette is one of the guys still pushing it but he's fighting against people in congress and he's fighting against people in the senate that still want to keep this funded and so here here here's the part of that tell you to tick you off because it because as me it really ticks me off and the american people should know this to know how bad it is inside that money there's a taliban mortar fun mortar fun mortar fun so if any tal every taliban member that was killed by a us service member during the war on terror is given is given a house property in a in a thousand dollars of us dollars tax us taxpayer dollars a month as a mortar fund because we killed their taliban family member during the war on terror there's no gold star families in the united states that gets that i mean name a gold star family in the united states that gets a house property and and a thousand dollars a month if if they are outside of the you outside of afghanistan that mortar fund is a system to move back and get a house property in one thousand dollars a month we're pay that's our us taxpayer dollar by the way oh yeah that's a slap in the face to every service member every every gold star family that lost someone in combat and that is that is not something that has happened it's something that's still happening today where chad

[Julian Dorey]

where does that how does something like that start who has that idea who sits in the room

[Chad Robichaux]

and says you know what is a

[Julian Dorey]

good idea we're gonna not only are we gonna fuck up the whole twenty year war and ruin all the work that people gave their lives for by pulling out and leaving all our tech behind and letting china take over all the lithium and shit like that but on top of that yo you know all those gold star families that we like send a letter to say thanks for your fucking service and never pay attention to again while their kids can't fucking pay for college or wait we're going to keep doing that to them and the guys who did that to their family so that they're dead and can't enjoy their husband father brother or anything anymore we're going to pay them what we would pay them yeah we're

[Chad Robichaux]

like to make sense right make it

[Julian Dorey]

no no no it's not even make sense that's evil that is the definition of evil where does that conversation start and how can a head roll so that conversations like that don't happen well

[Chad Robichaux]

to me it's what we're doing right now is the only solution because mainstream media is not going to expose it yeah of course because i've shared this story specifically with details too many mainstream media outlets and they haven't all all sides by the way but we we have to inform the public because the only reason these people sit in power they have the power to do that is because the constituencies allowed them to stay there yeah vote them there and allow them to stay there yeah we have to get these people out we have to continue to get these people out and we the people but there's

[Julian Dorey]

a lot of people by the way that aren't voted who are running those conversations people don't see right i agree with that yeah how do you get rid of that without burning the whole house down at once which would have catastrophic consequences in my opinion yeah as fun as that is and as much as i want to do that yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

i have to i'm with you to

[Julian Dorey]

be like what's the best thing for america while we can root out evil too and allow the system not the system as we have it but like the system of us having a functioning country on a day to day which somehow we still do slightly how do we keep that running while getting rid of all the bad gears in in

[Chad Robichaux]

the wheel i i think one way is is guys like me and you and i've been i've been a little bit try to be a little more intentional about this we always we always bring the problems and not solutions and not solutions and we and we don't we don't cheer on the guys that are doing well because we're so frustrated with the house and our congressional representatives and our senators and our politics we're so frustrated it's so easy to just focus on the frustrations and that's why i made sure i said merchant by name because guys like him are going against the grain they're they know they're going to probably get pushed out by their peers for doing the right thing but they're doing it anyway so when they when they do a good job like this when they put their career in a line when i say i hate to say career political positions are not careers it should be a place to serve but they put all of it on the line to do the right thing then we should put our energy behind champion them too we got to get behind them and and say hey this is what we want like instead of just saying this is what we don't want with this guy we gotta say when this when the guy does the right thing this is what we want we want a guy like him that's going to push the envelope and and and and fight against this

[Julian Dorey]

stuff you remember john runyon no he's a great football player he was the left tackle on well first the titans but then the eagles for many years in the two thousands and great guy when he finished his career a few years after his career he's like a he's living in south jersey i guess he was bored and he's like a moderate republican i'd say i'm gonna run for the house so he runs for congress he goes to congress i want to say i don't have it in front of me he was there for either just a two year term or like he started the second term or whatever as they run every two years and then he said this i'm going home and i'll drive some ubers in my spare time and the reason i had a lot of respect for it is because when people asked him why he said he got there he ran on like whatever his platforms were and he's like all right this seems cool got funding from the gop or whatever it was just a house race it wasn't a senate race or something like that it's like all right maybe i can go there and make a difference goes down to dc and within a few days he was like oh oh we can't do shit oh all right so everything that i actually want to do i know they're telling me i have to do oh this is bullshit and then he was like fuck this i'm leaving and i actually thought it was an amazing example for people not to be like you'll take your ball and go home but to be someone who also was a known name before he went in there did not have to do this job at all he's worth tens of millions of dollars and then at least come out of it and say hey by the way people you know how you think this whole thing's rigged it is it is yeah according to a recent rand support amanita muscaria was the third most consumed psychoactive substance in the united states in twenty twenty five that's more than lsd more than dmt more than most people realize but but there's a catch the majority of the amanita marketplace is unfortunately littered with counterfeit products you've probably seen this mushroom before amanita muscaria it's weirdly embedded in art and culture like it's literally the same one you see in mario it's not psilocybin it's not a traditional psychedelic for me it's very grounding at lower doses it puts you in this calm focused almost flow state headspace in fact some people refer to it as nature's wine like i said though a lot of what you're seeing on the market that claims to be amanita is not with vague marketing promising trippy psychedelic effects those are not amanita they're cheap research chemicals and synthetic compounds dressed up in mushroom branding and beyond just not working some of these substances are genuinely dangerous the reason i feel comfortable with amanita though is because of my friends at amantara amantara is the opposite of all these mushroom products they've served over fifty five thousand customers and their sourcing is clean lab tested and transparent they also have the largest selection of amanita products i've ever seen basically every way you'd want to try it at the best prices compared to what's out there i personally like their blue lotus extract which i take before i go to sleep sometimes it calms me down completely reduces my anxiety and also gives me some vivid dreams so if you'd like to check out amantara today head on over to their website at amantara dot com go julian link in my description below and use code jd twenty two at checkout for twenty two percent off your order once again that's amantara dot com go julian link in my description below code jd twenty two at checkout

[Chad Robichaux]

and you know i love that because he's probably uncorruptible because he didn't need the money right right and or the or notoriety and fame he's not power he's not seeking a name or or reputation because he already has it right i was just i just sat down and interviewed eli crane navy seal sniper

[Julian Dorey]

amazing he's in there right now he's

[Chad Robichaux]

in there right now yeah and we talked about this on on the podcast episode i did with him on on my show and and he gave a real good perspective i was particularly asking him about does he think it's a good idea for veterans take off the uniform and then go serve again in congress and he and he brought up a really good point and it makes sense and i don't think this just applies to veterans a lot a lot of folks that go up there and serve is you go and you kind of fall in the rank and file and so there's a organizational hierarchy of the gop and and the house wherever you fall in and you come in as a freshman and so now you especially military guys part of most show you feel like okay i'm the new guy and whenever you go to a new unit you're the new guy you got to re earn your reputation right you have to follow orders you have to and so you you go in that environment you get injected in an environment and and you just kind of forget like it just clicks off that that you don't work for them you work for your constituency back in whatever state and district you come from that's

[Julian Dorey]

who you work for but you spend all your time spend all your time in dc they set the system and

[Chad Robichaux]

and i think people need to go up there and realize before they go and recognize i don't work for these people i don't care if they even like me i'm gonna my my constituency from my district voted me there to go represent them that's why that's why it's called the representative i'm i'm a citizen not a career politician i'm a citizen representative of my district and i'm coming here to represent my district and i'm going to vote the way my district wants me to vote maybe not even on my opinion sometimes i mean if you really connected to your district you may say i don't completely agree with this but this is what my district wants and i'm representing them i'm going to vote the way my constituents but that has been lost and our founding fathers when they set up that system which we have a great system by the way it's not a system that's broken it's it's a system that's been misused that system was set up where we were representatives that way we came from there was no career politicians in mind at all we came from being doctors and lawyers and school teachers and and and construction workers to where our group appears from our community selected us and say go to washington dc and represent us and then come back and then we'll send somebody else that's the way it's supposed to be but now it's like you go there you make friends you're a bebos you become this elitist career politician career politician it was never meant to be that way that's right and one of the greatest things that this country could do to fix ninety i believe it fixed ninety of the problems that we have not just in our communities in our country but globally the americas would be term limits it was sovereign the problem is the only people that can make that happen are the people that's there so

[Julian Dorey]

andy busta monte i'll never this is one of those stories you never forget when i had him on episode one hundred and seven the second time we talked he told me about when he left cia big air quotes there and went to graduate school during part of that he they had a guest lecture where the local congresswoman came in to speak to them and at the end of the lecture she said you know well all you guys are my constituents so might as well just put it out to you now what types of things would you like to see me take to congress and present his bills i need some ideas fucking andy rachel and he goes yeah i would like you to take up a bill that says you should restrict congressmen and and women and senators to term limits and then he defined whatever the term limits he wanted were and she was like i'm not going to do that and he's like but you just said i'm your constituent and this is what i want how does everyone else feel about that and everyone went yeah sounds good to me yeah and she just like changed the subject because she wanted to be a fucking career politician she wanted the pension she wanted the connections on k street she wanted the things that come with that the corruption and all that and when the system is incentivized so the people within it are not incentivized to vote against their own interests which would include things like term limits it never gets done so i agree

[Chad Robichaux]

i agree with you chad bipartisan across the board if you asked americans i believe you'd be like probably ninety percentile vote that would be for term limits

[Julian Dorey]

yes so what how do we how do we fix that when you know the five including senators and congressmen the five hundred and some people in there are not incentivized to get any kind

[Chad Robichaux]

of majority on our system isn't set up for us to have a voice to do that unfortunately i mean the answer is there there is there is no how to there's no answer to it because the system set up for them that them to basically vote themselves out of a job and so how do you undo that that it's hard man yeah i don't know i don't know the answer to how to undo

[Julian Dorey]

that i think about this a lot and like this has been a great start to this conversation by the way because you keep introducing as someone who's lived in these worlds too which makes it even more special but like you keep introducing without trying to all of these extreme slippery slopes that exist and there's one thing that's kind of been thematically timed tied to a lot of the things examples you've been bringing up which is something you said early on about the military industrial complex and i think you and i share an opinion on this you said and i'm a paraphrase here correct me if i'm wrong but you said i love the idea of the military industrial complex in the sense that we get the biggest baddest best shit and we get to have the most powerful military in the world because that's important for deterrence and anytime we have to call on it agree and then you said i hate the aspect of the military industrial complex that is incentivized therefore to declare war and go to war war as a business all the time and do the world's bidding and bring other armies in and get civilian casualties in the middle of it by the millions which by the way you were correct on the ukraine thing the casualties are up at one point eight million and the deaths are somewhere i was seeing different research it was like between five hundred thousand and a million so you're like right there you know and by the way how do we fix how do we fix that by the way chad like how do we fix because i agree i want to have an extremely powerful military that's not underfunded so they can do all those great things things and i don't mind putting my taxpayer dollars to that but then how do i make sure that the companies that are given the money to create that military don't incentivize our government and therefore our military at their beck and called to go create wars around the world all the

[Chad Robichaux]

time kill lobbying kill lobbying that's it that's the answer that's because the money makes its way back to campaigns and politicians the politicians that vote on it

[Julian Dorey]

now how do we do that i

[Chad Robichaux]

mean again you go back to congress having to vote on that vote themselves out of money and power and and campaigns that keep them in power campaigns cost a lot of money yes they do campaigns and i mean you could you could buy elections in america you have enough money you have enough money to put behind a campaign you have enough friends and companies and and you know and so the military industrial complex in the in the petrol industry or in the pharmaceutical industry these are all the biggest funders of of campaigns and so by the way i want i want to throw this number out please it's crazy america's been we're celebrating our two hundred fiftieth year right now do you know can you take a guess how many years i won't say how many years we've been in war in two hundred fifty years i'll ask you how many how many years have we been out of war have not been

[Julian Dorey]

in war sixteen there you go am

[Chad Robichaux]

i right you're right where the did that come from whoa i think it's i think the action number seventeen somebody will fact check us on it both but we're close i mean most people have no idea like so you talk about war being profitable this is not just a new thing with raytheon and late raytheon and lockheed morton and stuff that war has always been profitable that's right and and politicians in dc who have the ability to to flip the levers to say we're in or out of war unfortunately their campaigns are paid for by the people who profit off

[Julian Dorey]

of war all right so two things one point i don't want to lose because it was on what you were saying i just want to make sure i throw this one out to you you talk about getting lobbying out of politics and then you unfortunately correctly say but they're not incentivized to do that i almost feel like this is not the way i want it done people just put a visual on it i almost feel like the only way that could ever possibly happen is if you got all five hundred and thirty five of them in a room with some spec ops guy like you with a gun saying listen buddy y' all are gonna go in there and vote on this right now before any of your donors can talk about this about taking money out of politics and therefore that means all of you will would have to lose the next election and you won't because now they can't pay for you to lose right like that feels like the only possible and i'm not advocating for that but you know maybe i'm not that but i'm just saying like that is not plausible it's not

[Chad Robichaux]

that the system's not set up to be and you know where you have where the and then if a president comes in and uses executive authority to do it where's a dictator right we've

[Julian Dorey]

had a lot of those i mean

[Chad Robichaux]

i mean we we are a we're not a democracy right we i know either as we're we're constitutional republic so

[Julian Dorey]

i always disagree with everyone on this

[Chad Robichaux]

we're both both we're both okay we're both can you can you break that

[Julian Dorey]

down for a democracy in the sense that the people do vote for their elected representatives and also that separates and i'm looking at this thirty zero zero zero feet in the air right now people this really would require a full podcast to give the proper details and evidence but we are able to have some separation of powers between state and federal and that is where it ties into like being a republic right right so you have elected representatives who act on your own interest but we are also a democracy in the sense that people can put forth measures that then get elected that then get selected directly and i would say another republic aspect to it and this one i'm talking out of my ass on so correct me on the on the comments but when you look at the federal government and you have the executive the legislative and the judicial and ideally they're all separate that's more republic related because you are electing the people to two of them and then the judicial is selected based on the people that you elect which would be a more which would

[Chad Robichaux]

be a public idea yeah yeah so really yeah i mean because you have aspects of all three of them are voted in a two into two separate separations of power right yeah right i'm

[Julian Dorey]

sure i'm going to get lit up

[Chad Robichaux]

for no you're right way too fast but but you're actually right yeah so i would agree with everything you just

[Julian Dorey]

said so either way though if you have all these if you have all the lobbying money in congress and in senate and let's say you can't get rid of that and you're still going to have pharma you're still going to have bankers you still have all this shit what can you do with the system set up as it is corrupt as it may be to at least get get twenty percent of what we

[Chad Robichaux]

want fixed yeah man it's a hard question i'm sorry no it's i mean hard questions are good that's i just i don't know i spend my you i asked you in on my episode with you what keeps you up at night and this is what keeps me up at night i love this country so much man i really do i've been all over the world i've been to sixty countries i've seen sixty i've been to sixty countries and we what we have here is exceptional and as bad as it is it's still as bad as it is still the best it's still the greatest country on the planet i agree period and and i believe in it and and and i believe in our the way our government is set up it's special i believe in the way our government is set up but there are flaws in it that i don't think i'll that our founding fathers would ever predicted that this level of corruption would have come from within and so when when i ask you like what keeps you up at night what keeps me up as night is is is is how do we how do we turn around save something that's been hijacked hijacked because it because it has been hijacked and and who

[Julian Dorey]

hijacked it or is it more incentives

[Chad Robichaux]

hijacked it i think incentive hijacked and it goes with that question other question i asked you who are they right yeah and i think america is so great has become so powerful around the world that people want to use it and for good i mean they want to use our military which i think is what we're seeing right now in iran they want to use our military they want to use our economy and and all those benefits other country get off of of hijacking the day right whether it's globalist or or different countries that have their their claws in america all the incentives they get from us they have to do it through corrupting through establishing relationships through corruptible people that are in dc and and every administration by the way has been that's right has been part of this in every party when i say every party both the democrats and republican are guilty of this i mean it's corrupted people on both sides the aisle in every every position that's been that you know from the white house from the white house down the local legislators and and so there's a lot of things that need to be exposed and and i think you know i think the exposure of some of these things are probably the only way to start exposing it and income i mean when you look at the insider trading i tell you i was really happy at the state of union the other day president trump called out inside the only one of the only things that democrats stood up for which i couldn't believe it was insider trading and then trump took trump took a pretty good shot so that all the democrats stand up against the entire trade even even even elizabeth warren or pocah pocah like she's like that was good that was good clapping and then and then while she while he won elizabeth war over standing yeah he did but then he said where's nancy pelosi i bet she wouldn't be standing he had to take he had to take a shot i'm like he had his moment to where he had everybody together and he like couldn't do it he couldn't do it it was nancy pelosi i bet she wouldn't be standing in chair

[Julian Dorey]

but now you see stuff like that it's a little disheartening right yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

i mean i mean look you can't go into you can't legitimize going into a position a job maybe have fifty thousand dollars in the bank right which is a lot of people and then and then you go in and the job pays one hundred ninety zero zero zero a year and you're not allowed to make more than twenty five zero zero zero you could you could write a book you could farm and you could do if you're a doctor you could do that inside that's it that's the three things you could do while you're in congress yeah that's the only other ways you can make money and and by the way i've written books books are very hard to make money yes so and now you go in you're worth like fifty one hundred two hundred thousand dollars maybe you have a bank account but in four years you're worth millions i think i think ilano more right now is what is it

[Julian Dorey]

thirty million that year yeah and i i can't stand ilhan omar but i'm pretty sure she married into it her husband's worth a lot but it's under

[Chad Robichaux]

investigation right now right it's under investigation is it she married into it but there's others is it her brother that she married into it i'm just kidding

[Julian Dorey]

no there was i saw some joke about that but i didn't she's married

[Chad Robichaux]

to a white guy so oh she did remarry right yeah i i don't

[Julian Dorey]

i didn't really get that one but but there's other ones that are just prime examples where it's like wait a minute they were worth like a million and now they're worth fifty million two years later and they didn't marry into

[Chad Robichaux]

it come on yeah yeah it's i mean ilhan is like i know that's current investigation so i mean honestly like while i don't like her i would be happy to know that she married that that that was legit it may

[Julian Dorey]

happen no yeah yeah i'm never that's the thing i'm never rooting for the

[Chad Robichaux]

worst outcome no no i don't know

[Julian Dorey]

what i mean like i wanted i want to believe that something's not as bad as it looks or something like that but investigate it and if it is get him the out yep yep

[Chad Robichaux]

you know yeah i mean it's i mean look i mean that's i mean right now you okay i mean crenshaw like he's he's he's under the like yeah so i'm using him to say it's a both sides out what what

[Julian Dorey]

do you make of all that because that's like you're in the military community there's a whole you know yeah i

[Chad Robichaux]

mean look up i've had it again i can't i can't stand i'm friends with eddie real good friends and eddie by the way is one of the most incredible human beings i know i love eddie yeah great dude so and in full transparency i'm i'm really close friends with eddie and and i'm in the guy who's running against crenshaw steve toth led me to christ and has discipled me and helped me start mighty oaks so when i say that so i say that to say there's bias there right that's bias there but as a veteran i was so happy everyone cheered crenshaw along to go into congress because we wanted someone to represent to come in the insider to represent the the the the things that we want in the veteran community and he just hasn't done that they take away the you know accusations of inside trading and all that stuff this stuff with him and sean i don't know and so i can't make those accusations against someone i wouldn't unless i really knew but i can't say he hasn't delivered on the things that need in his voting record hasn't reflected what what what we you know we the veteran community got behind him for so a lot of

[Julian Dorey]

you before if i'm understanding this correctly because i'm not familiar i'm not in the veteran community but guys that knew him or knew of him from the veteran community before he got into office

[Chad Robichaux]

liked him well it's just i don't know if they liked him personally it was just like hey we have a navy seal who's a combat veteran who's wounded you know gave his eye for our country is going to is going to represent us i mean right away off it's just on the surface like the the COVID value you're like i want to get behind that guy and so i think the veteran community got behind him and then you know i mean he's he's carried himself in a way that you know it's not very a good representation of the veteran community i'm just i guess i'm trying to be careful right now because one thing i can't stand because it's happened to me is the hate on hate veteran thing it's so toxic and so terrible i'll get it you'll you'll get some comments in the section of people that hate me i'm gonna stay right out here but yeah it's terrible and i so i don't want to jump into that but but i will say you know he hasn't i think crenshaw just hasn't represented the veteran community well with the way he carries himself he kind of lived the rock star lifestyle and you know he's he's interacted with the constituency in a pretty arrogant way that that the constituents hadn't been happy with and then you know there's some things that i could say that i won't because i don't want to use the platform to bash and when i don't know things for sure but but i will say the way he treated my friend eddie was totally was was totally wrong and and eddie and his wife are just amazing human beings and and he hadn't voted i mean to me like all that aside i i'm gonna i'm gonna vote for you based on your voting record of how you represent yeah i'm i'm in his district i mean crenshaw's district so i'm i'm his

[Julian Dorey]

constituent that's a hell of a district man you guys you guys drew that

[Chad Robichaux]

one pretty interesting they draw they they drew that thing up that was that

[Julian Dorey]

was a blind monkey drawing yeah i'm

[Chad Robichaux]

sure there's some deliberateness in how they drew that thing yeah like that wasn't

[Julian Dorey]

a straight line i thought nick cage was trying to find a declaration of independence watching that fucking thing but you

[Chad Robichaux]

know as a constituent some i'm going to vote for you of how you represent me on your voting and you know and so yeah i had some

[Julian Dorey]

disagreements there remember when i had mike yaglian here for episodes three hundred forty three and three hundred fifty one and remember what he said he used to do and allegedly does not still do these days when it comes to collecting your data from the public forums and using it without you knowing and remember how he said there are data brokers who make up one of the largest unseen industries on earth who are constantly doing this every day with your data that you don't even know about well yeah that's kind of a problem in mike's case he was looking at it from a national security perspective in your case you're looking at it from a privacy perspective which is why you need to be using protect my data data brokers collect and sell your personal information online but protect my data comes in and removes it from three hundred plus data broker sites to reduce spam scams and identity theft and if you don't think it could happen to you well last year americans lost an estimated one hundred ninety seven billion dollars to fraud there's also probably a lot we don't even know about deep and as i keep telling you guys each week we're not just talking about the daycares in minneapolis it's far beyond that there's even estimates that up to two hundred seventy eight million people in the united states alone last year had their data compromised this can include sensitive information like your name number home address and income and it's all happening without you even realizing it so take back control of your privacy today visit protectmydata dot com comma link in my description below and use code julian to get thirty percent off all annual plans and remove your information from data broker databases that's protectmydata dot com comma link in description below promo code julian if you like stories that

[Chad Robichaux]

keep you on the edge of your seat playoff hockey is right up your alley nhl on tnt has the best coverage making every game feel like a big event the action is non stop overtime big hits and moments you never see coming watching paul bissonnet crack jokes and wayne gretzky break down plays adds a whole new layer to the experience it's just as gripping as the wild stories you hear on julian dorey podcast watch the stanley cup playoffs on tnt tbs trutv and hbo max

[Julian Dorey]

yeah i won't i had a chance to talk with eddie off camera about that one so i assume all that's off record so i will go into that what i will say is just he wasn't eddie was really nice about it too he really is a dick about it at all like and i wouldn't have blamed him to be but it just seemed like bad guy you know like just just like basic indecency as a person is how i describe it yep

[Chad Robichaux]

i mean look it's like i said i could say some things that just it doesn't do anybody any good to say i'll just keep it a voter record but i could say like again eddie's like one of the greatest and eddie could be because of the way eddie was treated he could be out there like throwing dirt and bashing him and calling him a you know mfer and stuff he does do that he just kind of sells what happened and he's just very very straight up about it and his wife too oh yeah these are some these are some amazing people man they went through a lot man they went through a lot yeah

[Julian Dorey]

i i really you know having him in here i did episode two hundred fifty six with him and you know we talked for like four hours and i had been pretty clear on his story at that point before he came in here but i remember just passively reading eddie's story and emphasis on passively obviously in like maybe twenty seventeen twenty eighteen when it was all going down

[Chad Robichaux]

and being like wow what a scumbag

[Julian Dorey]

something like that and then sean had him on early on and i saw that podcast later and then had a chance to talk to sean about it as well and i was like wow i think i need to look at that more i think i have misjudged this guy and i knew before i came in here i had but then i had a chance to literally really see it for myself up close for four hours and at the end i was like listen man i i gotta you didn't know me but i gotta apologize i i i jumped to conclusions on that and that's not fair because especially especially like for the guys that are like the tip of the spear and really give it all you know you want to get it's not to when people actually do things bad you don't excuse that but like like you want to give people you should give people the benefit of the doubt innocent of proven guilty if you will and i he definitely didn't get that he didn't get it from me either yeah and i think righteously so he's been incredibly vindicated and people people need to hear that because they need to hear what happens sometimes when they make political footballs out of our guys that are just following the orders to do their job at the highest level i have a real problem with that yeah i

[Chad Robichaux]

mean look the front line of combat like kinetic warfare like eddie was you know i i you know i was a porsche guy and i transitioned over go contract and i did clades logistics you know at at the top level highest level and i've seen a lot of horrible things but being you know i was never in a kinetic role like eddie was whenever front line like like doing that kind of fighting every day like i mean like infantry marines do and and but man they were getting eddie and them were getting after it and and for like lawyers and and and journalists to insert themselves after the fact in those environments it's just unfair i just have and you know never in history by the way have we ever seen that war is ugly and i'm not saying we like we said in the beginning we always got to remember we're the good guys right and and and we always take the high ground ethical high ground even even in intense moments of combat but but war is ugly and and for for people to come in after the fact and dissect it with lawyers and journalists and stuff like that it's just very

[Julian Dorey]

unfair yeah i i agree but let's let's actually go back to that i'm glad you brought that up like the the good guys conversation because we got off that i wake up every day and i'm very grateful that i live here i think it's the best country in the world i think we got a lot of problems for sure but like i want to help fix those problems i don't want to sit here and be like yo for this place like it's it is a incredible two hundred fifty year experiment we have pulled off to this point that said when when i say like are we the good guy i'm not referring to the whole country itself or something like that i'm asking that question about some of the people who take power not by elections by the way and including also people by elections in some cases who just in the smallest corners are able to kind of slip through the cracks and ruin it for everyone else so when i ask you that question if i could pose it to you again are we the good guys or quote unquote are we the bad guys if i asked you through the lens of like hey have we let too many of those rats just on the ship a little bit too much to the point that maybe sometimes we are doing things around the world or within our own country where it is a bad guy thing would you agree with that on like that micro level that makes

[Chad Robichaux]

sense i do sadly i do yeah sadly i do you know we we're supposed to be the good guys i believe that totally i believe that god that god sovereignly gave us this opportunity two hundred fifty years ago to do something great in this world with and i think the the blessings that america has has been misused more and more throughout the two hundred and fifty years to the point to where now there are things that we do that are ethically questionable around the world as a as a as a entity as a nation we do things that are questionably the the right thing to do around

[Julian Dorey]

the world are there some that come to mind besides afghanistan and the pull out there and the money we're paying

[Chad Robichaux]

the taliban yeah i mean i mean we like when you get the clintons in haiti like and we have i think i think gaddafi was was a big one you know we we had a us a sitting u s secretary of state i i i believe call for the assassination of gaddafi had him killed bragged about having him killed and and sent that country in a turmoil and and and then we had you know our our ambassador and u s service members killed there in benghazi and you know i think i think we were i think america was the bad guys and that and then maybe not maybe not the the troops on the ground right of course but i mean you know america has a state department as a white house i think i think we made the wrong decisions and and we overreached into somebody else's as it comes into regime change we'll try to change change leaders of governments for whatever political reasons the powers whatever whatever reason they're doing it whether it be economic or for selfish reasons or whatever whatever's happening behind the curtain we overreach and do things like that so that's probably one of the ones that sticks

[Julian Dorey]

out to me i mean as you and i sit here talking today though they're beginning to wage a war in iran and i think it's it's a different situation than libya in a lot of ways yeah but if we just looked at it at the top of the spear there's there's comments we could agree on here gaddafi was a bad guy he's a dictator yeah hurt his own people i describe him as a sociopath kame and members of the irgc same thing and yet we can look back on libya and regime change and be like well that was a mistake to say nothing of our own guys that died with that and now we're looking at a war with a country of ninety two million people that sits on a lot of oil and is allied with countries like china and russia at least least to some degree and

[Chad Robichaux]

it's like is it the same thing or not yeah yeah i mean so right now i've been spending the last few days of kind of avoiding going on fox because man i get asked to go on fox a lot and i go i go when i can but i'm always careful to i think guys like you and i get asked to do things and we're expected to know everything all at once i mean and i just don't i'm i'm not any different than anyone else i'm i'm not a foreign policy expert right but if i'm going to go on and talk about something i want to know at least what what i'm talking about i don't want to speak out of my butt because it's dangerous and reckless and too many people do that i don't need the clicks i don't care about it i i i'm trying to gather the motivation of why we just did what we did in iran because motivation to me intent to me matters there's a lot of reasons we could have that done that in iran and and i know you and i may not agree on this but iran has been the number number one funder of terrorism around the world i agree with you on that but but i but i also agree with you in the fact that i think we have a pretty good handle on that yeah i think we had a pretty good handle on that and and having to do a complete regime change over it maybe maybe it wasn't the answer i don't know that that was the motive i don't i don't think that was probably the motivation that we went and did it do i think we did it to help the revolution the people take over revolt against the regime i don't think that's why we did it either so if we didn't do it for those two things then then what did we do it for did we did it because israel wanted us to because israel was was threatened because i don't think we were threatened i agree directly i don't think i mean they don't have icbm's that could reach any of our assets and resources they can reach out military bases in the in the region but that's just part of that's just part of geographically positioning yourself near a place like that that's that's kind of part of the game yes i i and and i have to i have to question all the other things that what are all the most motivations that could be because as i assess this and try to put my head around it is it oil because if it is oil i'm not okay with that that i'm not okay with that even if it's strategically better for america i'm still not okay with it our

[Julian Dorey]

guy is going to die for oil

[Chad Robichaux]

for real i'm not okay with that never have been okay with that and by the way president trump wasn't okay with that when you talked about iraq the iraq war that's what i'm saying yeah so so right now i'm still trying to to answer your question it's i'm not copying out i'm just i'm still i'm still trying to i'm trying to grasp what the motivation is because right now i don't see i don't see the where the incentive is to be the best thing for america yeah

[Julian Dorey]

you you say a lot there that also under underscores another important point which is that you have the ability to hold multiple thoughts at the same time and you talk about you know this idea that if you go on fox or on mainstream media they need three minutes and they want you to know every thing and they want you to

[Chad Robichaux]

have a clear place to stand yeah

[Julian Dorey]

these are complex things things very complex society has incentivized a two hundred and eighty character tweet or less and people

[Chad Robichaux]

listen to you and i so when you when you and i say something there's i have a responsibility in what i say not because i want it because it's just the nature of having to build a platform and i don't want to mislead people because my opinion is im is is premature sure yeah

[Julian Dorey]

and people got to let things play out for sure but like we're not we don't live in a world where the things that go viral are things that say well i see this but i also see this well i see this but i also see that we live in a world where it says this is what i see fuck you die if you disagree and that means that if you have one opinion on like a major thing there is therefore one hundred other opinions that must orbit that that you completely agree with or all the opposite and that's just not

[Chad Robichaux]

how the world knows a team or b team i pick a team i'm like i can't i can't always do

[Julian Dorey]

that yeah and that was the thing that was fun about whether regardless of the politics when trump was running in twenty fifteen through up until he became the nominee officially and it got real right right right so we're talking all the way through like april may twentieth twenty sixteen for goddamn near a year there it was fun watching a self funded billionaire who had been inside these clubs yep hopefully not some of the ones but had been inside these clubs to quote dave chappelle walk outside and say yo i've been in there yeah it's exactly what you think so i'm a member of it i'm gonna invite everyone up here to take a look with me and people were like yes yes yeah because he would sit there on stage and be like marco he's funded by twenty million dollars from sheldon adelson i fund my and it was like oh my god he's funding himself and then he got to such a big point that it was impossible to fund himself because of how much money goes into a presidential election right and it's almost like looking back on it he got castrated in some ways when that happened because now you can't just do absolutely whatever you want even when it appears that's what he's doing yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

i mean i mean i was moved by it right a businessman from new york to go into prescott arizona like small town america and backcountry america and sell out a stadium him unreal i mean it's unreal he has a finger in the pulse of what the american people want but i believe somewhere along the way other people were able to cast their voice into his world because he needs it he needs to be in the white house and it's and and one of the the terrible things and i i actually sympathize to president trump and everybody that goes to dc over this is they they at some point they get to they go there with all the right intentions and they have to come to this conclusion that that okay the greater good and as soon as when you when you start trying to balance the greater good compromise comes with the greater good and that compromise is what takes people off you

[Julian Dorey]

know but the greater good i think also is where they subconsciously perhaps i could i could believe that not everyone's evil right no no subconsciously they tell themselves the greater good for something but below that the greater good part of the calculation of getting them to the point where they have to say the greater good to make a compromise involves money coming from somewhere else that says they can't vote on this even they want to even though they want to but they can vote on this because the money's not coming from there therefore

[Chad Robichaux]

that's the greater good and that and that greater good goes to those bills right those multi layered bills that are that are you know thousands of pages thick yep and they're like whoa well i don't believe in this but this is the greater good and it's just these guys that's what i said i sympathize for them and i sympathize for president trump and everybody everyone that goes up there because they're gonna they they they all get faced with that yes i came here to do this what's but i have to make this decision i have to make this compromise for the greater good and i think most of the time they a lot of at least in the beginning think they're doing the right thing yep i bless my side that i think i share with you i try to give people the benefit of doubt that that i think do for sure yeah for sure

[Julian Dorey]

i i don't and and it's fun and easy i should say to just assume all of them are evil and i will admit i tend to lean that way with politicians but i could see some of them actually being good and being by the system you know but who am i to guess which or which that's what makes it hard so i just kind of treat it with all the same energy but yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

i can tell you guys that that are disruptors that probably won't stay along you know derek van orden latrell corey mills like eli crane burleson burchette like these guys probably won't stay there long because they they're not compromisers at least for what i've seen there they're not they hadn't got that they're not compromising for sure i talked to all these

[Julian Dorey]

guys regularly and and you think they're

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah for the most part those guys have they they voted they voted unpopular to the gop a number of times and massey's massey's another one one yeah i mean they they're like i'll go down on my shield to to do the right thing and that's what that's they're sending that's why we send them there right we send them there to do the right thing and represent us well and and and so what so what if they can't stay like listen let's send another another soldier right behind them that's going to do the right

[Julian Dorey]

thing right you know you talk about all we're going through all the different ways the money comes in and all that and one of the things that i just i don't know if i never wanted to believe it which if that's just what it was then shame on me or if i just really didn't think the evidence was there enough and it was just too easy of a one size fits all explanation was the idea that like when we look at violence and conflict around the world they're all just bankers wars and i can remember all the way back in you know early twenty twenty one in april talking with my friend matt kiminash and in episode forty three who i would describe as like an extremely intelligent intelligent cultured conspiracy minded individual which now to me is like grade a of people in society because he actually brought receipts on things and didn't just believe everything that he wanted to believe he would have he would throw in thoughts like that about and that i would kind of be like okay yeah whatever and now i look at it and you read these epstein files and everything and you see the people who are funding the people who take care of the people from a fixing perspective like the rich jeffrey epstein of the world right right who actually run the world and you're like oh my god maybe it is all banking and technocratic wars yeah do you think that's real i

[Chad Robichaux]

i think the true i think it's real by the way i know you're interviewing me but i'm curious because you could you introduce this idea of this second tier is is there any other ones out there you know that are like epstein and stuff out there floating

[Julian Dorey]

around today oh that's a great question i've been thinking about that a lot yeah i'm still working on that i i want to see if i can find and what we're referring to because we had a conversation earlier on your show which will come out before mine is when we were talking about that supra government idea of tucker carlson where it's like leaders of state leaders of industry right here a fixer class that works for the class that actually runs society the bankers and the technocrats and stuff like that so you're talking about other people on the fixer class lane who are all generally very wealthy people powerful individuals i'm still working on that but to answer your question broadly there's a lot more than just jeffrey epstein and it's not i mean i hope it's not just every time they're running pedo rings and sex trafficking but they're doing they're always doing always is a strong word they are generally doing something i'm sure that's objectively evil to get their means of helping the people above them run society and i do think we need to do more work as a society to figure out who those people are as best we can yeah yeah yeah i agree you were talking about though working with like intelligence related stuff about the use that intelligence gets out of fixers and stuff like that meaning people you were referring to it in the context of like people who don't exactly do good things but are useful because of the access they get get and i understand the world's not perfect and i understand that sometimes there's a calculation that goes into that and there's things you're willing to live with but did you ever encounter a situation where you were like that's crossing the line for me this guy is beyond repute or whatever you want to say

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah so i mean my job in afghanistan was doing clandestine logistics so advanced force operations so essentially like if you imagine a tier one special forces unit that's captured that's their task is to go capture kill whoever the worst bad guys in the battlefield are mainly those people are not in conventional areas they're going to be like in afghanistan for example they were in a f the federal minister tribal area where conventional military is not or across the border into into pakistan and so because conventional military doesn't have that reach to provide access and placement the advanced force operations like like guys the afos we go ahead of those units and create a reason to be there in an undercover type capacity create businesses whatever create a reason to be there exist there in that environment live in that environment with a local national for me was a and and then build all the clandestine logistical infrastructure to get those assaulters on target to capture kill those bad guys and safely off with all the contingencies and everything in place so that's that's so in order to do that to work in that world separate you separate yourself from the us government and the military you're just totally kind of off doing your own thing there you have to interact with the local populace and in those taliban villages the people that we interact with would be the taliban and so many tribal leaders taliban leaders that i'm doing things with to make those logistical put those logistical infrastructures in place and can't quite say how you know what kind of COVID capacity i would have but i had a reason to be there i created a very good reason to be there if it allowed me to be there for me allowed that allow me to stay alive they are worth more alive to them than am dead and so that's my safety network not just a gun right my my street smart and training ability tradecraft and ability to be able to function in that environment so now i have a relationship with these people these aren't good people these are people that are killing us service members and if you've been around if you know much about taliban culture sexual molestation of children y stuff like that so i had to add to to add to kind of observe and watch this and know that a guy i'm sitting across the table with having tea with probably is just responsible for killing u s service members and is a pedophile either you're sleeping with little boys or little you know raping little nine year old girls and and this is the person i have to deal with and and so yeah that was that was definitely ethical dilemma there for me and but my job wasn't to choose whether this guy was a a good guy or a bad guy and if i want to be his friend or not my job was to choose to say hey we have a mission and that mission is to build infrastructure for to get my assault force on target to capture kill this bad guy that was my job and my opinion in that in my moral my moral dilemma with working with this guy and not reaching across the table and ripping his throat out of his neck like i had to put that aside and that was very hard for me because i'm a person of like a lot of principle and conviction that was that was very hard for me but i had to do it and and honestly some of the things that bothered me most about my time there is is is having to you know bite my tongue and be in those

[Julian Dorey]

environments i appreciate you sharing that and it's a it's a hard spot to be in so now here's a difficult question because that one you're there you know the stakes you know all the variables you know who you're dealing with what you don't like but you know what's on the other side of it it with like the epstein situation you're like me you're looking at it from the outside you weren't there you don't know who dealt with them let's look at it from like cia's complicity in it obviously like that's in our government as opposed to mossad and their complicity what's the difference between what you did there in afghanistan with a guy who's who's probably a pedophile and killing american service members but you're working with him for a greater good what's the difference between that and someone at cia sitting across from jeffrey epstein who's a pedophile and killing people as well and working for someone else probably against you in that way definitely against you in that way and deciding to work with him

[Chad Robichaux]

for a greater good yeah i mean it's a great is pretty it's a pretty gray area and look i mean i think it always comes down to what's at stake what's what's the mission they're doing and but if they're knowing that jeffrey epstein's job so like like the taliban's job was to fight a war that they believe they believe on their end by the way was a just war so their their jobs as war fighters and they're fighting a war agree with them or not they're evil or not that they're they're war fighters that's their job jeffrey epstein's job i i believe was to extort politicians and people of influence and he was and he was and and that's that's what i believe his job was and what

[Julian Dorey]

if he was doing that on the battlefield of espionage primarily for another country to do it against our own and

[Chad Robichaux]

i believe he was yeah and i believe he was i believe he was even the cia was working him as an asset his primary asset would have been was for another country i believe israel i agree and and and and and so if he if he worked with us he was definitely working against us at the same time and so i believe you know a cia agent working working him as asset it's probably sitting down just like i was across the taliban guy sick to his stomach trying to make a decision where whatever the mission was whatever they're using him for is it worth to to to do a you know whatever deal they were going to do with this guy and i can imagine that the disgust if if they knew if they knew what we know now i couldn't imagine to discuss they they had to do that but it doesn't surprise me that would from what i've been exposed to it doesn't surprise me that i'm not shocked that our government would have would engage in that particularly if he was like not one of ours that didn't work for our government but someone out there already doing it and we just like hey we're just going to capitalize on this we're going to take advantage of this they they have they're extorting you know the pr the prince of you know saudi arabia or who's the guy what's it was mbs us yeah so now we have something on him right like it wouldn't surprise me and i and and i man i i empathize for that agent that would have sat there and had to i mean if they're any kind of decent human being they would have just had a disgust in their stomach like i had i know what that feels like and it sucks but they would probably try to make the decision if it's right or wrong and there is a line and i think that lines you know is that line is just really blurred it's really gray and and only individual can make it in that moment and for me i think back sometimes and think man i can't believe like i had that moment i could have like this guy's probably still up right now and probably still raping children i could have like freaking just stuck my freaking spider cool in the side of this guy's head like right that could have did that did you ever tell them

[Julian Dorey]

guys like that how you felt no

[Chad Robichaux]

no that's hard that's hard bro i'm a very principled person like especially when it comes to children and that was this i never talk about that stuff so i'm glad you bring it up like i never talk about that stuff everybody talks about like you know everybody everybody wants to know about a gunfight and stuff like that i've been in two gunfights in my life like everybody thinks oh even afghanistan you've probably been like you know i've been two gunfights in my life i've never been i wasn't a kinetic guy that wasn't my job i trained for that before but then when i went to yeah like

[Julian Dorey]

i said getting it yeah it was

[Chad Robichaux]

my job so everybody expects that but those are the things that i have the horse time with like children for some reason children you know is is what bothered me most of the consequential the consequence of loss of life of children on the battlefields with i always had the yeah and it's just always been kind of the kind of the thorn inside of me that just really bugged me because when you go out there in afghanistan or now you know now ukraine you know went me me and my buddy seaspray went out we identified these mass graves in ukraine and seen these all women all children fourteen hundred mass graves mass grave like fourteen

[Julian Dorey]

hundred but you found person one yeah yeah jesus christ how big were they

[Chad Robichaux]

well we were told fourteen hundred and and just from my observation it would probably been a good estimate when did

[Julian Dorey]

you find a mass grave in ukraine

[Chad Robichaux]

it was about year in is is so it would if if you if you want an exact date i couldn't tell you exact i have it written down i just don't know it off hand in my book mission without borders i have the date stamp because that was the day zoom was liberated and so if you don't know the the cia when the cia has what's called a solo special operations liaison officer that was kind of our liaison with the cia at the time and and the white house is not allowing the u s military or the cia to go into ukraine and so i was working with a solo in in poland in krakow poland quite a bit as a surrogate so he'd say hey we can't go do this but while you were there in this area will you check this out for us and as a patriot you would do it yeah and so one of the things well we were going to this area see spray and i had heard of this marine guy who's a marine that got shot in the gut and was captured by the russians and so we thought we had the ability to move him and so we were going to actually try to extract that guy so we had another team going to a place called bachmut to bring some bring some supplies to some troops on the front lines in bachmut boot and seaspride and i went off to izum to try to get recover this marine and while we were there the the guys we were keeping tabs with the solo special operations liaison officer and he said hey we just got word that the as as the ukrainians retook a zoom they found a mass grave and you got to think you got to understand like they were the our government was worried that false reports coming out to get more money right every time there's a false report you get more aid so so like hey can you just confirm this is real because it's coming from ukrainians we want to make sure it's real while you're there we just go get eyes on that's all we were asked to do and so we were like yeah absolutely and so we went and we went into zoom while i was like while i was being liberated and and got to see these mass graves and reported back and then we leaked it to fox news and what i

[Julian Dorey]

mean you come where was it like what what's the take me to the place around it like where was it

[Chad Robichaux]

zoom zoom like by the way ukraine's beautiful zooms there's a lot of national forest and this it was in like this national forest these pine forests and the russians had dug in so they went the russians had put a tank brigade there and so they dug in in these pine trees it was really brilliantly done it was it was kind of neat to see because it's like trench warfare they had trenches dug in for fighting out of they had tanks that went down and she was just looking you just look at this natural pine forest and and and you would never known until you walked in there that it was like freaking trenches everywhere tanks dug in there was tons of whole russian brigade there it was just outside the outskirts of a zoom east a little east of a zoom and and russians had occupied that area for six months and so all the guys that were that were that were recapturing it were were troops from that area and their wives and children had been captured there and and so when the russians left there they tried to cover up the evidence and they pushed up they had these these graves that they had just killed executed all these people and mainly women and children they were bound and they pushed him in his hole they tried to pile up pile them up and burn them but the bodies are actually hard to burn without some kind of really accelerant so the so a lot of the bodies would just partially burned and and yeah so they took us in and showed us the grave sea spray and either grave cave fourteen hundred and yeah they said fourteen hundred and like i said from what we've seen it was it was it was probably a good estimate i couldn't validate exactly fourteen hundred i don't

[Julian Dorey]

care how many battlefields you've seen or how hard a you are and there's no doubt you are and you've seen a lot of but you come upon a grave of fourteen hundred people mostly

[Chad Robichaux]

women smell it smelled too bro like it was i've been you know around a lot of decaying bodies before and it it was you recognize it right away like it smelled and on the way there we had seen like like tons of r because they kill they they ukrainians freaking slay some bodies man they were like russian bo like i i stopped counting after i counted i don't know why i was counting at first and i counted eighty and i stopped counting after eighty but like russia like and they were all freshly killed like still bleeding out and some of them some of credit to the ukrainians because that these were these were russians that had again killed their family members and occupied their family members they were rendering age i observed that they were rendering aid they had one one guy

[Julian Dorey]

guys who may have executed a bunch

[Chad Robichaux]

of women and children yeah one of the guys one of the russian kids has arm blown off and ukrainian troops they're rendering aid and how do you

[Julian Dorey]

you can't un download the hard drive of forget the smell that's one thing yeah but like seeing that how does

[Chad Robichaux]

that i never see anything like that i know i know plenty of our troops seen stuff like that and i never seen anything like that in afghanistan or anything it was the most i mean because just the amount of bodies fourteen hundred i mean and not even there like just going there amount of like troops in uniform i never seen like troops in uniform like like just laid on the roadside of them just laid all over the place like bmps like t fifty four s t like tanks zsu's like just hit with javelins burnt to the ground with people still in them like it was it was horrific man man it's ukraine the front line of ukraine is insane like and so yeah so we we by the way we never got to that marine we lost comms where that marine went but but we did we did leak that information back to back to fox news for because we were asked to

[Julian Dorey]

do that so yeah so many guys i've talked to who have been over there just talk about what a stalemate war the ukraine russia war is they're like they'll fight they'll fight for two weeks over fourteen yards yeah i mean

[Chad Robichaux]

and and know the ukrainians recapture territory here meanwhile ten miles north the russians recapture territory there it's like a trade they're trading in in a all at a cost of i mean very young y very young the men out there in the battlefield on both sides and most of them have either don't want to be there they're conscripted or or drafted or or taken and both sides from their homes and put out there yeah zawinsky's doing it putin's doing it they're taking young boys and putting them forcing them out there to fight and

[Julian Dorey]

pawns on the board if you will yeah that's just you know it's crazy we like forget about that war now because all the other going on still happening right now it's happening while we're sitting here single day yeah how do you end that war what does it take to end that well i mean

[Chad Robichaux]

i think credit to you know to trump and vance they've you know they really i think they really have tried to corner you have to cut the funding you have you have to cut the funding completely and i know i

[Julian Dorey]

know why they pick it back up they cut it and then they picked

[Chad Robichaux]

it back up yeah that i think there's too much pressure in dc from the from the lobbying because i mean to me like why would why would zawinsky who has the power to end the war i love that you call

[Julian Dorey]

him so once

[Chad Robichaux]

i'm not a fan yeah obviously i don't even think he's we put him in power in twenty fourteen yeah i mean i mean why why would why would he end it he's become one of the wealthiest people in the world at the cost of the lives of his own people why would he end it when we continue to keep the money coming he's going around row begging for money we're writing him checks why would he end it that he's saying he don't want to give up territory that territory is being is is farfet of the people there don't even claim to be ukrainian you're fighting for territory that people don't even

[Julian Dorey]

want to you're talking about like the don boss yeah in the east yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

like i mean those people don't don't care i don't want it they just want the war to stop trump said it perfectly in the campaign i just want people to stop dying yeah and i i look i get like as a world leader you don't want to give up land but there has to be a compromise somewhere like that's the

[Julian Dorey]

word people don't want they don't want

[Chad Robichaux]

to hear it yeah and i mean you could lose your whole country because putin's not going to stop no he's not going to stop like and but as long as we keep funding it he's gonna zavinsky's gonna keep he's gonna keep taking the money and keep getting rich off of his people and people die and he doesn't have to have an election right yes he gets to stay in power he didn't have to go back to being a drag queen theater belly dancer

[Julian Dorey]

yeah yeah i remember when they did like the vogue cover a few weeks or a few months into the war that was where i

[Chad Robichaux]

was like oh wait a minute he's an actor man the whole green like you know attire like and and he's

[Julian Dorey]

warrior one yeah he's a five foot one actor and he talks like this there's no way this but it's like the he's like the elizabeth holmes of dudes he's an actor like there's no way he he doesn't look at his wife and say hello i had a great day at work he goes hey i ain't doing i'm sure yeah but like he gets there and he starts

[Chad Robichaux]

talking like this it's like shut the

[Julian Dorey]

up and it's just you know like you said hundreds of billions of dollars from us going there and this is where again people are like systems raid because you see like blackrock already gets the contract early on to rebuild ukraine when it's over and to say nothing of ukraine was also like the no man's land of corruption for western nations as well it's where there was all kinds of going on so much so that the new york times used to report on it all the time they conveniently stopped when the war started they could do no wrong but it's like you know human trafficking has happened there they there's been resources that have been exploited there i mean the burisma scandal was there yeah you know know yeah like what there's always another reason for it when they do it beyond just the simple military industrial complex like we need population control or something like that there's always some other reasons yeah yeah that makes me cynical but how did you so you're from louisiana from louisiana and you come from a family that sounds like every generation's been serving yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

pretty much pretty much every generation has served and and like i said no we have no career military in our family just guys who you know i think our military our family is just real southern patriotic that's cool and everybody's you know raise their hand to go do their you know two or four

[Julian Dorey]

years i think that's awesome yeah that's awesome so did you always want to do that as a kid yeah i

[Chad Robichaux]

kind of wanted to do it honestly out of a i grew up in a very broken dysfunctional home because my father my father was marine infantry vietnam veteran a lot of physical abuse in my home i just said not a very happy household and so it's kind of like hey man what's your way out of a small town i say a small town like backwoods back swamp louisiana and join the military so my brother and i were you know grew up together anybody grows up in a dysfunctional home like that you know siblings get really close and we'd always be talking playing military out in the woods and talking about joining the military and with thirteen and fourteen years old and we saw that old navy seal video called be someone special and his navy seals like you know coming out of the water with his face painted green twenty eighty scuba tanks on his back and a m four right not m four m sixteen rifle back then and seaweed hanging off him and like i want to do that that's the job i want to do but i don't want to be in the navy like i want to be in the marine corps because because my dad as dysfunctional as he was or something always it made my my dad proud the fact that he's a united states marine and i'm like if you make that miserable guy happy like i want a piece

[Julian Dorey]

of that and so did you have how do i want to ask this because you had an understanding that your dad had seen a lot of and done a lot of in the worst kind of environment did you have some empathy for obviously the serious flaws he

[Chad Robichaux]

had had or never until until i had it myself yeah i mean in fact like you know after my brother and i made the decision we start running and swimming at that young age and we trained for about a year my brother was shot and killed so it was like a pretty devastating blow to our family my dad actually left he my stepmom couldn't couldn't handle the loss of a son so she went back to her parents my dad didn't couldn't handle grieving wife he moved away so i think fifteen i was living on my own with my sister was in college and wait so hold on

[Julian Dorey]

a minute you're he was your stepbrother

[Chad Robichaux]

he was my stepbrother yeah okay from like from like six and seven years

[Julian Dorey]

old okay and he got shot and

[Chad Robichaux]

killed in war just a a feud between another stepbrother on the other side of the family his kid was only eleven years old and they were fighting and arguing over something and he picked up a shotgun and shot him in the chest an eleven year old yeah yeah so both of their lives were destroyed and over that a kid never recovered and end up in and out of in and out of drug rehabs in jail and everything else yeah were you there for that i wasn't there i was i was with him a few hours before that and then and you know got and you know found out right when it happened and he and growing up the way we grew up he was the closest person to me in my life at that time we were like really really close we and you know we were always either riding dirt bikes out in the woods and hunting and fishing together we're kind of connected at the hip so and

[Julian Dorey]

you two had always talked about being

[Chad Robichaux]

in the military yeah we're we i mean we we made the commitment together we're we're gonna we're gonna you know try to be recon marines together and so that was a that was kind of my life goal and and that that actually put a flame under it

[Julian Dorey]

right i was gonna say did that really push you to want to see

[Chad Robichaux]

that i was like want to see it through something i started with ambassador and and but when i was seventeen i i wasn't going to graduate high school i'm living on my own trying to work going to high school and so i went to this marine corps recruiter i'm like his name is ronald brown saf ronald brown i remember his name i always joke that people remember the recruiter's name because they hate them mine was the opposite i remember it because i just so thankful for this guy i just i just went in his office and told my told my story this is where i'm at this is what i always want to do here's the situation i'm in i'm living on my own i'm working like trying to make it i'm not going to graduate high school and he helped me get in the marine corps without even

[Julian Dorey]

a high school diploma he definitely said said stay right there walked out goes

[Chad Robichaux]

got one got one yo yeah infantry contract that's exactly helped him make that quota that's right wow yeah so that's really yeah i really like i see

[Julian Dorey]

why you call it the resilient podcast

[Chad Robichaux]

it's a it's a you know it's a it's a i went in the marine corps i got my ged after infantry school all those years later i got an mba i'm about one semester from new york to tech i'm working on my second masters right now i've been about two years now one class away from my second masters at har at harvard so that's awesome i always i keep saying that i'm not gonna finish that class class because i don't want to don't know if i want a degree from harvard or not but it's it's a it's my first master's my first masters from new york tech mba and this one's a masters of nonprofit management and yeah just i'm just thankful the marine corps gave me an opportunity and everything i want to do being a recon marine i took a took a long route to be a recon marine i went through a brc and and this recently came up that i've just brought this up recently but end up going to brc whole dream i make it there i go through the course i'm passing everything and i i get caught talking on land on the land nav course and got a noo on land nav which is something i was really good at so it was like super shameful i had to go back to my unit it without graduating passing everything but without graduating would

[Julian Dorey]

you say you got caught what talking

[Chad Robichaux]

on land nav like like we had a little sidebar class yeah this was land nav course and students aren't supposed to talk to each other and and i fell for it right everyone does it right open each other but but the captain was like hey like devil dog like kind of pull me in right integrity is a hallmark of all marines you're out like you were talking and yeah so now i got to get to stay i just couldn't couldn't graduate great and and so i had to but my unit kept me and i had to go back and do it over again and so i take the long route you know it's all about resilience like i had to put my head down take take take it on the chin and because it was it really is because something i'm really good at and so i was really proud of being good at it but you got mas became a recon marine and i got to go to all the schools and one of the things i love most about being a recon marine being a military free fall parachutist i loved you know doing going to

[Julian Dorey]

hail you know glad someone liked it

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah that's not for me like yeah i got like six hundred free free fall jobs and and but you know i trained all that time and doing all that job and and then i went from active duty to the reserves went to unico third force recon and ran the training program there and then and then it looked like when nine eleven happened man i was like i mean when those planes flew world trade center buildings even being in reserves at a a at that type unit a special operations unit like and my life just changed like we're going to war but what the military don't realize is that not everybody goes like a small segment goes not every even that every special operation unit right there's a certain people units the old days yeah i mean yeah i mean it's not a you know you got to keep contingents in different places and you got to have people on standby and so so we didn't go and and so man i really want to go end up going to the federal air marshals actually to the what to the federal airport marshals the federal air marshals like up in the yeah in the airplane civilian planes so you were doing that yeah and and i'll tell you why it's it's pretty brilliant plan at the time there was only like i think the number is like i can't remember if it was twenty or forty just slipping my right now air marshals at the time and they were all like former special operations guys and so now they have to ramp up to like over two thousand air marshals right after nine hundred eleven how do you do that right how do you get top secret clearances the federal hiring process our special agents like a year just to so they were brilliant they said let's go to the reserve special operations units they already have top secret clearances they already could shoot because the shooting standard was really high and recruit and that's what they did so they came to my unit and and and a couple of us went to the i was the second class of the federal so if

[Julian Dorey]

you're going undercover on plane shortly after nine eleven are you just like sensory overload like oh that guy's going to

[Chad Robichaux]

try to take that oh yeah the idea was so cool but but then it into being i mean you think of the idea of being a federal air marshal on a plane to prevent a hijacking and shoot the terrorists but it doesn't happen that often ever so it became the most boring job ever and and you know and and and then iraq war kicks off and now i got buddies that are going to afghanistan and iraq invasion is happening like i want to go all right slow

[Julian Dorey]

down slow down yeah you just went through about fifteen years in about three minutes i was letting you go for a while but now you got to stop okay gotcha so because it it's interesting like how you got there and everything but you mentioned when your brother was tragically shot and killed your stepbrother your dad and your stepmom broke up yeah was your real mom in your life at all she's been on and

[Chad Robichaux]

off in my life you know kind of at a distance the whole time yeah even even this day to this

[Julian Dorey]

day yeah so was some of that because of the abuse she endured or

[Chad Robichaux]

i think so i think so you know you know my mom i definitely think my mom like has a huge heart and loves me and loves my kids and stuff like that but she's always just kept a good like safe distance from all of us through her life and i think maybe it's you know she's been through a lot a lot of abuse and and so she just kind of always have kind of heard none her thing what about your

[Julian Dorey]

dad today my dad passed he passed

[Chad Robichaux]

he passed several years back and and it was a lot of lot of hardship and resentment towards him but in the end of his life like people have showed me showed me a lot of grace and it was a moment that people had showed me a tremendous amount of grace that he popped back up into my life because the hospital had called with him having a stroke and a heart attack simultaneously oh jesus and and i was actually kind of mad i was like why would they call me like he hadn't talked to me in ten years like why would they call me like they call somebody else but then i i had recognized like man i was in a moment in my life where people had just showed me a tremendous amount of grace place and and that was a redemptive process that it just took place in my life from both from god and from people and i was like you know what like i have to i'm the only person in his life at this time he burned every bridge and so i went flew in and went over to to sign some paperwork for him to get the care he needed and and then start restarting a relationship with him and and last few years of his life he was he was in a pretty the bad spot medically and then he disappeared again some woman that he was with ended up taking him into a pretty bad area and put him in he was like literally parked in a i found him went looking for him because somebody called me and said hey he's he's being like used for a social security check oh jeez so so they parked him in the back corner of his room with you know he hadn't he didn't have underwear he didn't own either thing and he had open open feeding tube in his body and they were they just was like collecting so i walked in his house i found where he's at ren you know flew in to oklahoma rented a car found him and when i got into his house like i think they thought it was the cops because everybody scattered when i walked into the house and and i kind of like got frantic because he had like long fingernails and feces under his nails and stuff so i started cleaning up i called nine one one and and yeah they were they were using him for a social security check and got him into a a home and got to i got to introduce him my relationship with god and and and his and and so that was pretty cool at the end of his life and we had this moment of like forgiveness and then he he passed that's what

[Julian Dorey]

i was going to ask you did

[Chad Robichaux]

you forgive him for absolutely that that's when to answer your first question did i have compassion for him i never did before because i didn't know but from me and the things that i dealt with post afghanistan and the things i see my friends deal with with now i knew what he had went through and i knew why his life was the way he was and so i was able to because of my own experience i was able to have compassion for him and because of the grace people showed me i was able to pay that grace forward to my father and had that closure with him at the end of his life and you know at the very end of his life he had never told me he loved me or anything like that but at the very end of his life i had to keep him oklahoma because the way the medicare thing set up i couldn't bring him to where it was and so i got him you know everything he needed a tv and a phone and and i prepay his phone card and he would call me and he was starting to get dementia because of his condition at the end and he would he would call me and just say hey chad this is your dad i love you and he would never say i love you and and then and then i'd say okay okay and then he'd hang up and like five minutes later he called me again hey chad this is your daddy i love you and and then then i got a call from i didn't get a call from the hospital the god bless home i actually got a call from the funeral home they called me first trying to do funeral arrangements and so it was kind of weird way i found out but yeah he passed and man he had burned so many bridges his life i never even i couldn't have a funeral for him not a brother a sister a

[Julian Dorey]

friend no one but that's pretty special that like you got to rekindle your own relationship with him yeah very thankful for that and have some some grace

[Chad Robichaux]

with that too yeah and i believe that i got to lead him to a relationship with christ which is something that been profound for me and so while we may not have had a good life in this life together i believe we'll have one later on so

[Julian Dorey]

that's great man yeah and and it's it's also because like you strike me as a big family guy talking about your kids and yeah also you're someone who clearly cares a lot about taking care of other people you go and risk your life as a private citizen now to war zones to help people so like you got a big heart and all that and it's always interesting to me when i see people because like i i came from a great home like my parents have a great marriage and everything everyone's got their flaws i never you know i got i had it really good and so when i see people like you who come from just every possible challenge thrown your way from death of a sibling that you're who's your best friend to your mom not really being in your life to your dad having all these problems and leaving your life and then you're able to i guess take that pain and those scars and the environmental troubles that you went through and instead of giving into that if you will harness it into changing your own future reality for yourself and the people that you love and the people that will come after you that's a really hard thing to do and i think that's amazing that you've been able to do that

[Chad Robichaux]

i think we all have that choice no matter what where we came from if we had it good or bad or you know if our dad was rich or poor over black white you know lived in a trailer park or the projects or mansion like you know as we move into adulthood and we all have that choice to make and what we do with our lives and we could let our past destroy us or give us a platform to do good with hell yeah man and it's kind of i think life's a lot better if we choose the ladder and

[Julian Dorey]

also what's really cool and comes through there is that that it's clear to me you don't you didn't hold grudges you may have been really angry at people may have lasted a while too you may have been like what the

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah but it's hard for me because like i said earlier i'm a kind of principal person so yeah and i'm like a super loyal person so when i lose loyalty towards me which has happened a lot in my life i have very difficult time understanding it but i usually come around to to be

[Julian Dorey]

the bigger person yeah yeah that comes through do so man that's really that's really really impressive man i i can't the best i can do to process something like that is when i hear a story like yours and someone's sitting there or anywhere else not necessarily just the podcast studio can tell me about their experience and i can try to conceive it but you know in some ways i'm glad i can't it's good

[Chad Robichaux]

i'm thankful for thankful for people that hadn't had to endure yeah unfortunately too many people have to endure stuff like

[Julian Dorey]

that that yeah yeah but good on you so you end up in the military like you said you go through the marines by the way just we've done this before because i've had on a recon marine before but for people when they hear the term recon marine what specifically does that mean for people

[Chad Robichaux]

who don't know that yeah so recon marine is a it's it's special operations unit but it's very the marine corps is very unique in the fact that prior to i'd say two thousand i know the date's not exactly right this guy's gonna eat me up on that but just just generally prior to two thousand the marine corps no participation in socom special operations command or jsoc and marine corps still doesn't have any participation in jsoc joint special operations command but socom special operations command continued to push the marine corps for a participation and but the marine corps didn't want to get rid of get want to get rid of recon so he started a unit called that one which a detachment to send a socom to basically participate and show the marine corps capabilities and so those were all recon marines who did that amazing guys who just represented the marine corps really well at that level and and you know kind of terrible when you do a good job of something you kind of put in a heavy demand for yourself so the socom came back and said marine corps has to participate and so instead of marine corps giving up recon they created a new unit called marsoc marine special operations command and so marine corps special operations contribution to socom is marine special operations commands which gets funded by socom they do a a pretty similar job to the army special forces but the marine corps kept recon for itself and so recon and force recon is internal the marine corps and provides all the four reconnaissance on the battlefield at a from a division of a division asset level to the marine corps so all the reconnaissance on the battlefield where they're going forward and doing like route route reps or or or do set going ahead of the like the infantry battalion set up helicopter landing zones or gathering intelligence or doing side permissions all these different things that would be going forward of the marine corps division or or in the battlefield space for the marine corps that's what that's what recon does and they do kind of the eyes and ears right of the marine corps

[Julian Dorey]

you're laying the foundation yeah very small

[Chad Robichaux]

you know small team six man teams they could work as a platoon size element as well but six man teams and and over the years you know i'm an older guy so it's really progressed a lot since i've been out i mean like a lot of times you hear guys that are like oh back in my day well back in my day it was nothing compared to now like these guys now they go through a year long pipeline they leave their when they show up at the unit they're like jump dive free fall sears school like everything's they show up ready to operate near like basically like like professional level athletes with all these skills so really high high caliber training that they have today with a lot of capabilities and the units are very funded well it's it's pretty amazing so the marine corps has a very kind of two two tiers of special operations one at socom one internal the marine corps so recon and every every recon battalion has a four street four shriek on company which would be the the more senior guys that have been around longer and selected to be that force recon element inside there so that's it basically belongs internal to the marine corps and and it's it's amazing and they don't get a lot of credit they they stay pretty low profile and uh and and i think they're very proud of that i've caught a lot of hate for my my public pro profile being out there and and uh guys that you know the recon community doesn't like guys going out and writing books and but but it's it's amazing guys and then recon community is just amazing group of group of human beings and it's very special very special humans and so that's what i did that's what

[Julian Dorey]

so you just to review the timeline you had been going through there before i pulled you back you end up in the marines and then you end up in the reserves and while you're in the reserves are you doing any civilian jobs too are you full time

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah i'm so i did my four years active and then i went to the reserves went to went to third force recon company in mobile alabama moved to louisiana i was my job my idea was i'm gonna go to college because no wars going on ninety seven when i got it when i got a factory to use nineteen ninety seven those were no wars going on kind of hard to think that we had a time time in our country like that and and i'm gonna go to college and go back in as officer didn't know what i was gonna do for a job while i was going to college but i already started a family so i had to have a job so i went i was a police officer in new orleans oh cool and then but i also didn't pay much money to be a police officer in orland so i was doing about ten days a month at the reserve unit so i was doing about ten days as a marine corps reservist about twenty days at the police department and working my butt off trying to you know not making any money on either side trying to go to college and get my family in a better position and so that's i did that for like four years until nine eleven when

[Julian Dorey]

you by the way when you suddenly start a family and everything because i haven't done that yet i really look forward to it but especially like when you're young and you're in the workforce and you got to bring home the money did that just totally flip a switch in you like oh nothing else matters i got to figure out how there's a roof over the head all

[Chad Robichaux]

the time yeah well i mean i don't know because i got married while i was you know freshly in the marine corps and you know one of the great things about being in a service when you get married like you don't have to worry about anything i mean now your pay goes up like you you get married i got you know base housing and you get you get money for food and groceries and for being married so you make you make more money and you have a place to stay and so there's a lot of security in the military but transitioning right like transitioning out to to the reserves like you lose all that and you know it's just like now you have to figure it out and and that plan is to go to college but i didn't do like a me set program anything like that i just got out and i'm gonna go to college and and so i had to figure out what to do and my initial thought was i'm gonna go commercial diving because i love diving so i got a job at a commercial diving company and i realized really quick quick i'm not about to do this and go to college what's a job that i could do while going to college so so that the police the police departments where i went yeah the sheriff's office is where i went how

[Julian Dorey]

was it being a police officer in

[Chad Robichaux]

new orleans it's pretty wild right pre cell phones nobody videoing you so watching

[Julian Dorey]

the beepers go off like it's the

[Chad Robichaux]

wire yeah it was wild because i went to the police academy and because i was because i came out of you know i was a recon marine young in shape so i did really good in academy and so they put me right undercover straight out of the academy whoa so i went straight to like in new rollings yeah so i went straight undercover narcotics straight academy before i ever put on a uniform and so what was that that was a really cool experience it was kind of funny you guys your audience probably laugh i did like twenty one jump street thing so i went into i went into high school so i went from back after four years of being in marine corps corps you know i was a you know corporal in the marine corps and now you know as in charge of a recon team as a team leader and now i'm a now i'm having a teacher tell me to spit out my gum oh my god so yeah so you were literally i literally went into high school and then my job wasn't to bust high school kids though my job was to catch people selling drugs adults selling drugs to high school kids so did a couple of weeks a couple of weeks actually in the school as a student and then the idea was to build some relationships and drop them out had an apartment in town while my pregnant wife this poor poor pregnant wife's having to deal with me being around a bunch of you know high school kids living in the next town over yeah it was it was pretty and so it was it was wild man because this a it was a rough area it was a really rough area town and end up getting in a shooting while undercover working with high school kids and then what happened there well i mean it was i was at a let's see it was at his high school

[Julian Dorey]

party oh my god yeah so you had to do the whole damn oh

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah i think you didn't have any

[Julian Dorey]

close calls nope

[Chad Robichaux]

none of those but yeah yeah this this high school party this big bonfire party and and this is is this guy's girlfriend was i guess like wanting to talk to me just a high school girl right and and he got jealous and came tried to fight me and we're there trying to do police work and i'm over this high school drama this guy's so this this guy takes a swing at me through the car window we're trying to leave and these are bad guys these aren't kids by the way these are adults like and and i i pushed a door and when i pushed a door he missed me hit her and and i grabbed a hold of him and when i did someone shot up the back of our car and my partner shouldn't shouldn't do this by the police by the way came out the sunroof he's from another another sheriff's part came out the sunroof and and fired up with his glock fired like a base of of of fire over the over all these kids yeah firing his gun over and everybody got down and we drove out of there and so the next day these the next day these guys came found me and i was at the parking lot of the high school picking someone up and and they attacked me i went i went for my i actually they came to like there was a bunch of guys and so i rushed to my truck opened my truck because my gun was under my my seat i grabbed my gun and we started fighting over my gun i ended up getting my gun away pushed him back and held them all at gunpoint never said it was a cop or anything and then drove off and when i drove off they went and picked up a long rifle ak forty seven was looking for me and then and that and then my my supervisor called me and said

[Julian Dorey]

hey we gotta get i would have

[Chad Robichaux]

been like yo this i'm leaving high

[Julian Dorey]

school i ain't going back to this

[Chad Robichaux]

this is over yeah so so that ended up and then ended the end of the operation because it escalated so bad and these guys so yeah so so after that we ended up doing the roundup which is where you go arrest everybody that was so we had like forty five fell felony warrants from my time there from people i bought from and stuff and these and not only the drug buys but these guys for aggravated assault oh my god and so i actually got in uniform and to go surprise i'm not in high school yeah that's the first that was the first time i ever wore a wore police uniform besides the graduation you

[Julian Dorey]

must have had a baby face oh

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah super baby face yeah oh my

[Julian Dorey]

god i couldn't see that now you

[Chad Robichaux]

know what's funny though is i they i i i was like wish they would had a wrestling team because the next the next par the next parish over because in louisiana that parishes the next parish over there was a guy doing the same thing i was doing it was it was a statewide effort it was a state task force so there was several of us doing it he was like this guy had played like a this guy had played like division one baseball and everything he goes in and puts on this sob story that his dad died or whatever the baseball team takes him on they buy they get together buy him a glove he's out there like knocking the skin off of balls at high school games

[Julian Dorey]

like what do you say at the end athletic director hey listen it was for a good cause yeah oh my god who was the kid in the little league world series like twenty years ago who was just mowing down and then turned out he was like eighteen

[Chad Robichaux]

there was a movie out there like the guy had his id it's like a guy from puerto rico oh my

[Julian Dorey]

god i know what you're talking about

[Chad Robichaux]

i'm sixteen it's like crayon i'm sixteen yeah he's twenty seven three kids oh

[Julian Dorey]

that's dude i've never heard of that before yeah i didn't think that was like a real thing yeah it was

[Chad Robichaux]

a real twenty one jump street man

[Julian Dorey]

oh my god and you were what like twenty two twenty i was twenty

[Chad Robichaux]

one years old i was twenty one

[Julian Dorey]

years old all right so you're close enough you could kind of pass but

[Chad Robichaux]

that's crazy man it was it was it was it was it was it was a crazy then i go straight from there to being a patrol officer in that same area like and you're like hey guys yeah remember me officer yeah and then that's funny so i get in a get in a shooting my first year another one as a patrol officer yeah and what happened there so my partner i was working this

[Julian Dorey]

one beat wait your two shootings you've been in were as a copy camp

[Chad Robichaux]

what yeah when i say when i say when i say two shootings i was in one shooting in afghanistan when i say my two shootings i mean well i personally shot back okay so this is the first one i didn't count the first one because i didn't i didn't even have a gun on

[Julian Dorey]

me got it but this one's the

[Chad Robichaux]

first one is this is the first one so what happens yeah i'm in if you ever fly new orleans you're you don't land in new orleans you land in saint rose okay land in jefferson parish and that's so you have jefferson parish saint charles parish so right by the new orleans airport is a town called saint rose in the saint charles cop area that's that's a that's beat two hundred four i was in two hundred two no one was in two hundred three at the time and so i heard that i heard a guy the guy on two hundred four come across he's a marine named steve got he was one of field training officers so i got really respected and i'm you know just kind of listening over the background because a single single single like deputy patrol course and heard his voice over the radio like something was wrong and he called for for backup and and then the radio went completely silent we had a we had a brand new radio system a good one but it was like a glitch in it so the runner went radio system went silent so this guy had never heard his voice before like in a kind of distress so i like was panicking to get there man you know like lights and sirens like getting there to get steve and when i got to where he was he said because elevated kind of modular home and there's about thirty people outside you know to kind of see what's going on and and steve was on the front porch arguing with this lady and the lady the the lady was the spouse her husband was inside his domestic violence thing and her kids you know juvenile kids were all like in the crowd people are holding their kids back and when i get there i'm asking steve what's going on he said get this lady off the porch her husband's in the back he's got a gun and and so she's arguing with me i i argue with her for a second then i like grabbed her by the back of her shirt and her pants and pushed over the rail and a couple of guys actually grabbed her and helped take her over whoa over the rail and and so how fast does

[Julian Dorey]

this happen by the way or is just time kind of slow down time

[Chad Robichaux]

kind of slows down but it's you know it's pretty bad and by the way i had been to this house before the guy's name was russell stebbins he had been a lot of trouble he's always problems with the priests he's place he was drinking all the time time and there's always domestic violence calls there so i've been to the house before and then so i stand in the doorway and steve goes to the back window where the guy barricaded himself because we didn't want to shoot out the window to this crowd so steve goes to that window and i'm standing there's doorway and when i'm standing in the doorway i'm looking across the living room kind of catacorner across from me is is the hallway and i'm looking in there's family pictures there's toys it's like the food's dinner's still on the table like this isn't a combat environment war environment this is like somebody's home and and he's he he russell stands in the hallway and i can see man it's a mirror and he's like he like takes his takes his rifle and i could see him like messing with the chamber like press checking it to see if it's loaded like and i'm like and i'm just starting you know like a police officer like hey put down the gun come out talk to us and then and then he's like i'm not coming out say my wife in here i want to talk to my wife i guess you guys need to leave and i'm like we're not leaving your wife's not coming in like put down the guy we can talk and and then he comes around the corner man and when he comes around the corner he didn't have the gun in his shoulder like a like you would shoulder a gun he had it over his shoulder which is almost like him trying to pretend he still had control like hey like hand up he's got the gun over shoulders pointed his his fingers on like the receiver but his but his thumbs up kind of like by the trigger and so i felt like by the way lethal force he's pointing a gun at me i could have shot him right there yeah like totally could have shot him and if you'd asked me that day if i would have shot somebody that would have did that i'd be like heck yeah like but then like this guy's home yeah i mean this guy's home like his kids are right there watching me his wife's right there screaming there's the toys and of like are

[Julian Dorey]

you clutching that in the moment oh

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah yeah like i'm like and i'm and i just felt like i still had control so i stopped yelling at like a police officer i'm like i'm gonna kill you let's i remember telling him that like i'm gonna kill you because that i just wanted him to know like like this isn't a game and and for some reason in that moment i i just i felt like i'm at the time i'm like i'm a small guy and by the time i was at that time i was probably like one hundred twenty one hundred thirty pounds i was a little guy and he's six foot three two hundred sixty three pounds i know his weight because of the autopsy report and and i felt like i could handle it so i stepped in and close the distance to him and i took the barrel and grabbed this barrel's rifle and pushed it away from me and i kicked him in the nuts like not like a not like a football kick but like a push kick to pull the rifle out of his hands i kicked him the second time the first time nothing skipped him the second time trying to pull and not only did i nothing like he grabbed my wrist with my gun in it it and this guy's he's a monster guy so now we're fighting with two guns and and i'm like man he's not gonna give like he's not ever gonna stop like and so i i knew that moment like i had to you know i had to shoot so i i broke my grip like of his wrist and i shot once like pop right and then i shot five more times like shot six rounds i didn't even know steve was behind me at the time steve shot six rounds over my shoulder i could hear like i could hear i could literally hear his gun functioning like the mechanics of his gun functioning i never heard a bang i could hear like like pops i could hear his gun like functioning and i seen russell kind of like step back and then he fell back to his knees and he literally looked over his shoulders and made eye contact with me he said you killed me and i just pushed him down and when i pushed him down i like reached under him and pulled the rifle up from underneath him and and then i handcuffed him and i could hear him i could hear him in that moment like breathe like his last like his last breath i heard him breathe out out

[Julian Dorey]

where are the kids and wife at

[Chad Robichaux]

this point they're right outside the door looking in are they screaming his wife's screaming and his kids look but i look because i know because i look back his wife was screaming and his kids look like we're just like in shock like they were just looking i looked right at them through the doorway like i'm in the living room on the ground look back i could see through doorway and it's like i don't know if it was like i could just see like a tunnel like like right to them and i wanted to go out to her i know something inside of me want to go out to her because i felt like i was there of protecting her but obviously she was right right furious at me and i as i handcuffed him i had short sleeves on and somehow cuz one of his hands went in front of his body and and so there wasn't much blood that came from his body it's weird the human body's weird sometimes it bleeds sometimes it doesn't but it was even though all all all we shot him we hit him eleven out of twelve times and all it was all center mass and there was no blood coming out of his body but when i grabbed his wrist it was like mush because i think what one of the rounds went through nothing one of the rounds went through his wrist and and so like i literally had like blood like all the way up to both elbows just from fighting with his hand because his hand was so limp trying to handcuff it when

[Julian Dorey]

you obviously as you laid out in the story your life was in danger he's he's got a gun on you he's twice your size he's resisting it's an unfortunate situation you have to take the action right there regardless of where you are you tried everything he could to not get to that point nonetheless once it's done you did your job but you turn around and his young kids are right there and you did just have to kill their father like when you when you looked at them and you just see them in shock like what goes through your head not

[Chad Robichaux]

even just then even now i wonder what they think of me you know yeah i mean to this day i mean i haven't shared this story a ton i've shared it a few times but i'm always kind of hesitant to share the story because i could i think about what they might think you know know and you know i could still see them i will for the rest of my life that you know the wife and hearing her scream and and seeing those kids and i wonder where their life's like i don't i don't know i don't know what her life's like i don't know what their life's like i don't know where they ended up

[Julian Dorey]

you know that was yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

it was that was the end of the you know i was i was super angry at him for putting me in that situation right i mean look i gave i i did everything i could to way beyond i even should have for my own safety and for my partner safety to give him the chance to live and and he forced me to do that he i mean he was he was he was wasn't coming after me i was in the way he was going for her and she was in a in his kids they were in a crowd of thirty people he had a rifle and by the way that rifle not that it mattered or not it had a round then chambers off safety he was ready to he was ready to so you

[Julian Dorey]

may have even saved them him yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

i mean we certainly did i mean i don't know i mean he wasn't he wasn't going out there after her with the loaded gun off safety that's right to talk to her i mean god i was i was i was in i was just in the way and he wanted me out of the

[Julian Dorey]

way that's such a strange spot to be in because then you do in every way the right thing but then you're also still wondering how because he was somebody when he wasn't crazy he was somebody to those people oh yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

she sued you know obviously got the thrown out she sued and then i i had you know i went through the you get polygraphed you know right that night you get your gun taken away from you get polygraphed you go home next morning i wake up the chief chief calls me and chief's like hey don't read the paper of course we get a paper front page of the paper says big headline cold blooded murder very small print please say justified and that that started the process of a grand jury investigation the district attorney didn't make a determination on it left it to a grand jury so i had to go before a grand jury on and before indictment of first a second degree murder which is his election year the district attorney is not gonna make a position let the public make a decision and and so when you go before grand jury people don't know what that means the grand jury of your peers finds you guilty you leave in handcuffs and and so that was very stressful that's scary as hell time scary yeah because you got you got witnesses saying i didn't understand why witnesses say this you got witnesses were saying like hey we saw them they he was on his knees and they executed him now the forensic showed different the forensic show the bullets came from the front and everything corroborate everything we said his balls were like the size of a bowling ball from me kicking him in nuts like trying to disarm him like so forensic so on outside but you have eyewitnesses saying that hey i looked in he was now i now i know being older now and seeing you people hear gunshots and then they look inside and then they see him on his knees turned away right right so people people's brain can't process the timeline of that kind of stuff did

[Julian Dorey]

it ever with your head where you were where you start when you heard other people's accounts as you're leading up to the grand jury where you're like wait did it go how i thought it went or did it go like

[Chad Robichaux]

that no i was just like why why would people lie i was thinking why would people lie like why like and now i know people probably wasn't lying i think they were just right

[Julian Dorey]

i understand yeah so wow what a thing to go through through yeah and

[Chad Robichaux]

then you know and then you know once it's all over right now you cleared now we we get we'll be

[Julian Dorey]

a cop again it's like what we

[Chad Robichaux]

get the middle of we get the mailer valor from the come the governor's office oh you did this governmental valor both of us get the bell of valor and and then but but that by that point you're just like so jaded you're like yeah guys how can mean you need to give it to us after the grand jury like did

[Julian Dorey]

you did you have ptsd from that

[Chad Robichaux]

i wouldn't have said i didn't but i i think so now i think i i i don't think i ever healed from that till like probably like years like when i say years later after afghanistan i think i just like pushed that i was so angry about that i had to do that and i was angry at my wife why

[Julian Dorey]

were you angry at your wife well

[Chad Robichaux]

because i came home and i mean she's so naive to like afghanistan and what she was like she thinks that's what she probably my wife's like so naive which makes her a good made her a good wife for that kind of job like she probably thinks cops go every night and just you know get shootouts and stuff like that i was came home and told her what happened and she's like rolled over went back to sleep like no big deal oh good day oh sounds like good day at work and and i'm like i'm like wide awake obviously just shot someone and and and and so she's you know she was young and had no idea how to handle that and and or or comprehend that and it's probably why you know she's endured all that all that she endured and when we were married it's probably why she endured all that you know because she she was naive to that kind of stuff so i was i was like mad at her and then i was like i just stay mad at the guy and and and honestly like it's probably of all the stuff that i've seen in ukraine and afghanistan and it is probably personally the most traumatic thing i've ever experienced it's just the proximity of it it was so personal right there yeah he you know him looking back he killed me him bleeding on me him his kids wife screaming his kid right there it's most personal thing i ever been through i still like even talking right now i just get it shakes me up to talk about it i can see yeah yeah yeah i don't talk about it much yeah

[Julian Dorey]

well thank you for sharing it yeah i appreciate that real quick chad i gotta run to the bathroom i'm right there with you and then we'll we'll

[Chad Robichaux]

come back by the way i i said it to you but to your audience free again julian has the best coffee it's so good it's got me jittery man it's good coffee yeah that

[Julian Dorey]

one one was a strong batch today it's a strong batch this morning but i'm glad to hear that we'll be right back everybody all right we're back so where you were you spent four years as a police officer during that time while you were in reserves yeah where were you on nine hundred eleven

[Chad Robichaux]

man i was so i went after that shooting i went to the detective bureau and worked violent crimes and then went back to narcotics as a senior detective over special investigations division and so it was a i was on a on on that you know midnight nine eleven i was i was out on a surveillance so i spent all night sitting in my truck under surveillance for waiting for this arm robber to hit this place and nothing happens you know i go home and you know about to go to bed now i'm sitting on i can't remember what time what time the towers were hit eight forty

[Julian Dorey]

six nine o two or nine hundred

[Chad Robichaux]

three yeah i knew it knew it was early but yeah so i'm at home live room and i see the first plane hit on on the television and i think the same thing else everyone else thinks what kind of moron drops the airplane in a building right second plane hits and and immediately i'm like you know my life just changed

[Julian Dorey]

do you know who it was or did you have an inkling who it

[Chad Robichaux]

was no but you knew i did i mean yeah i knew it was a i was in attack and you know even being in the reserves being a you know you know like third force reconnaissance company i'm like you know if you're the mindset of being in a special operations unit you're like i'm gonna go to war like right away and kind of thought that i would and but like i said earlier it's just not how it works you know not everybody goes right and so as bad as i want i resigned from that week i resigned from the sheriff's department and i went to an active reserves to my unit and was pushing to deploy and we didn't deploy and and i was bummed man i want

[Julian Dorey]

to go so when did you end it because you ended up doing eight tours in afghanistan some of it as a contractor to jsoc is that the way to put it so when when did you first deploy when you were

[Chad Robichaux]

still in the military i didn't i

[Julian Dorey]

didn't it was all as the contract

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah so i went to so i went went to the air marshals i go to air marshals and then i go to and then and then i my unit's going to deploy to iraq so i'm going to go i'm going to deploy as a marine with third force augmenting second force recon to iraq and so i start working up on the deployment and during the deployment i had a friend reach out to me and say hey you should try out for this this jsoc task force is having a this contract there so leave

[Julian Dorey]

the military and come to the private contract side yep yep so what did

[Chad Robichaux]

that look like i can't say all of it obviously the unit but you know at jsoc you have your premiere you know you have like task force orange you have delta four seal team six you know all the different the seven different units at jsoc and so and so i i went over there to support one of the units as a to do inclined escalant logistics and so i didn't quite know which unit i was going to be with and i didn't really understand the job but essentially i told you earlier about the job of doing clandestine logistics doing advanced force operations that's what i went there to do and so it's a lot of training to learn how to do that job job and go and go

[Julian Dorey]

forward to do that job now what's different about going into it as a contractor from the outside versus like being in the military is are there a lot more gloves off type procedures you

[Chad Robichaux]

can do i don't know i mean you're still working for the military so all the all the legalities and parameters are the same i think there's a sense of like a little bit further distancing to be non attributable so you're your contractor there's you the us government's not completely attributable to your thing although when i first started i was contracting through another company there was a little bit of layering but towards the end i was was contracting directly with my command and so the attribution was pretty tight and you know i i reported directly to the the xo and ceo of my unit so it wasn't much different i mean you're not wearing a uniform you don't get paid the same you get paid a little bit more but i think everyone that was contracting at at that unit doing that job was doing it it for a sense of service and patriotism outside of a

[Julian Dorey]

job so this is zero three to

[Chad Robichaux]

zero seven these eight to to to two thousand seven april april of two thousand seven is when how long would

[Julian Dorey]

each deployment be three months kind of

[Chad Robichaux]

deal yeah three three anywhere from three to six months okay for me so

[Julian Dorey]

obviously there's some classified stuff you can't say like like you said so any

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah i mean my book if my book saving aziz like it went to the pentagon for full pentagon review so kind of kind of the liberty i have is actually know what's what they redacted right and so i kind of know what what i can and can't

[Julian Dorey]

say all right so we'll we'll get into the stuff you know and when there's stuff you run into that you can't no problem just say that but you'd be going there for three months at a time you're doing the recon stuff where you're going ahead kind of setting the stage for then some of these special forces teams to come in and you're serving in six man teams

[Chad Robichaux]

no no it's pretty much just either i'm usually with one other teammate or by myself with disease wow okay so you're all right so yeah singleton would be like the terminology yeah what's it

[Julian Dorey]

like like obviously you're an american you come into these places there's a lot of americans all over the country because of what's going on so that alone

[Chad Robichaux]

is not enough i think a lot of people a lot of people think that's like surprising oh how would people think you man there are ngo's all over any war zone in the world

[Julian Dorey]

but you're in plain clothes so you could technically blend in and they wouldn't necessarily know oh he's working with delta or any one of these teams or something like that okay now zero three to zero seven is interesting because you're going there right when iraq kicks off yes and when i look back at the history of afghanistan it's like we can argue about all the logistics around nine eleven that's certainly a conversation we do know that at least like the guys who flew the actual planes were associated with al qaeda and al qaeda was being harbored in afghanistan by the taliban so the us goes to afghanistan all right that makes sense iraq was a whole different thing so when they go to afghanistan they pull off minus getting bin laden they didn't do that but they pulled off one of the more impressive paramilitary operations ever done done in world history at the time and i would even looking back on it now the first year or two in afghanistan looks like some really good things happen from a military perspective yeah you go there in o three when they're now going into iraq in march zero three and looking back on it it does feel like the old quote that like kind of took your eye off the ball resources go to go to iraq and then afghanistan slowly sinks down into a hellhole over the next eighteen years at that point when did you start to notice in your four year period there or did you notice at any point that hey it seems like some of these guys we took out are starting to quietly build up again

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah i think as far as the military effort goes because of where i was and who i was with i didn't notice there was a a lack of attention put because i'm with the i'm with a tier one unit who gets all the resources and put they need so their mission was very well supported i think the conventional military's mission would have been you know become a little less and less over time but that that tier one units their their mission was very supported they're heavily funded everything they needed was done and they and they actually i think the progression of of what they were did and what they're capable of doing from two thousand one to probably twenty twelve would had continued to be amplified all the way till you know they got bin laden and so i i i think i was in a i was in a kind of a niche area to where i just seen a tremendous amount of resources and support going into operation that we were doing and so but i do think you're correct in the military i mean we're spread thin between two major wars and and it was a lot of the conventional effort shifted

[Julian Dorey]

to iraq yeah and you also brought this up earlier and we should go back to it because because every single guy i talk to who served significant time in afghanistan i'm talking navy seal guys from multiple teams including team six delta guys army ranger guys and i'm definitely missing a couple in there every one of them talks about you know the thing that people didn't talk about at dinner parties with the culture over there which i'll just use the direct quote many of them have independently given me that seems to be common in afghanistan where they say women are for kids and boys are for fun and it is a rampant under current culture i don't care where the it is i'm going to call that out it's crazy like at what point did you realize that was as widespread as it

[Chad Robichaux]

was right away right away i mean because just because of the fact that i mean you gotta think in in eight deployments there i spent like two weeks on a base so i lived out in the community and and so learned right away that you know women are for babies and boys are for for fun you know and and and these little boys especially like in within the taliban these little boys are generationally like like raped like as as boys and then they turn around and do it to the next generation so it's rampant and it's you know i i i always like struggle with like like they're going to fight a jihad war and and be so spiritually driven that they will end up you know put on a suicide vest or or fight to the death over the spiritual ide the spiritual belief and ideology of war but yet they're going to y be engaged in pedophilia it never there such a contra contradiction of morality that i just it never really understood it and it's just i mean and when it when these little girls man when these little girls get married off most of them are just they still think they're kids they're they're getting you know drugged through heels dug in drug through away from their parents wanting to just play and they're getting drug off at nine years old ten years old eleven years old to go be married off to some fifty sixty year old monster that's going to rape them the day the rest of her life it's like it's horrific and i mean especially right now like after post afghanistan post coast to afghanistan we got twenty million women and little girls in afghanistan right now and they they already you know marrying them off as young as nine years old and and even the ones that aren't marrying off they're like the ones that were our former allies their daughters are being you know sexually raped to death and there's where's the metoo movement where's the human rights people for them you know it's it's an atrocity that that people are quiet about it why would hollywood and stand up stand up for for these little girls you know why not these little girls they don't man it's so yeah my heart's always been with these these children so early on to answer your question early on i was exposed to it and it was it was very it was it was very you know disturbing to me it really it really drew that drove a hatred inside of me to who the taliban was on top of nine hundred eleven right on top of like why we were there in the first place and like this is who the bad guy is we're really easy to hate

[Julian Dorey]

them did you guys talk i mean i imagine you did what when when you were talking with your guys about this when you weren't just with this ease or something like that

[Chad Robichaux]

how do

[Julian Dorey]

you even talk about something like that while you're in there mission driven oh

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah it's easy i mean we just talk about how just how vile these guys were and just like like but

[Julian Dorey]

also the people that you're trying to use to like build the new military the non taliban they're engaged in the

[Chad Robichaux]

same they're engaged in the same st enough to i i you know the taliban's worse though i will say that culturally the taliban's worse because they're because of the because they take them they take these boys from their families at a young age to go to madrasas and be in taliban so they they take them and now they don't have parental protection and so they start raping them at a young age and they do that to the next generation the taliban is much worse it happens systemically across the culture but it's it's it's ten times worse in the taliban you know but in in the afghan community while while is systemic child pedophilia is systemic there there are good families that don't engage in that like aziza's example like i mean aziza's families wife just babysat my daughter like two days ago

[Julian Dorey]

that was my next question did you talk with him about this all the time and what did he say about

[Chad Robichaux]

it oh man they think it's disgusting like he thinks it's disgusting and they you know and they were careful like where their kids were around you know like because they know how rampant it is so it's it's systemic but it's not everyone and that's important and yeah and yeah i think it is because because you don't put everyone in one category but where it is like seems like one hundred percent systemic is the

[Julian Dorey]

taliban like that culture yeah you know i was telling you earlier there's moments that stand out in here and there was one when i was talking with andy boostamante in episode two hundred and ninety nine i was asking about the worst places he had ever been and one of the ones he mentioned was being meeting with a warlord in africa and a country that he didn't name and when he was there he saw the child soldiers around him they're all nine ten at most eleven years old and he said they would put all these kids on you know cocaine like drugs and and they would rape them and then those kids would grow up and turn into the if they lived turn into the general sitting in front of them and the guys who worked with him yeah and do the same thing to the next generation and i said to him i said how do you how do you stop that side cycle how do you get rid of that and he leaned back and andy's a blunt guy but you could tell even he was uncomfortable with the answer and you know him but like he was uncomfortable with the answer he was going to give he leaned back and he paused and he said this is gonna sound so bad and i'm like just god he goes you gotta kill them all i'm like kill them all all of them you got to put them all down and you got to start over and you know as much as that sounds like an awful solution and something that morally i would never like get behind just yeah i'm like looking at it and i'm saying to myself because it's he's not advocating like genocide or something like that he's talking about just specifically like the soldiers there which will include some child soldiers and stuff and and all i could think about is i was like all right julian you don't want to do that because that sounds awful do you have a better solution though like internally i was thinking in my head and i was like at this moment i don't have a better solution than that what what i you know morally what does

[Chad Robichaux]

that say yeah i mean i i agree like i mean you look at the taliban culture like how do you undo someone that's been exposed to that yeah i i i don't know the answer to that i mean the ideology in a way that the thinking that is as it's impressed into who they are yes you know it's and you there's redemption available for everyone but man i don't know how you turn that kind of thing thinking around at the

[Julian Dorey]

time when you were operating in afghanistan you know especially when you get to the end of the four years and the eight deployments before we get to why you decided to leave and all that did you feel like you were really getting somewhere and accomplishing things i

[Chad Robichaux]

don't believe i don't believe i felt that afghanistan as a whole i felt like it was an endless like like like bailing out of bailing bailing out a boat full of holes you know just like i don't believe afghanistan as a whole but for our mission i felt like we were getting somewhere i feel like because because it was it was very tangible when you're at the unit i was at that they had a target list and basically whoever's in the top ten that's who they're going after and we were knocking them down the command was knocking them down man i was with these guys are these guys at these at these these assaulters at these premier tier one units they're freaking they're amazing human beings and they do such a great job and they were and not just not just the guy the shooters like the the whole system like the intel like they they were doing a phenomenal job and they're taking targets out you know every time you take one out one rises up right but they were taking them out and so i thought that was tangible wins for us because of the job we did but i was observing the afghanistan as a whole and i'm like man it's just like like i said we're bailing out a boat with holes in it and and that's kind of

[Julian Dorey]

what it felt like now working you're not allowed to say which tier one unit you were working with but people can yeah guess there's there's a lot of really amazing ones either way they're all top tip of the spear if you will did you feel like those guys because sometimes this goes either way they talk about these teens being really insular or like really cool did you feel like those guys viewed you on the level or there was a little bit of a hey you just kind of do your for us and yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

we're here yeah this is terminology in all the special operations called enablers and so you go from being operator like to enabler and but i really believed in a job like the job's not less when you're doing the kind of work we're doing the job's not less important it's like you know it's and so at first i kind of felt like oh okay i'm here to support those guys those guys are going to go through a door they can breach the door and they're going there and they get either capture or kill a bad guy and my job's supporting those guys that's my role right now i'm gonna do the very best job i can when i got there i realized that oh my gosh like the guys who are here way more qualified than me me and i either could intimidate you into kind of kind of cowering down or or challenge you to do the best job you can and for me like being a recon marine being there and realizing like how lucky i was to be there i felt like i had to i want to represent my community really well and so i worked really hard and and that earned me to at the very end i got picked to be on the kind of premier job and what do you mean by premier job i mean there was a there was an effort effort at the very end a project that was going to be in a neighboring country i won't say which one because the pentagon redacted my books pretty easy to figure out i was gonna be in a neighboring country by myself neighboring country to afghanistan yeah so yeah by myself to go and and help you know help get those guys on target for some of the top top few guys on there you know from number one down so so i'm gonna get and everybody wanted that job and i got picked to do it and and you know i was i was pretty proud of that i was very proud

[Julian Dorey]

of that were you ever in those four years tasked with something related to chan tangentially or directly with trying to

[Chad Robichaux]

hunt bin laden of course yeah so whoever was whoever was that i mean the whole command was that for that

[Julian Dorey]

yeah and well some guys when i asked that question are like nah we're doing other a lot of guys actually that's why i asked but yeah that's

[Chad Robichaux]

what he he was he was the target i mean he was the target until twenty eleven until we got him from two from september eleventh twenty twenty one i mean september eleventh two thousand one till till twenty eleven he was he was the target now i think the capturing or killing of him several times has been intervened by our government for whatever reasons let him live i've

[Julian Dorey]

just heard that wait wait you're saying that they knew where he was sometimes and decided not to kill him i

[Chad Robichaux]

just heard that i don't know if it's true or not win yeah i mean i mean i know a lot of people give the guy shrek mcphee a hard time but but you know he he talks about a personal incident to where they they had you know had it had a chance to get him and was called off what year approximately i don't know what year i think that i think that was early i think there was early on john mcphee is his name yeah yeah yeah yeah he talks about that on on the sean ryan or sean ryan why would would they andrew rogan he talks

[Julian Dorey]

about him why would they not want

[Chad Robichaux]

to get him i don't know i mean i mean you know was he you know his level of complicity with with the attacks and what he may or may not know may maybe didn't want to want him captured i wanted to make sure that when we did get him he'd be dead i i don't know i don't know know i just thought it was always strange i've heard that two or three times from

[Julian Dorey]

different people dead men can't talk that

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah i heard i heard two or three times from different people that we could have got him and we didn't

[Julian Dorey]

and then does that piss you off

[Chad Robichaux]

it did at the time i didn't understand it when i when i heard it but now now it makes a little more sense to me i mean i'm thankful and i do believe by the way i do believe we did get him in in two thousand i know people there's a lot of people like oh we didn't see his body why did he throw away at sea and president obama i believe i got him yeah you know they got the whole drama going on between you know rob o' neill and all other guys that were there and stuff like that those guys i believe those guys got

[Julian Dorey]

him yeah do you think like do you think it's possible and again i was telling you off camera i i really try to stay out of the military drama like i'm gonna let them figure that out obviously this one's talked about in the public domain a lot i don't have an opinion or whatever do you think it's possible that in particularly like rob o' neal and matt bissette because it's a dark night vision mission fast chaotic in an enclosed house going after one target a bunch of them and closing on it on the same time do you think they may both actually really believe their memory of

[Chad Robichaux]

what it was i think they both think they're telling the truth yeah and and it's a shame it's a shame that they would be in in odds against it it's even more a shame that the veteran community attacks either one of those guys and here's why because both those guys are incredible patriots and they not only raise a hand to serve but they served at not only as navy seals but at the premier tier one unit in the world you know seal team six and they volunteer for that mission knowing that the they that mission was a high chance they wasn't coming back right and they both went through that door and on the other side doors or something bin laden what happened to the other side of that door personally i don't really care i think a lot of i think a lot of people put bullets i'm b l if i have to guess because they were just like i you know i want a piece of this too i don't know i was at

[Julian Dorey]

the end of inglorious bastards i don't

[Chad Robichaux]

know i wasn't there but i think this probably semantics and perspectives and and different recollections and and you know people don't look at any any crime right you you interview ten people that witnessed a crime and you get ten different stories that's right i don't know i wasn't there and and and everybody else commenting on it wasn't there either bissonnette was there and and and o' neill was there they were there let them let them sort that out and everybody

[Julian Dorey]

went through the door like you said like they all did it the whole

[Chad Robichaux]

team those guys are heroes man they're

[Julian Dorey]

american heroes unbelievable what they pulled off like the fact that and the the the blackhawk goes down and they got they gotta lose it on they were so prepared that they didn't skip a beat with that and they didn't lose any guys it's one of the most impressive missions ever in anything bro there's

[Chad Robichaux]

so many people that you could attack right now over over legitimate things that the fact that veterans are attacking but i get it too like i mean i got a text just now before we came out i get it too like people people are always like like you know picking apart your servers and your and what you did and what you didn't do and the semantics behind it and and just you by the way you put any human being under a microscope find something right so it's it's like why do you like you know do you start do you start looking at someone because of something or you look start looking at someone because you're envious of a position they're in you know and usually it's the opposite they start looking at someone because like that guy's doing that guy's you know getting this attention or doing this thing that i want to be doing so now i'm going to look into him and i'm going to find a way to pick his pick his life apart that's just not great it's not great to do it's not good for the veteran community you know it's it's just it's just not a good thing and i agree yeah like i said i deal with it i think it's part of the territory of of choosing to go on a public platform unfortunately but yeah so i try not to engage in in the bashing of the veterans but but i'm not just saying that to i i don't care like personally i don't care if rob o' neill or bisonette right both of them to me are amazing humans who did amazing thing for our country yeah what did it like to let it lie at

[Julian Dorey]

that yeah what what i appreciate that perspective what did it when we did get him you know you were out at that point yeah from from the from the military and from the serving with with the guys as a contractor in afghanistan but that was a ten year odyssey effectively and then we get them you know yeah how'd you feel like did it feel like something shifted in the world or i did me

[Chad Robichaux]

and several of my friends spent years of our lives investing you know blood sweat tears time away from family risking a lot to for that operation so it felt like a little personal win for me i'm not claiming that like anything that i didn't do it just but but for me it felt like i invested a lot so it felt like a personal win and then i had a friend who called me and he said some things that we did and he's like hey just so you know like some of this stuff that we did like it tied to that operation like and it was like it felt so good to be part of the winning team you know and that like to be personally part of the winning team that and because like i said we worked so hard for so long i was so invested in that and it was really redemptive because i left i left i left kind of my heels man i left with my head between my legs and what do you mean when i left the program that i was in it was it wasn't you know it wasn't on the best of terms for me personally what happened well i mean we had a compromise on our operation we had some you know several of our teammates that were that were killed and would have

[Julian Dorey]

you know wait so you had a

[Chad Robichaux]

leak week yeah we had one of our afghans flipped over to the taliban no it compromised us and so we had we lost several team members and our operations compromised but even our operations compromised we choose to skip operating now i'm working on a cross border operation and i i get i get rolled up by a foreign intelligence agency and i can't again i can't say which one and i can't say what the conversation was about but i get rolled up by foreign intelligence agency taking prisoner i wouldn't say take a prisoner but pulled off pulled from my house to a to a remote site to be heavily interrogated tied up yeah so not able to leave like they you know they forced me into a car forced me in their car drove me out armed guys drove me out to a remote location on the side of a

[Julian Dorey]

mountain to interrogate me now what's going through your head in that car right

[Chad Robichaux]

i thought i was gonna be killed i mean like no doubt in my mind like they're they're gonna to i thought you know when the guns come out to kill me i'm going to try to fight but more likely i'm

[Julian Dorey]

how long was that drive i was

[Chad Robichaux]

terrified probably about thirty minute drive of no silence they wouldn't respond to me

[Julian Dorey]

nothing were you speaking their language at

[Chad Robichaux]

all or no they all spoke english they all spoke english these are yeah highly educated guys these aren't these aren't

[Julian Dorey]

thugs what led to them rolling you up

[Chad Robichaux]

some information that they collected it from our house when we knew that they collect some collected some information from our house tied to the compromise on the on the afghan side of the

[Julian Dorey]

border i think i know what government

[Chad Robichaux]

this is go ahead yeah yeah and so it was you know it was a it was a scary moment man it was it was it was ter it was terrifying i'd like to be a tough guy and say like oh that was it was terrifying and and then you know i said enough to for him to probably not believe me me but enough for them to say okay we gave him more more rope to hang himself and let me let me go drove them i thought they were driving me back to my house but they actually drove me on the way back to my house and then let me off at a curb kick me out of the curb how long

[Julian Dorey]

were you there in where they took

[Chad Robichaux]

you oh a couple hours we were in a couple hours i thought you meant the whole like in the country

[Julian Dorey]

so they question you overall for about a year were you tied down when you in question you're in a room

[Chad Robichaux]

i wasn't know that in a room outside the road on the side of

[Julian Dorey]

a mountain on the side of a mountain they're just drove back drove back

[Chad Robichaux]

well not like a mountain like not like not like not like game of thrones where they're gonna the train station on on yellowstone you've seen yellowstone it wasn't like that it was it was like a hill you know like yeah i got a roll down if they pushed me off but okay yeah i was more thinking i was gonna get shot and then but because it was not you know kind of the middle

[Julian Dorey]

of the nowhere without going into specifics that are classified what kinds of things i guess from a high level were

[Chad Robichaux]

they asking you they were more asking about one of the guys that i worked with there was a guy i worked with that they i think they were more suspicious of than me for what reason i really can't say what reason there was a reason but there was there was a very legitimate reason and i knew it which helped me which helped me because then i'm thinking oh wow you guys are more interested in him than me me so that was kind of a glimmer of hope that maybe they're not completely on to me and so i felt like i could talk my way out of it at least let them give me enough and man i probably should have left at that time but i didn't i chose to stay and keep operating because i just believed in i believed in what we were doing so much and and but i started having panic attacks and and and i got to the point to where like i realized i was making decisions i was putting not only me in danger but put some other people in danger as well oh

[Julian Dorey]

how do you stick when when you get rolled up like that you get forced into a car by a foreign i guess like intelligence service whoever they were you know it's a problem you know they're taking you somewhere they're not responding to you you are thinking as you said that like oh my god wherever i'm going they're going to kill me yeah how do you keep your wits about you to even be able to like process a question that you get asked and give a coherent answer when you're dealing with that that you know guillotine over your head yeah well

[Chad Robichaux]

i'm i'm i mean i'm thinking you know you one you go to sear school and then high risk sear which is like yeah and i went to this corporate cover training and i mean unfortunately you know the military does a good job of training you in situations like that you could be in whether you're a you know a bulk fuel guy or a special operations guy you get trained for every scenario you're going to be in so thankfully our training is really good and one of the things i thought about right away is okay how i'm supposed to be here doing this right i'm supposed to be here as a in this i mean this corporate cover capacity so i'm supposed to be doing this how would this person i'm supposed to be react right how how am i supposed to react you know playing a role so yeah so in those moments you got to react the way and they had already been incident with the same guy that had that came to my house to get me me they'd already been another incident with the same guy where another another co worker of his exposed who they were and i had already had to behave like like the person i was pretending to be and and and so i'd already had already been going back and forth with these guys they were kind of showing who they were and they were starting to discover who i was and so there was already kind of this back and forth dialogue of me having to behave a certain way so i was already in that mindset okay how would i how am i supposed to react yeah i'm supposed to be scared which conveniently i'm scared right now right but how am i supposed to react like i'm supposed to i'm actually supposed to throw a fit like i came here to do business i'm spending money in this country i'm just trying to do a good thing and now i'm getting you know i'm getting treated like this like i'm scared i want to go home that's how that's how you react right so i'm doing exactly what i was trained to do do and you know thankfully again they thankfully they they i don't think they believed me but i think it was enough for them to say okay we're gonna let him go and watch him watch and get and get more yeah and get and get let him

[Julian Dorey]

hang himself more was there did they when they were done questioning you did they say all right let's get in

[Chad Robichaux]

the car like yeah they just like

[Julian Dorey]

free to go they just kind of

[Chad Robichaux]

say anything they motion i remember vividly nothing was said nothing was said it was kind of like this moment of like silence and i could tell they were trying to decide what to do i mean i've been a police officer i've been done interrogations before like i could tell they were trying to decide what to do and they just opened a door and motioned for me to get in the car whoa and i didn't know am i going to a jail now i didn't know where i was going and they wouldn't talk again and then we got towards town let's tell we're going towards my house and they stopped and let me out on the curb her and drove off you

[Julian Dorey]

weren't worried they were going to shoot

[Chad Robichaux]

you when they when they let me out they let you out let me out in a busy area it was a pretty busy area yeah i knew i was good at that point but i was just like but they didn't say anything so now i'm like i'm like oh the police like are the police coming like a uniform police coming now like i don't know and so i had to go back i went back to i went to dubai met some of my team told them basically i was given a choice to continue with working or not and i don't know why i chose to but i

[Julian Dorey]

did was this like zero five zero six or this zero seven okay so you didn't work for that much longer after that no when you got back to dubai we're now you're leaving another country the whole way that you're getting onto i assume a plane to get to dubai are you worried you're about

[Chad Robichaux]

to get rolled up yeah so that for that reason for whatever reason that time i'm like it didn't really hit me got flew to dubai right away i'm like man they probably i think they could have rolled me up like right there there but i came back and i started working and there was some things that happened that like led me to believe that it was closing in on me again probably a lot of parallel back into that country went back in and then and then i had this i made some decisions that i made some decisions from a lack of real clear thinking that i think didn't only put myself in danger putting other people in danger and that was when i recognized like man i'm i'm not in a good shape right now and and that's when i left and when i left that time i was i bought i called and i left executed like a protocol that says i'm in trouble which means me saying like hey i'm coming to dubai i'm gonna go to dubai to see a doctor i'm not feeling well and that's kind

[Julian Dorey]

of like a code word yeah and

[Chad Robichaux]

so i bought a round trip ticket only packed a backpack overnight i left a lot of money in my safe when i say a lot of money like and you know seven figures seven figure monies in my safe and in the the in the in the bank and i got on a plane and and flew and for that for that moment like literally i was going through customs like oh my gosh they're gonna not let me out of here there's more police here than normal like i'm looking at everything like i was panicking my flight was delayed i'm like they're stopping the flight to you know get people here to get me and i was like i was a mess i

[Julian Dorey]

was a mess whoa now seven that

[Chad Robichaux]

was it for me that was that

[Julian Dorey]

was the seven figures that you left behind was that like like a part of your earnings from what you had

[Chad Robichaux]

gotten it was just operational money it

[Julian Dorey]

was so it wasn't your money it

[Chad Robichaux]

it wasn't my money no no okay some of the money yeah i was going to say yeah not my money but but all of it was from what i understand all of it was

[Julian Dorey]

recovered by command and so you knew at that point like i'm having some hyper inflated panic attacks oh yeah and i can't do my job effectively yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

i was in bad that's a hard

[Julian Dorey]

thing you know you've been going at it it for so long hardened dude been through multiple careers by the way at that point where you had to do some hard it's a hard thing to at the heat of the battle in the middle of it be able to remove yourself and be like hey i'm not right right but it's an important thing to be able to do

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah yeah yeah you know get to dubai and you know spend a few days there they didn't they probably had couple a i you know i don't know this i don't know i must i assume they had us you know probably a counter intel team watching me to make sure no one was following me and and i i had to go to little local pharmacy to get some volume i never took volume before when local pharmacy gets involved in the calm myself down and and then i finally get home i get put before did a polygraph some post interview stuff and then a post post trip interview stuff they were making sure you know some things which they should have you know at the time i was very offended it yeah but but it was some things they probably should have did and and then because i was diagnosed with ptsd by a clinical psychologist i was ran out of my program mean i lost didn't lose my clearance but lost access to the program i was in and no longer could do that job whoa and which was now i'm dealing with the building any panic attacks feeling like i'm going to die extreme anxiety and and also i'm completely embarrassed and ashamed for haven't failed at what i thought to be was the most important job on the planet you know

[Julian Dorey]

were you still married at this time yeah yeah so you go home to america now you've been on and off going to afghanistan back and forth but that's a constant and this is something i talk about with all you guys who have done this at like high level you have a constant source of adrenaline right and it keeps you boom moving and then all of a sudden it's like you take that volume on the speaker you've been and you just go down to zero and now you got to be a regular person again at home like out of nowhere and your mind's not right because of what you just went through what's that how did you deal with that i tried

[Chad Robichaux]

to get a regular job i just finished my mba and so i tried to get a regular job at a at a i i went in and just totally use my tradecraft to talk my way through interview and i've been in afghanistan and doing construction work and and building projects and and talked my way into getting a job at a high rise construction company as a project manager wow and so successfully used my skill set to earn a job and but but i couldn't do it i couldn't i couldn't literally i was going in the bathroom fighting off panic attacks and it lasted for about two weeks and i'm like i don't know what i'm gonna do like i i'm and and i've been doing jiu jitsu my whole life you know judo traditional jiu jitsu grappling i was already professional i'm a may fighter on a side and i was undefeated so i was pretty good at it so wow i wouldn't get into mats and i rolled i was really worried about grappling because i thought man get my heart rate up and maybe give myself a heart attack or something but doctor's like totally fine

[Julian Dorey]

like that's how you've dealt with it

[Chad Robichaux]

to yeah got in those mats man and when i got on his mats i felt like i found a cure because you can't you can't think about afghanistan or you know stuff i'm doing while you're grappling you got to be mentally present you gotta be that's what's one of the good things about the that sport or any kind of engaged sport where you have to be you have to be mentally present that's what one of the things i love about skydiving like you have to be mentally present skydiving you can't think about something else you're going to die like you you have to be in the moment and so i i love things like that but jiu jitsu is something you could do for not for a moment of skydiving you could do like right for hours you know like and just go and grapple and so and that healed you no it didn't it didn't heal me but it gave me a place to to recover so how did when i say when i say it it didn't heal me it was a great great i i think it's a great thing i think people have shirts like jiu jitsu saves lives and stuff like that i think it's a good thing but i think there's a balance on my show the resiliency show we talk about like mind body social spirit you have to have all four of those you gotta be mentally healthy you got to be physically healthy you got to socially be around the right people you have to have a strong spiritual foundation like all those so jiu jitsu for me gave me the the mental the physical the social but it was you know i was still missing that spiritual piece but but in that moment like i found a place to heal i found a place to have community and i trained as much as i could and so i i won a world title mma i want you know as a black belt of one american nationals and bronze bronze in the pans and and i've won i was ranked number six in the world as a as a flyweight in mma and number twenty three i think i had made it up there pretty good eighteen and two as a pro fighter fought in all the big shows and stuff and but on the surface it looked like i was healed field thousand students in my jail open a school i had like a thousand students but about three years into that really false facadeic success something was still missing i was still broken end up you know separating from my family had an affair like and just separated from my family and had a suicide attempt and in you know

[Julian Dorey]

twenty ten what led to that what

[Chad Robichaux]

happened i had this big fight on showtime i fought in a strike force strike force was owned by the ufc at the time and you know so the whole time i separated i was training for this fight and the fight was over and i mean remember the my hand being raised in the front ten thousand people in the toyota center and i'm just like man like i just fought so hard for this win and like i just like gave up on everything you know most important to me i remember thinking like of all these people here in this crowd cheering now one of them was was my wife kathy who had been you know been around before and i just went home like so depressed and i thought like like all these people i blame my whole life for everything like the common denominator is me and i thought maybe my family would be sad without me but they'd be better off you know and i think that's the same hopeless thought that finds a home in the hearts of over twenty something veterans every day like maybe my family maybe my loved ones would be sad without me but they'll be better off and i don't think a lot of people that commit suicide take their life because they want to escape their pain i think they re we really believe that we're going to unburden the people around us and not realizing that that's one of the worst burdens you can put on people was you know you take your pain and transfer it to everyone that loves you when you do that

[Julian Dorey]

so you had a full blown attempt

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah so yeah so i sat i would sit in my closet i had a glock twenty two pistol a forty caliber pistol and i literally put my family pictures on the floor around me like that's almost like a say goodbye but every time i put that gun to my head i would have this vision of who's going to find me cuz someone's going to find you right so somebody's g a gunshot you're in an apartment or you're not going to show up somewhere morbidly somebody's going to smell you like somebody's going to find you you and so every time i do that i thought my son hunter is the only one that has a key to my apartment it was enough to pump the brakes in that moment but i was still there and it was one morning i was with that pistol in my hand and i heard a knock at my door now i wasn't gonna answer it but when i heard kathy's voice announce herself i panicked when i say i panic like she would never came in my apartment especially in my closet but i hid the gun under a blanket like if i was ashamed what i was doing and it sounds stupid but i ran to the door like so mad that she interrupted me killing killing myself like i was so like like i was just livid and i'm like what are you doing here like i didn't ask you to come here you can't just show up here and yeah yelling at her trying to get her to leave and in the middle of the argument she asked me a question that you know radically changed my life probably saved my life in a moment she's like how could you do everything that you've done we met when we were seventeen eighteen she saw me become a recon marine and go to schools and training and cut weight for fights and all this stuff she saw me do that requires so much discipline she's like how could you do all of that and when it comes to your family family you'll quit and oh so she knew yeah so she she knew well she meant i was quitting on our family you know and everything myself and and so she just really challenged me and and and in that moment i made a decision to get back in the fight and i knew i couldn't do it alone i knew i couldn't do it with the people i surrounded myself by i talked about that earlier i can't remember on what show but you have to have you know regardless you're at in life i think all people especially men have to have accountability right and i had surrounded myself by everybody i told me what i wanted to hear not what i needed to hear i needed to hear some hard things and i knew this circle of people that around me were like people that were fans i mean i had a lot of friends but had people that were like you know when you're when you're successful as an athlete a lot of people cheered you on and and no no fault to those people because i probably systematically i pushed accountability out of my life but i asked my wife is there someone at this church you're going to because she was going to this church i didn't care about god or her church or anything i was just like if someone at this church you're going to some man could help build me accountable to pulling things back

[Julian Dorey]

together were you guys separated at this

[Chad Robichaux]

time too separated yeah so did you

[Julian Dorey]

still love her

[Chad Robichaux]

at that time i didn't even love myself and so i felt like i didn't love her but i did we're we're unfortunately we're we're you're not together now but but i'll always love and and care for her she's we met when we were seventeen eighteen years old together for thirty years so she's an amazing woman what made

[Julian Dorey]

you you know you mentioned like you were pretty broken didn't feel a lot of meaning inside you couldn't get rid of some of this stuff that you were dragging with you understandably so from your previous career and then in there you know you love your wife maybe you go through times where you don't because you as you said you don't love yourself but what made you like have an affair or get to that

[Chad Robichaux]

point i was i didn't feel anything i had no empathy at all like i think something turned off in in afghanistan it's very weird like i remember when foster harrington was killed like we had been friends for we went through training together he served him a wedding we've been friends for ten years and when he was killed in two thousand four like that was the first like hardest and first experience i had that night i had to go out and operate so like back home if you have a family member friend that dies as bad as it is there's a grieving period you have when you're overseas and you're operating you have to be able to continue to work and so something inside your brain like allows that to happen that's right so you can function and survive and be there for everyone else and so you turn something off off and and i don't think our military does a good job of teaching guys that turn it back on and so or else you wouldn't be able to function in that environment and i remember me i mean maybe some

[Julian Dorey]

of that money they give to the taliban martyred families they could use for

[Chad Robichaux]

that right well that's why we do what we do at mighty oaks you know that's why our foundation exists because in the in the in the void of government programs that just don't do that and i just didn't know how to feel and so i didn't feel anything towards the her i didn't feel emotion towards her i didn't feel love for towards her i didn't feel affection towards her i didn't feel mad when or or i didn't feel angry towards her at times i didn't like her at times but i but i'd make her cry and i didn't even feel sad about it i'm like what's wrong with me i don't i mustn't love her if she's crying i don't even feel bad and i just want to feel again so i don't think i had an affair because i was pursuing sex i had an affair because i just want i was looking to feel feel and i think that's what led me to making those bad decisions you

[Julian Dorey]

felt bad about it afterwards obviously i didn't but not not right away not

[Chad Robichaux]

right away yeah eventually yeah yeah because because when i got caught i didn't even have an emotional response to it i'm like okay well i guess we're getting divorced you know like so i was just like i had no empathy and and that's not me by the way i'm like a very like my highly compassionate person i'm a very kind person yeah yeah like none of those character traits are me but for like three years i was in that state

[Julian Dorey]

yeah no it's interesting to hear you say that because then at some like your wife obviously still cared enough about you to tell you the thing that was the most important thing that was true that no one wanted to tell you and it starts the journey of you getting back on the path and i understand obviously she's pissed at you yeah for doing what you did no problem with that whatsoever but like like now you you're like you'll always love her and everything like that but because of that time period where you're going through this and make some poor decisions for sure you know you lose your you lose your marriage and and it's like it's a strange thing for me to think about because i haven't been married but like how you can do everything that's mostly right or you know have everything right and then go through a time where something happens and it just just kills it and then even if you want to undead it on the other side and even if both of you want to do it you don't because there's still this thing yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

yeah because we tried for years and and we we started some great we started mighty oaks foundation together we start some great things together we heal i mean but she tried for years and i always give her credit for trying and she she once she saved my life she rescued me she helped me build mighty oaks and she really revealed a lot of things to me she tried for years but for her she just could never never get past some of these things and you know you understand that i understand that yeah i mean look that's you know sin has consequences and just because you confess those sins and make them right doesn't mean the consequences aren't still there i was i was i think i told you earlier i'm good friends with phil was good friends with phil robertson and robertson family duck dynasty duck dynasty yeah sat down across the table just like this actually with table just like this and shared my story with him he had heard my story many times but he's not a very quiet guy he always likes to interact but he was jason after was telling jason's son a good friend of mine was saying jason jay were saying phil's never that quiet he just listened to me the whole time because this movie was coming out and he was having to face his past in the movie the blind and he and later that day he pulled me aside and told me he goes i appreciate what you did with your life but he's like he's like you could always leave sin but sin will the consequences of sin will never leave you i didn't really understand that at time i think he was talking about himself like in me the consequences of santa and i didn't get that until i went through this with my wife at the end at the end of our relationship was that the consequences are still there you could change your behaviors you could you could have redemption you could have forgiveness even the consequences are still there and that's an important lesson for me and for everyone that that i have an ability to speak to especially working with you at mighty oaks like you can make things right but the consequences there's sometimes still there and and i'm having to i'm having to deal with that now and but you know

[Julian Dorey]

are you happy now you feel like your life's in a good place i

[Chad Robichaux]

feel like my life's in a good place i mean i'm hurt i mean i have an amazing family that that i lost you know through this i have you know i have a you know was married for thirty years and and my my have four kids i have three adult kids twenty nine twenty eight twenty five and and i have a three year old that my wife and i chose to i hate to use the word adopt but but she was a family member that we came in at birth and wait kathy and

[Julian Dorey]

you yeah so when you were still

[Chad Robichaux]

married yeah yeah it was our kind of last thing we did together and we brought summer in and she's three years old now and she's i was naive enough to think we're blessing her and it was the other way around she's been the biggest blessing to me and she was a niece she was

[Julian Dorey]

a niece so you had to okay

[Chad Robichaux]

adopted our niece at birth and yeah and i have six grandkids that's awesome so yeah so it's man yeah it sucks to to lose that you know and we did so many great things together you know one of the things that i quickly passed over was you know in that redemption process was this guy steve toth who's running against crenshaw by the way and he was i sat down across from steve and he was an elder and called to the church when i asked kathy to help help me and he showed up met me at a starbucks coffee shop and i had this perfect plan of how i was gonna fix my life and i wanted him to show it to kathy and i was like super impressed with it it was like a military operational order and and i slid it over to him and he read it and he slid it back over to me and told me remember he tapped on a paper and he said if if this plan does have anything to do with god i'm not gonna let you waste my time i'm not going to waste mine and had you ever

[Julian Dorey]

been a religious guy at all i

[Chad Robichaux]

grew up so i i grew up till like fourth grade catholic and my dad left i ended up my mom was never went to church or anything like that and then when my brother died this family took me to church to their church it was like some kind of i think it was assembly guy church and and i went to this altar call and i was like really moved by it and felt like the guy was just talking to me and so that kind of really inspired me but i never had any follow up and then when kathy and i got married we were like hey we should probably go to a church together and raise our kids that way and i always went to church with kathy and i would have said i was a christian but i never lived it lived it out out and really understood it and when i went to afghanistan i became very like either maddock like because of things i was exposed to i was either like agnostic or mad at god i mean i didn't know which one but yeah if i was agnostic yeah but one of those you believe something's there right yeah and even if you hate god you still believe that's right i mean by the way demons and the devil believe god more than us more than we do and so but but i still believe something was there but when steve told me that right this plan doesn't mean to do a relationship with god i'm not gonna help you and i can help waste your time not gonna waste mine what i had recognized in my life at that point is that everything i had tried before didn't work i had been through medication counseling had professional success and redempt and rebounding financial success was making good money all those things some of those things are good some of those are bad but none of those things change my situation so it's kind of one of those moments like what do i have to lose and and so i surrender my life to christ through a leadership of him but i'm i'm a very i'm a skeptic you're a skeptic i'm a skeptic of everything what do you mean i don't just trust things on face value to this

[Julian Dorey]

day so you're a skeptic of what

[Chad Robichaux]

you surrounded yourself to i'm a skeptic of of everything that i make if i'm exposed to something i'm gonna make a life decision i want to know why i made the decision i want to so for me like i made this decision there's a lot of value in it it but i really want to understand why like i made this decision i want to understand what it is so i was really start went into the study of apologetics and that investigation of that really solidified my faith beyond a decision to a true belief and a true faith and by really just studying the gospel and the history of the of the gospel and really understanding it and so my faith became

[Julian Dorey]

very strong you saw the evidence of

[Chad Robichaux]

it i saw the evidence of it and i wanted i wanted to i wanted to for myself i'm not going to look if i'm going to commit my life to this it's a pretty big decision by the way to commit your life to faith because it's not just what you live out it's not nine to five it's like twenty four seven everything is every decision you make should be if you're a person of faith every decision you make should be through the the filter of that of that lens and that purview and that belief and so that's a big decision so you should up to me if anybody's going to and i challenge people with that because i know where you're going to land right if you pursue truth you always going to land that jesus because jesus is truth and so i just challenge people like man if you if you're skeptic then dig in that's what i did but what i discovered at the end of that first year of steve like not just leading me into decision but discipling me and mentoring me for a year it was pretty profound for me is that all these things that happened to me as bad as those things were my childhood afghanistan i didn't end up in that situation with a pistol to my head because of those things that happened to me i ended up there because the choices that i made in response to those things and i never lost the ability to make good make good choices i was just making bad ones because i didn't have a blueprint ever in my life no one had ever given me a blueprint to make good choices and people say life doesn't come in my handbook i disagree now i think it does we just don't read it it's the bible and and what i discovered from that was like every problem i had had had in my life and every problem i will have in my life the bible had to answer to and so what i learned to do is pause in my problems and pause in my hardships and my emotional response and and seek the response that i should live out and it became very intentional and deliberate about that as a process in my life and and through that i found restoration i found hope and ultimately i found purpose and that purpose for me like really ended up in a deep burden on my heart to pay it forward to others and that's why like today that's why i started mighty oaks foundation and have the podcast and do all things i do because i just really feel god burdened my heart to pay those lessons that i learned through my life life that resilient kind of lesson forward and man like i know you follow like i know you're just kind of getting introduced somebody else foundation but we've we've we've served over half a million warriors through residency programs we have seven thousand core graduates we do like eight million dollars a year in free programming and then all the humanitarian efforts in the last ten years we've raised like i've raised like a hundred million dollars in like both veterans care and humanitarian efforts all because i you know kathy's challenge like you know you willing to quit or you're going to get back up get off your butt and get in a fight again you know and you know and so i'll take a low

[Julian Dorey]

moment and turn it into something beautiful

[Chad Robichaux]

like that yeah yeah it's i think we all could do that though right that's all all of us could do that we could choose to you know stay there and literally stay there and die or get up and move forward and damn right and and you know not just for ourselves but for the world around us and that's what we're called to do and so yeah so my faith has been so you talk about those that resiliency like those pillars of mind body social spirit spirit like at the one jitsu did the first three in redemption but i was still missing that one piece that faith and you know my my surrendering to relationship with jesus and an understanding what that was and how to live that out that brought all together to me and that's what that's where i'm kind of at right now and and man i couldn't i couldn't be more blessed in my life like like i said it's it's you know unfortunate what's happened with my family but i couldn't be more blessed in my life to get to do the work i do and impact impact the people that i get to work with the people i work with it's it's it's a pretty incredible life

[Julian Dorey]

that's awesome man and chad i i i have a lot more questions yeah we could talk about this forever but i already kept you fifteen minutes past what i was supposed to i know you got an event to go to in new york so i do my book i i do want to get you out of here but this was awesome man i really appreciate you having me on on your show earlier i really enjoyed that and your story is great and i think i think you picked the right word guy man yeah

[Chad Robichaux]

it's the resilient show and and but you know but yeah tonight we're going my book shadow silent horizons is book one of a three book series with tyndale publishing it's a fiction fiction book my books i talked about earlier was saving aziz the afghan evax mission without borders ukraine those are phenomenal but if you like fiction solid horizons book one and book two's coming out as a pre sale right now and we have a book three next year wow but but machine book i love i actually love writing book one though is it got nominated for the audio awards and as a finalist and ray porter reads it he reads a terminal list as well oh very and so tonight we're gonna go and and hopefully we'll get we're here here in new york get get get the audio award for i

[Julian Dorey]

hope you do man i hope you do but i appreciate you fitting me in as well oh yeah this and

[Chad Robichaux]

doing it i want to come back when we do so we're gonna we talked about it earlier but shadow figures is the show i have coming out i can't say what network but right

[Julian Dorey]

i do talk to you about that

[Chad Robichaux]

i'd love to come come back and talk about it let's do it you're gonna you're gonna i'm gonna send you some clips of it you'll totally dig

[Julian Dorey]

it man i heard the concept so i know i'm gonna like it but chad thank you so much thank you brother this was a pleasure everyone else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace what's up guys thanks so much for watching the video if you have not subscribed please hit that subscribe button before you leave as well as leaving a like on the video it's a huge huge help you can join my patreon via the link in the description and you can also join my clipping community via the discord link down below see you for the next episode