As desperate mothers hurled their babies over razor-sharp concertina-wired airport gates during the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal of Afghanistan that left many stranded, Marine veteran Chad Robichaux sprang into action, spearheading the largest known private civilian evacuation effort.
Last week, Robichaux received a record from Congress honoring his perilous expedition deep behind Taliban lines, which was conducted with a dozen special operations veterans and saw the successful evacuation of an estimated 17,000 people.
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“The level of desperation is something I’ve never seen in my life before. I mean hundreds of thousands of people swarming the airport, stampeding each other to get out,” Robichaux told the Washington Examiner.
One of his buddies, who he referred to as Joe, counted six dead babies who bled out in concertina wire near the airport in Kabul, said Robichaux.
Images of people clinging to the sides of a C-17A aircraft quickly circulated across the United States as the two-decade-long war that cost the lives of over 2,400 U.S. soldiers and $2 trillion came to a brutal end.
Robichaux was spurred to action after learning that his friend Aziz, an Afghan interpreter, was left behind in Afghanistan and was struggling to navigate the special immigrant visa process.
Aziz had been like family to Robichaux, who credits the interpreter with saving his life multiple times during his days in the elite Joint Special Operations Task Force.
An MMA champion who went on eight deployments to Afghanistan, Robichaux assembled a team of elite people formerly from the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and other special operations squadrons. Active-duty personnel could not join the endeavor because of military rules.
One of his partners noted that there were roughly 3,500 orphans who were poised to be left behind, which then soon cascaded their evacuation mission into a much larger undertaking as they began to expand their rescue list.
“I’m a pretty strong person of faith. And I believe that what happened from that point was just a divine miracle. I mean, every door that would have seemed impossible to open with a process like this was just miraculously opened,” Robichaux explained. “Everything came together in a period of three days.”
The U.S. government soon gave Robichaux and his squad permission to go to the Kabul airport, and a team of volunteers helped them comb through and vet prospective evacuees. They also began to obtain the necessary manifests and approval from important partners such as the United Arab Emirates. Conservative radio host Glenn Beck helped raise over $20 million to fund additional civilian aircraft and other critical supplies to aid their rescue mission.
On the first day of the excursion into Afghanistan, Robichaux coordinated for his ground team and U.S. military personnel to get Aziz, his wife, and six children safely out of the beleaguered nation. Robichaux said much of the rest of the mission is a blur to him.
Running on little sleep as his team traversed through freezing and slushy ice melt-covered rapids in the dark of night, Robichaux made the trek in and out of Afghanistan multiple times. At one point, the group journeyed through a river with armed Taliban soldiers about 100 feet to their left and Chinese patrols not far to their right.
Although his team took steps to screen who they brought with them and leaned on advanced military techniques during rendezvouses, there was always the lingering fear that a Taliban informant slipped among their ranks.
“You couldn’t even stop for a second. If [you] stopped and slept for five minutes, you just traded that five minutes of sleep for someone’s life. And so we just kept pushing,” Robichaux recounted.
One of his friends lost 37 pounds in 10 days “just because we didn’t stop moving,” Robichaux recalled.
On at least two occasions, his crew endured sniper fire. He and his team were always on edge that the Taliban may fire a man-portable air-defense system or some sort of surface-to-air missile to blow up one of the aircraft cruising through vulnerable geography to assist in the mission.
Robichaux helped co-found the nonprofit group Save Our Allies, which strives to rescue all of “our brothers and sisters” and help them resettle “into a life of safety and freedom.” He also has a book coming out early next year titled Saving Aziz: How the Mission to Help One Became a Calling to Rescue Thousands from the Taliban, which discusses the evacuation mission.
“I’ve gotten a lot of personal credit for this,” Robichaux noted. “I’m one of many people that were involved in helping with us. … When our government failed to do the right thing, people stood up and did the right thing. And I’m just one of them.”
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Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) read remarks on the House floor honoring him back in September, and he received the record last Monday, which hailed his work as “extraordinary heroism.” Hartzler assisted him in some of his efforts, including trying to get a special immigrant visa approved for Aziz.
Festering in the back of his mind is the pain that not everyone can be rescued. Robichaux struggles to use his Facebook account because it is overflowing with messages from people in dire straits languishing for help.
“The level of requests that were coming to us is just heartbreaking because there’s no way for us ever [save everyone],” he lamented. “This is like over a year later — I can’t even use my Facebook because there’s thousands of messages that I can’t even get to, and there’s nothing I could do anyways.”
