April 14. Chad Robichaux. Chad has been a Force Recon Marine—eight deployments in Afghanistan. He has been a detective—that is a Surveillance Detection Senior Program Manager with the US State Department and a Special Agent with the US Federal Air Marshal Service—and received the Medal of Valor. He has been a professional Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) World Champion, and he is a third-degree black belt.
Chad is president and founder of Mighty Oaks Foundation, a nonprofit organizations that serves military and first-responder communities. The Foundation offers faith-based combat trauma and resiliency programs, and they see lives healed.
Chad has spoken to more than 150,000 active-duty troops and led life-saving programs for more than 3,300 active military and veterans.
He has written five best-selling books related to veteran care. Is it any wonder his life-story is being made into a feature-length movie?
Things could have gone differently. That could have been a terribly short movie. Here’s how it went.
Success isn’t final. Failure’s not fatal. What counts is the guts to keep going.
Chad Robichaux, the golden-boy Force Recon Marine, sat in a dark closet with his gun, and he could only think of one way out. Eight tours in Afghanistan had trashed his life.
Chad thought about all the evil he’d seen day after day, what one man can do to another, what hatred can do to a culture, what the constant violence had done to him.
Chad couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t process it, couldn’t live with it. He’d gone to Afghanistan to do something right. So how had he come back so filled with evil?
He couldn’t be that man full of pain and hate in Afghanistan and then come home to his family and suddenly be someone different.
The man who came home said and did hateful things, and he didn’t care that he said and did hateful things. Here, in the dark, in the closet, alone with his gun, Chad wondered why he didn’t care.
At the end of his last tour of duty, he’d lost control, and his life crashed down around him. Repeatedly he felt numb in his face, hands, and feet. He felt like his airway was swelling shut, and he had full-blown panic attacks. He couldn’t remember things. ““I was a runaway train looking for a place to crash.”
Chad morphed from the really ugly person Afghanistan had made him to a weak-and-broken man. He was removed from the task force—like going from the star player to being kicked out of the game. They sent him home to face a new enemy … Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Chad’s pride was shattered. Being sent home left a big void in his life that he had to fill.
He thought mastering Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) was an answer. And for a while it worked. It didn’t give him time to think about Afghanistan. He did become a world champion, but it didn’t solve his problem.
Chad’s failure to deal with the issues that brought on PTSD resulted in separating from Kathy, selling their home, and planning for divorce. Their children were devastated.
While he sat in the closet, thinking how could he take his life and make it look like an accident to spare his children, Kathy turned to her relationship with God. She prayed for Him to let her see Chad the way He did, to help her to forgive him as God forgave him.
And God answered.
Holding divorce papers, Kathy knocked on the closet door. When Chad opened it, she asked him, “How could you do all the things you have done in the military, in Afghanistan, and as an MMA fighter and never quit, but when it came to our family you quit?”
Chad had never been called a quitter. But she was right; he’d quit being a husband and a father. PTSD had stranded him on the edge of a cliff, and he was the one responsible.
At that moment Chad decided he wanted to live again. There was a fight to win, and it was the biggest of his life. “My wife had fought for me when I was weak, and now it was my turn to fight for her.” When Chad submitted his life to Christ and walked in relationship with Him, he discovered that PTSD no longer controlled his life.
Now, Chad and Kathy help veterans and their families get victory over PTSD through their Mighty Oaks Warrior Program. They share their story of hope to end the tragedy of 22 veterans committing suicide every day and the failure of 80 percent of marriages in the military.
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh,” (Ezekiel 36: 26, NIV).
Are you trying to survive on your own? Success isn’t final. Failure’s not fatal. What counts is the guts to keep going.
This story is based on an interview with Craig Garland.
Story read by Blake Mattocks
Story written by: Thomas Mitchellhttp://www.walkwithgod.org/