Father and son team rescuing Americans from war zones

When Vladimir Putin’s Russian military invaded neighboring Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Chad Robichaux knew he had to help.

The former Marine Recon gathered a team of elite special ops veterans, as well as his 25-year-old Marine son, Hunter, and headed to Europe to help those about to be subjected to “unspeakable brutality,” as he explains he in “A Mission Without Borders – Why a Father and a Son Risked It All for the People of Ukraine” (Nelson Books).

As a co-founder of Save Our Allies, a group dedicated to helping Americans and allies in war-torn environments, Robichaux had already helped thousands of people trapped inside Taliban-era Afghanistan, and now, with Ukraine surrounded by Russia, his services were needed his. again.

Robichaux landed in Krakow, in neighboring Poland, on March 4, 2022, barely a week after the Russian invasion began. It was cold and dark. “Faced with a formidable and powerful enemy, even the sun seemed to have surrendered,” he writes.

Almost as soon as Robichaux joined his team, he could see the panic in the Ukrainian population as they waited on the Polish border, eager to escape the fighting.

Robichaux spotted a family of four waiting with their dog.

As the father said his goodbyes, he watched his wife and children join the freedom line before turning and heading in the opposite direction. “Walking again to war,” writes Robichaux.

Those who managed to cross into Poland found themselves inundated with offers of support from volunteers, doctors and NGOs.

Alas, as Robichaux soon discovered, there was no beauty in war, especially in Ukraine.

From the mass graves of hundreds of bodies, many executed with their hands tied behind their backs, to the corpses being dumped in the street, it was a harrowing scene, even for an ex-Marine. “They were all civilians. All of them. The children. Women. Old people”, he writes. “It was a war crime. An atrocity. A bad act.”

It was not only the Ukrainians.

Everywhere he went, there were tanks, bombed or abandoned. “Some of them had the bodies of Russian soldiers either hanging from the gates or scattered on the ground nearby,” he recalled.

Their rescue of Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was typical of the dangerous work Robichaux undertook. Hall was seriously injured in a Russian attack in Kiev in March 2022, which killed two of his colleagues, cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and freelance journalist Sasha Kuvshnova.

When the Robichaux reached their safe house near Kiev, they still couldn’t be sure that Hall was alive.

“I was struck by the sight of a First World country in such an apocalyptic state,” he writes. “Random buildings turned into ruins. Roads littered with bomb craters. Bridges swept away.”

With the help of contacts and the local church, Robichaux eventually found Hall in a makeshift military hospital—but it didn’t look good.

From severe burns to gaping head wounds, catastrophic injuries to his legs and feet, and a large piece of shrapnel lodged in his neck, there was no guarantee he would make it, not least since the only antidote the pain he had was ibuprofen.

The problem was getting him out and across the border to safety.

Flight was out of the question, while driving through bombed roads would, in all likelihood, dislodge shrapnel in his neck and rupture an artery.

Then, good news.

Word reached Robichaux that a nearby train carrying the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, who had been in Kiev for meetings with President Volodymyr Zelensky, would be leaving and they had 30 minutes to board the Hall.

But that meant navigating several Russian checkpoints manned by soldiers who would shoot on sight and using an ambulance unable to go faster than 15 mph.

Amazingly, after some frantic negotiations, Robichaux and his team made the train, and when Ben Hall crossed the border into Poland, he was loaded into a Black Hawk helicopter from 82^n.d Airlifted and flown for safety to US Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany.

Meanwhile for Hunter Robichaux, the experience has been invaluable, especially in terms of his relationship with his father. “I have learned that working with your father is not always the easiest thing in the world, but I am grateful to my father for letting me love, protect and trust me,” he says.

For Chad Robichaux, writing the book was never about the geopolitics of the Russia-Ukraine conflict: “When it comes to helping people in need, the world needs fewer people who are calculating what they’re going to get out of it, and a a whole load more people who are just going to do the right thing.

“Sometimes we just have to do the right thing simply because it is just that – the right thing to do.”