Marine vet strives to bring faith back to the foxhole after Obama purge of faith-based programs

Force Recon Marine Veteran Chad Robichaux says the military's morale has declined so steeply over the past decade that he was moved to create a faith-based organization called the Mighty Oaks Foundation to build community among service members and help them through similar struggles.

"I've been around the military community for 30 years now," Robichaux said Wednesday on the "Just the News, No Noise" TV show. "I've never seen morale as low as it is present day."

At the inception his administration, President George W. Bush signed an executive order allowing faith-based communities to launch programs to help serve troops struggling with PTSD.

Robichaux says that before 2009, every military service member was given a Bible by the United States government, but former President Barack Obama put an end to that.  

"Those are programs that are very successful for our military troops," Robichaux said. "Not forcing them, but they had the option for it. Every veteran and service member deserves that option to have a faith-based option or solution for their issues. In 2009, President Obama signed an executive order and moved that funding from the faith-based initiative and reallocated all that funding to clinical programs."

Robichaux says that after those faith-based initiatives were ended, veteran suicides spiked from 16 a day to 22 a day. When former President Donald Trump was running for office, Robichaux said he had a chance to discuss this issue with him.

"I took that issue to then-candidate Trump in 2016, and I asked him if he became president, would he overturn that and sign some executive order to bring that back as an option for the veterans community," Robichaux explained. "And he did. I was able to be a part of that."  

Some of the services that the Mighty Oaks Foundation offers include resilience programs for active duty service members, recovery programs for veterans that are suffering from PTSD, and a legacy program to help first responders who struggle with thoughts of suicide. 

As a result of President Biden's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Robichaux and some other veterans put together a task force to go and help retrieve Americans and allies left behind under Taliban rule. While he he was honored to be a part of "Pineapple Express," Robichaux said the Biden administration should have been proactive and rescued those stuck there.

"The truth is, we should not have done it," Robichaux said. "We are 12 veterans from the Special Operations community who did it because our government wouldn't, and our service members had to sit there and watch us do it. It broke my heart to see our service members have to watch us do something that they should have done. 

"They would have done it better than us — proud of our team, we have awesome guys, but they would have done it better than us. They're currently the guys that should be doing this. But they were not allowed to due to our administration."