The fighter pilot who came back from a fireball
Brian Shul 1948–2023
Major Brian Shul wasn’t supposed to fly again. When he was piloting a fighter jet during the Vietnam War, his plane was hit by small-arms fire and ignited in flames, crashlanding in the Cambodian jungle. Shul was rescued by U.S. Special Forces, but his prognosis was bleak: More than half of his body was badly burned, and doctors said he’d never walk again. He spent more than a year as “119 pounds of blood and gauze,” as he said later, undergoing 15 painful operations and grafts. But just two days after being released from the hospital, Shul was back in an Air Force cockpit. His final assignment, in the 1980s, was to pilot what was then the fastest plane in the world. At the height of the Cold War, he donned an astronaut suit to fly an SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane over the Soviet Union, at an altitude of 85,000 feet and at more than three times the speed of sound. The plane heated to 565 degrees from the supersonic flight—so hot, he said, “you could bake cookies on it.”
Shul was born in Quantico, Va., into a military family. His father directed the Marine Corps band, said The New York Times. He first knew he’d become a flier at age 9, when he was mesmerized by the Blue Angels at a Navy air show. “It reached in, grabbed my soul, never let go,” he said. He graduated from East Carolina University in 1970 and enlisted in the Air Force later that year. He flew 212 combat missions in Vietnam before he was shot down and left a burn victim. “Enduring treatment more painful than the flames,” Shul lost the will to live, said The Washington Post. He said he prayed to die for months, until one day when he heard Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the radio and made the decision to live.
A colorful storyteller, Shul wrote several books after retiring and became “a favorite speaker at air shows, fly-ins, and aviation museums,” said Flying magazine. His last act was to give a speech to a military group; he suffered a fatal heart attack shortly after. In all his appearances, he would resist praise for the 1973 mission that left his face and hands visibly scarred. “Leaving your jet in the jungle does not qualify as heroic,” he said. “I am a survivor.”