He was an avid photographer of aviation and nature, and ran a photo studio in Marysville, in Northern California.
Brian Robert Shul was born on Feb. 8, 1948, in Quantico, Va. His father, Victor, was the director of the Marine Corps band. His mother, Blanche (St. George) Shul, was a homemaker.
When he was 9 and saw the Navy’s Blue Angels perform at an air show, “I’m like, ‘Whoa,’” he told the Museum of Flight in Seattle in 2017. “It reached in, grabbed my soul, never let go.”
He graduated from East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1970 and joined the Air Force later that year.
In Vietnam, he was a foreign air adviser during the war, piloting support missions in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Air America, which flew reconnaissance, rescue and logistical support missions for the military.
When his aircraft was attacked, he crash-landed in the jungle, where he was rescued by a Special Forces team and evacuated to Okinawa, Japan, where doctors predicted that his burns would prove fatal. He underwent two months of intensive care before he was transferred to the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where surgeons performed 15 operations over a year.
“I kept saying, ‘God, just please let me die. I can’t do this. You picked the wrong guy. I’m not strong enough. I’d have nothing to fight with now. It hurts too bad. I don’t even want to wake up each morning,’” he told the Museum of Flight.
