Global Courant
Brian Shul, a retired Air Force major who modestly described himself as “a survivor” rather than a hero, after being shot down in a Vietnamese jungle, where he nearly died before returning to pilot the world’s fastest spy plane, died on May 20 in Reno, Nev. He was 75.
The cause of his death, at a hospital, was cardiac arrest, said his sister and sole survivor, Maureen Shul, a former mayor of Castle Pines, Colo. He had previously collapsed when he finished celebrating the Nevada Military Support Alliance’s annual gala with his aerial adventures.
Major Shul flew 212 combat missions during the Vietnam War before his T-28 Trojan ground attack aircraft was hit by small arms fire and crash-landed near the Cambodian border in 1974 as the war neared its end.
He underwent 15 surgeries and spent more than a year with “119 pounds of blood and gauze,” as he once said, recovering from burns that covered half his body and left his hands and face disfigured. But two days after being released from the hospital, Major Shul, despite doctors telling him he would never walk again, was back in an Air Force cockpit.
His last assignment, before retiring in 1990 after a two-decade military career, was piloting the SR-71, the world’s highest-flying jet.
Nicknamed the Blackbird and deployed to monitor Soviet nuclear submarines and missile sites, as well as conduct reconnaissance missions over Libya, the aircraft could soar to 25,000 feet, fly at more than three times the speed of sound, and cover 100,000 square miles from the earth’s surface in one hour.
“To fly this jet, and fly it well, meant entering into a personal relationship with an amalgamation of titanium, fuel, stick and throttles,” wrote Major Shul in his book “Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet” (1991) , citing the distracting nickname that U-2 pilots had pinned on their faster Blackbird counterparts. “It meant feeling like the plane came to life and had a personality all of its own.”
Major Shul piloted the Blackbird for 2,000 hours for four years. He was armed with a personal camera that he used to take the pictures that illustrate “Sled Driver” and another book.
The Lockheed Martin SR-71 flew so high in the mid-stratosphere that the crew was outfitted in spacesuits, and it flew so fast it could outrun rockets.
“We were the fastest guys around and loved reminding our fellow flyers of this,” Major Shul wrote.
He often recalled a radio exchange with air traffic controllers monitoring the groundspeed of aircraft within their jurisdiction as his plane screamed 21 miles above Southern California, “I heard a Cessna asking for a readout of its groundspeed. “90 knots,” Center replied. Moments later, a Twin Beech needed the same. “120 knots,” Center replied.
“We weren’t the only ones proud of our groundspeed that day,” Major Shul recalled, “when almost immediately an F-18 transmitted, ‘Ah, Center, Dusty 52 is requesting a groundspeed readout.’ There was a short pause, then the answer: ‘620 knots on the ground, Dusty.’”
Major Shul and his crewmate couldn’t resist also asking, “Center, Aspen 20, do you have groundspeed for us?” There was a longer-than-normal pause, ‘Aspen, I’m showing 1,942 knots’” — or 2,234 mph
“No further questions were heard on that frequency,” Major Shul wrote.
In addition to “Sled Driver”, he wrote “The Untouchables” (1994), about flying the SR-71; “Summer Thunder” (1994), about the Air Force Thunderbirds; and “Blue Angels: A Portrait of Gold” (1995), about the Navy’s precision flying squadron.
After being released from the hospital, he flew in air shows with the first A-10 Thunderbolt demonstration team, became the chief of air-to-ground academics for the Air Force, and volunteered for a training program to fly with the SR- 71 to fly.
He was an avid photographer of aviation and wildlife and had a photography studio in Marysville, Northern California.
After Major Shul’s plane crash-landed during the Vietnam War, he underwent 15 surgeries while recovering from burns that covered half his body and left his hands and face disfigured.Credit…Air Force
Brian Robert Shul was born on February 8, 1948 in Quantico, Va. His father, Victor, was the director of the Marine Corps band. His mother, Blanche (St. George) Shul, was a housewife.
He was 9 when he saw the Navy’s Blue Angels perform in an air show. “I’m like, ‘Whoa,'” he told Seattle’s Museum of Flight in 2017. “It reached in, grabbed my soul, never let go.”
He graduated from East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in history and joined the Air Force later that year.
In Vietnam during the war, he served as a foreign air adviser, conducting support missions in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency’s Air America, which conducted reconnaissance, rescue, and logistics support missions for the military.
When his plane was attacked, he crash-landed in the jungle, where he was rescued by a Special Forces team and evacuated to Okinawa, Japan. Doctors there predicted that his burns would prove fatal. He underwent intensive care for two months before being transferred to the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, where surgeons performed 15 surgeries in a year.
“I kept saying, ‘God, please let me die. I can’t do this. You chose the wrong man. I’m not strong enough. I wouldn’t have anything to fight with right now. It hurts too much. I don’t even want to wake up every morning,” he told the Museum of flight.
But one day, as he lay in bed, he heard kids playing soccer and when he remembered his age, the radio started playing Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow.”
“You listen to the words of that song – it’s all about daring to dream,” Major Shul said in a speech at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in 2016.
“I heard the words of that song for the first time that day,” he continued. “They penetrated my brain more sharply than any scalpel they used, and I could look out the window and see the other side of the rainbow and those kids, and I made a choice. I made a decision right then. I’m going to try to eat the food tomorrow. I want to live. I’m going to try to survive.”
But he said, “I don’t want you to confuse me with someone who’s heroic or famous or did something great.” He added: “Leaving your jet in the jungle is not heroic. I am a survivor.”
