AIRMAN
Official magazine of the U.S. Air Force, August 1977, Vol. XXI No. 8

Badly burned when his plane crashed, Brian Shul fought for his life and his first love.

Because I Fly
By Capt. Dick Sheffield, HQ USAF

Every time he changes clothes, takes a shower, or walks into a crowd, Brian Shul remembers: The air crash, the delirium the utter horror of seeing and feeling his own flesh burn. And what came after. First Lt. Brian Shul didn't know it as he lay on the ground-more dead than alive that hot, humid day in Thailand in April 1974, but he had already begun a journey toward a new beginning.
      It would be a journey of distance and desire, one that would attract many others to join him along the way. All these things were yet to come, though, as Shul taxied his T-28 for takeoff earlier that spring morning. An air advisor in Southeast Asia, the 28-year-old pilot was embarking on a training mission over enemy territory with A student in the front seat.
      Shut noticed that a fellow pilot in an aircraft next to his on the runway "had his sleeves rolled up, sun glasses on, and no visor." Brian, however, felt differently about his equipment. He wore it properly-and it was to pay off a little while later.
      While making a low-level pass, Shul's engine suddenly lost power at 500 feet-and with no ejection Seat in the T-28, Shul was without options. He rode it down-all the way down into the thick jungle over growth. Metal ripped and tore as his wings buzz-sawed through the trees. In a hall of crackling debris, the aircraft exploded into a fireball. The frontseater was dead.
      In the cockpit, Shul was literally sitting atop the fuel pump, now an inferno of lapping flames. With gloves ablaze and arms smoldering, the lieutenant managed to pop the canopy, leap onto what was left of awing, and sprint a hundred yards into a clearing.
      "It was so hot [in the aircraft] that I felt I could have run through a brick wall to got out," Brian said. "The skin on both my arms was burned off-erased!"
      It had taken him just 10 or 12 seconds to free himself from the plane and find refuge on the edge of the clearing, where he collapsed in a clump. His mind, however, raced on.
      What did he want first? His water bottle? First aid kit? Radio? All were useless. His hands were badly burned and he cupped them softly to his chest while he put his feet up on his helmet in resignation.
      "O.K., God, this is it. We're going. This is it."
      But leather-palmed gloves had saved half of his hands; the parachute and survival vest had protected his back and chest. The helmet's sun visor had shielded his nose, eyes, and ears. But his mouth and neck had "taken a hit." He had instinctively held his breath to protect his lungs, but the intense heat had fused his lips.
      Today, new skin covers 40 percent of his body. Although he was in shock and torturous pain was everywhere, Shul never lost consciousness. Each heartbeat pumped an added shock wave of agony through his entire body.
      "I lay there hoping someone would find me and shoot me to make the pain go away," he said. While Brian lay still, hoping for death, two Air Force special forces members-by coincidence two friends from Bangkok-were thrashing toward him through the brush. Shul remembers when they arrived.
      "Little John, a soldier's soldier, looked at me, turned his back, and vomited. I didn't feel that bad, but I must have looked that bad." Within minutes an Army helicopter shimmied into the nearly inaccessible clearing to pick him up.
      Little John's reaction was repeated by a waiting nurse at Udorn RTAB. I saw the expression of shock and disbelief. Shul said "What was it? Was my leg and eye, or something else gone? I felt all right."
      That evening as the numbness and delirium wore off, he was wheeled to a C-9 for an air-evac flight to Okinawa. In the light drizzle, he recalled, "every drop of rain was like a knife in my face."
      Days later, on Easter, while a medic cradled a phone to his mouth, Shul talked for the first time with his family in Florida. "Dad I had a bad crash. Boy was it ever! Yes, I'll be back flying in three months. I'm burned bad but have no internal injuries. I just had to wish everyone a Happy Easter.
      Today he doesn't remember making the call. But he did and characteristically, he never revealed the torturous pain. Capt. Brian Shul is like that and much, much more.
      Reared by practicing Christian parents, Shul is wholly committed to a like that encompasses positive ideas and physical strength. His speech is laden with personal parables. He is a believer - in God and himself. As he would latter explain. "We're going up the hill of life. I have a 50-pound pack on my back. I have to carry that extra load. I fall harder, but watch my dust. I'll beat you to the top."
      Flying had become a spiritual commitment for the young pilot ever since he attended an air show as an 8-year old and "heard the thunder and saw the flames of the jets."
      "Because I fly." He would later write, "I envy no man on earth."
      Brian, then, lying in a hospital on Okinawa, had made his decision, just as he told his father. He would get well. He would fly again. The odds were very long. The burns themselves weren't the only consideration. Often internal disruptions cause vital body fluids to escape. With blood chemistry and metabolism out of balance, a burn victim's temperature rises as the body fights the major risk: infection. Even vital organs such as the kidneys and the heart can malfunction or stop working completely.
      "At Okinawa, Brian recalled, "they poured terrible tasting beer down me to get my kidneys' working." He also began taking his turn in "the tank", a large, germ-free, whirlpool like tub filled with a water based solution heated to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It is here that dead skin is washed away, the patient experiencing a frightful sensation similar to a splash of alcohol on an open cut.
      But complete skin removal requires much, much more from the patient, who must endure the scrape of the surgeon's scalpel, the tug of tweezers, and the snip of scissors. The pain is indescribable, even with a shot of morphine. Twenty minutes at a time - that's all the toughest can take. "Any longer would kill you," Brian Said, "and some have-died. You grit your teeth and try not to scream. I chipped two teeth." He was also fast becoming something of a celebrity among visitors to the tank.
      "If you go once, he said, "it puts hair on your chest. Three times and you get a medal of honor. Five and you're a superman. Go 10 times and you're a folk hero in the hospital."
      Thirty-two times Brian went to the tank. Thirty-two times he came away. He was a well-established folk hero more than three times over, but was also human. Down now from his normal weight of 175 pounds to a 120-pound mass of raw tissue and gauze. Shul slept fitfully, his arms heavy with splints. More and more often he found himself making excuses to obtain strong painkillers.
      "I would be in fairyland or on a train ride to hell." He said, "but the worst trip was better then being awake." After three weeks, he was "ready" to turn in my resignation. Everything I held dear was gone-my faith in physical strength, my lungs, breath, legs. Even my airplane, family and friends, body, clothes, and money. I had nothing." Yet somehow an inner strength survived, stronger than the physical strength that had made the once solid 5-foot-11, all-around athlete the sixth best college handball player In the country in his days at East Carolina University. Okay, God, I know you're in control," Shul would pray, "but I don't like the way things are working out." Neither did his doctors. They were frank.
      One Thursday they told Brian he would probably die by the weekend. "Well I'm not ready to do that yet," Brian retorted. The doctors weren't too encouraging with other predictions either. Even if he lived, they told him, flying was out. There was just too much tissue deterioration. In fact, they said ... he would never walk again.
      In character, Brian countered, "I don't need to walk. I plan on running through life." After nearly two months on Okinawa--the time made bearable by daily phone calls from his sister Maureen in Washington, D.C., and visits by family friends--Shut was flown to the famed burn center at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
      "It was a new group of 'no' people," Brian said. "They told me I'd never fly again and that I'd undergo three years of surgery and two years of therapy." Army Col. H. D. Peterson, Chief of the Clinical Division at the burn center, expected the hostility. He was, in fact, pleased by it. "Recovery comes from within the patient," the plastic surgeon said. "Brian worked very hard."
      Peterson conceded that Shul was injured badly, but as he put it, "Brian should have lived and he did. His burns would not have killed more than one out of 15 in his age group and In his condition." The surgeon did note that few severely burned pilots ever return to flying duty and that even fewer were in Brian's Outstanding physical condition at the time of the crash.
      Brian Shul was to stay at Brooke for more than nine months while doctors performed the "pure artistry" of plastic surgery, the term used by the Army's top burn expert, Col. Basil Pruitt. Brian's back and chest were donor sites for the intricate skin grafts, a fact that's obvious when he jogs along the beach without a T-shirt. After the operation, the captain volunteered for physical therapy, a painful necessity for recovery that many avoid. "I wanted to fly, run, eat, and love again," Brian said.
      It was slow going at first, but Brian kept at it. After six weeks he could open a door and pop his own soft drink cans.
      On Life God did not call upon you to be like the canary bird, trapped in the confinement of a cage, but rather to be like the eagle, to fly across continents and reach for the galaxies, so that in the end your life will have shown brightly - like the sun and the very stars will whisper your name.
      In the hospital, surrounded by people "who seemed to just enjoy lying there," Brian experienced bouts of depression. For therapy he answered six months of backlogged mail. Later, "to maintain my sanity and escape from Gilligan's Island' and 'I Love Lucy reruns," he began putting his thoughts on paper and eventually compiled them into a book. Initially it was "merely a personal effort to keep busy, while rebuilding my dexterity at the typewriter," the amateur author explained.
      He recorded his pain, joys, and deepest feelings, all tied together with his own special brand of positive thinking. Before he left the San Antonio hospital, a few draft copies of Between Operations had been printed. The staff op Ward 13-B loved it. They offered suggestions and encouraged him to print more copies and leave them for future patients to read. Soon, the 38-page book was in its second printing and he had become well known at Brooke. Then it snowballed.
      One parent, whose child recovered with the help of the book's inspirational passages, told another. The good news spread from nurse to nurse, doctor to doctor, hospital to hospital. "I never thought the book had relevance outside the burn ward," Brian said. He was wrong.
      Between grafts and hand exercises-squeezing a rubber ball, Brian typed. Expressing his thoughts intensified their meaning as his hands and fingers strengthened. Even sitting on the hospital patio encouraged him. T-38s flying overhead from Randolph AFB made him envious but even more determined. Weekly, discharge papers were offered, and just as often literally thrown into the trash. He knew he would never have to work again disability would take care of him--but he wanted to fly, to feel the stick again. "Once you taste it, you have it," he said.
      At times Brian's body responded poorly to the skin grafts, but Col. Peterson finally put the pieces back again. The finished product, however, looked different. Brian had the same name and the same social security number, and the inner organs were all his and functioning. But the cover had changed.
      Seeing himself in the mirror made Brian tell himself, "I can't call anyone ugly anymore." His fade had changed dramatically. His previously fused lips had little definition. He would have to learn to talk all over again.
      Characteristically, he developed a three-phased plan to deal with himself and others: "First you have to accept what's happening. Don't con yourself. Second, survive. Over come the blood and pain. And lastly, adjust. You are now high 'vis' [visibility]". His most difficult transition was yet ahead.
      Brian had been popular ... even famous, and certainly well-liked at Brooke. The hospital had become his womb, comfortable and reassuring. There, he was surrounded by people who either had been burned or had grown accustomed to new faces. Thus it was not so unusual that when he left the hospital in March 1975, he felt as though he was being "cast out into a different world like a convict set free."
      The ex-con's burden, of course, appears on paper. Brian wares his. His fears of people's reactions was justified. Even his sister Maureen saw only the scars on their first meeting after the operation.
      Prior to flight requalification training, Brian took leave to visit his family in Florida. It was during that visit that Maureen really saw the brother "who had always been, is now, and always will be my closest friend." On one of their daily walks along the water's edge, she told her brother, "Brian, I saw you today for the first time. You're still the best looking person I know."

Because I Fly,

I laugh more than other Men, I look up and see more than they.
I know how the clouds feel, What it's like to have the blue in my lap,
To look down on Birds,
To feel freedom in a thing called the Stick.
Who but I
Can slice between God's billowed legs,
And feel them laugh and crash with his step?
Who else has seen the unclimbed peaks?
The rainbow's secret?
The real reason birds sing? Because I fly,
I envy no man on earth.

The kid sister, who used to sell her brother's school pictures for 50 cents, said many of her women friends were initially stunned. "But after they got to know him, every one of them thought he was one of the most beautiful people they'd ever known."
      After the "breathing time" among loved ones and friends, Brian reported to Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona. He loved nearby Tucson but, nonetheless, he admitted to falling into a pattern of eating hamburgers in his room at night rather than facing the stares downtown.
      Eventually, Brian decided the time had come to live the philosophy he had written down for others to follow. He mingled with friends, jogged with his shirt off, swam in the pool. It wasn't easy. Everywhere he went he could sense the staring. He couldn't dismiss it, but he did learn to live with it.
      "I can walk into a room of 4,000 people", Brian said, "and from 400 yards tell how many people are staring at me. I know which ones they are. I have to be extroverted because if I'm not, people will feel extra uncomfortable."
      During a periodic checkup at Brooke, he also learned there are people who see beneath the scars. He met Anne Tabor, a social worker with the Red Cross in San Antonio. He couldn't believe there was someone who really didn't "see" the scars. "We hit It off," she said. "It was magnetic. Brian has a way. His main concern is to make the other person relax. He touches every person he meats and they listen. After you meet him, you feel as though you can turn around and do anything in the world."
      And Brian keeps touching people through his book. His parents still receive countless thank-you letters for Brian's work, and Mrs. Shul believes that God spared Brian's life for a purpose. "He's been an inspiration to so many," she said.
      Brian continues to work with patients, trying to help pull them through. He emphasized, however, that "you can't change in the hospital. You bring what you are with you. One example was a 15-year-old burn victim who wasn't responding to treatment. Doctors and the boy's parents asked Brian for help. He tried. "Johnny, what really turns you on?" Brian asked. "I mean what makes your heart beat?" The boy stumped him. "He wouldn't come up with anything. Not hamburgers, sports, or girls. He had nothing to live for. No motivation." Johnny subsequently lost the use of his arms and hands.
      Brian had a different perspective, though he admits going through some rough times before reaching it. It's clearly evident in athletics. Before the accident, he was the Number One handball player in the Air Force. Today, because of massive sear tissue, he has poor circulation in his hands, but he still enjoys playing racquetball with his modified, right handed grip. In fact, he also enjoys winning, he finished second among 35 top competitors last spring in the first worldwide interservice racquetball championships held at West Point.
      And he still enjoys--yes, loves the goal he lived for, flying. He's currently an A-7 pilot with the 354th Tactical Fighter Wing at Myrtle Beach AFB, S.C. Brian lives in a two-bedroom condominium adjacent to the rambling brooks and majestic pines of the Deer Creek Plantation's golf course. Everything in the house whispers-occasionally shouts-aviation.
      Aircraft mobiles hang in the master bedroom and foyer, A 48 square-foot wall, completely covered with pictures ranging from a colorful PAO to the sleek black of the SR-71, dominates an otherwise unassuming living room carpeted in pale yellow. A visitor can't turn a corner or blink an eye without seeing a plaque:
- "Beware the fury of a patient man."
- "What is true is invisible to the eye."
- "Touch, love and honor the earth."
      A bookcase contains the History of Aviation, One Day at Kitty Hawk, and the thoughts of Teddy Roosevelt on plaques. There are also statues of Lincoln, the American eagle, and JFK. "These are the things I love," Brian explained, "the things I believe. They are expressions of me."
      Brian devotes many off-duty hours talking to anyone of a hundred groups around the country about his crash and recovery. His booklet has opened avenues for meeting new people. He travels the country on leave and at his own expense speaking to church groups, hospital patients, doctors, nurses anyone who has read his book or heard about it and wants the man with the positive outlook to share his enthusiasm.
      Brian also takes a special interest in children. He has voluntarily spent many hours on sweltering runways talking flying with kids at open houses. According to a neighbor, "Kids follow him around like puppy dogs. When Brian is gone, my son counts the days and will lake an illness to stay home from school the day he's due back. He worships Brian."
      Brian's mother feels that her son's ability to attract others is "because he's so appreciative of life. He's got another chance."

Epilogue:

Pause for moment and taste the greatness of life,
Cast your fate to the wind,
Feel the sun on your back.
As you stand barefoot in the grass,
Watch a cloud drift quietly by
And give thanks for the thrill of being alive.

And Shul is making the most of it. He was one of the first 15 pilots from the Tactical Air Command chosen to form the first operational A-10 squadron, an honor he cherishes. With it all, though, Brian's father, a retired marine, knows his son is still searching. "He's still unsettled as to what his ultimate goal is. For what he's gone through, there has to be a change in his life. Up to now he's worn those scars well, but they are still there. It's too early to say what's going to happen." There may be more than a touch of truth in the elder Shul's words. Brian does comment that he sometimes feels like he's three years old or "18 going on 80," and he does allow that he "doesn't know what he wants to do when he grows up."
      But probably more important is the fact that the captain that many thought couldn't--did. He's back again with the stick in his hand. And he can say once more with hard earned conviction, "Because I fly, I envy no man, on earth."

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