TIMES-REPUBLICN

In the entire history of the T-R, few writers have logged a higher word count than Garry Brandenburg, who has been sharing his “Outdoors Today” column, mostly focused on his encyclopedic knowledge of nature, hunting, geology and history, with readers for over 30 years. But before he was the longtime Marshall County Conservation Director and an avid pilot and aerial photographer, he was a Bremer County farm boy who, after showing the milking cow champion at the County Fair two years running, signed up for the United States Air Force and ended up traveling halfway around the world during the Vietnam War.

“I enlisted because in 1963, that was the year I graduated from Waverly-Shell Rock High School, I was not college material. I still had a lot of growing up to do because you’re a teenager. You think you know it all, but you are absolutely dead wrong,” he said.

Two of Brandenburg’s uncles had served in the Navy during WWII, and his father tried to enlist but was rejected due to his flat feet and instead stayed home and farmed during the conflict. He credited his decision to choose the Air Force as a product of time spent during his youth watching planes fly into Waterloo from Rochester and the Twin Cities and thinking he’d like to be a pilot someday. His parents alerted him to one problem, however: at the time, it was believed that pilots had to have “perfect vision,” and Garry wore glasses.

A young Garry Brandenburg is pictured in uniform while serving in the United States Air Force in 1966. He was deployed to the Korat Royal Air Force Base in northeast Thailand during the early days of the Vietnam War.

“It was like a dream, someday I’m gonna do that. The only thing I didn’t know about the dream was when it would be fulfilled,” he said.

Surprisingly enough, though, Brandenburg never did much flying when he was in the Air Force. Not long after the county fair, he took a bus from Waterloo to Des Moines to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for basic training then technical school at Lowry Air Force Base just outside of Denver, Colo. By 1964, he was assigned to the Oxnard Air Force Base in southern California for 13 months before it was finally time to head to southeast Asia in 1965.

His primary posting there was the Korat Royal Air Force Base in northeast Thailand, which was located within a few hundred miles of the Cambodian border and, of course, not far from the rapidly escalating conflict between North and South Vietnam. Most of the planes at Korat were sent into North Vietnam.

Brandenburg only actually set foot in Vietnam once on his way home, but his contributions were still vital to the overall effort.

“We were in the theater. We’re all working together to do our thing,” he said. “I helped work in the ammunition dumps taking care of bombs of every size and the boosters and the fuses and delays and missiles and rockets and all that stuff to get them to the flight line. And once on the flight line, other groups of people would load them onto the airplanes. The pilots would come later and fly the airplanes away, and most of the time they’d come back. Sometimes the airplane didn’t come back.”

Four years in the Air Force helped Brandenburg achieve some of that maturity he said he desperately needed before signing up, and he got out of active duty in August of 1967. After his assignment in Korat, he did another stint on the U.S. territorial island of Guam in the south Pacific and eventually came back stateside to work on B-52s at the Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota.

When his four-year contract was up, Brandenburg determined he wanted to go to college and study something related to biolife or conservation, and he wound up at Iowa State University with his base commander’s blessing to pursue his dream.

“Even though he made the attempt to try to get me to re-enlist, I didn’t bite,” he said.

Like most other soldiers, Brandenburg eventually got word of the controversy back home and the mass protests against the war in major American cities, but he joked that he was too busy working to pay too much attention. Opting not to say anything too controversial, he simply indicated he was “not a fan of Jane Fonda,” the famous Hollywood actress who was active in the protest movement and earned the nickname “Hanoi Jane” after she was photographed seated on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun in 1972.

“When I got back to the States, some of the guys would joke and say ‘The first thing I’m gonna do when I get off the plane is kiss the ground,’ because America, with all of its faults, is still the best country in the world,” Brandenburg said. “You really don’t appreciate that kind of a statement until you’ve lived in other environments (in) some place where people don’t have anything close to the kinds of opportunities we have in this country.”

His conservation career started in Kossuth County before he was accepted into ISU as a 23-year-old freshman, but once he settled in, he got better grades than he did in high school. A professor even read one of his papers out loud in class as a recognition of his exemplary work.

Upon graduating, Brandenburg moved to Albion and became the Marshall County Conservation Director, a title he held for decades, and in 1988, he got his pilot’s license. He’s since put it to great use both in exploring the area from the air and shooting breathtaking photographs.

For a man who’s a storyteller to his core, being part of the United States Air Force was a crucial chapter in that story, and if you see Brandenburg around Marshall County, there’s a good chance he’ll still be donning the cap commemorating that service.

“Military service is a fantastic opportunity for any young person because young guys mature slower than young gals, but military service gives you time out and discipline. Basic training and the military way of life is a disciplined, structured kind of a thing which many young people need,” he said. “If you had it before you went into the military, it made living in the military a whole lot easier. If you were a goof off and you didn’t wanna toe the line or whatever, let’s just say drill instructors have a way of making you wish you had. It’s all based on trying to get you to be part of a team effort.”

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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611

ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.