WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – One Wichita veteran spent most of his service in Germany before the Berlin Wall came down.
“My mother was kind of the influence for making me join the Army. She was like, ‘Brent, you need to grow up,'” Brent Stiles said.
Stiles worked various Air Capital jobs after high school, but says it was the Army that kicked his career into high gear. In 1987, he ended up training to be a combat engineer specializing in carpentry and masonry.
“(We trained to do) demolition work, we were trained to do temporary bridge building, rapid runway repair,” he said.
Once training was complete, Stiles was sent to U.S. Army Garrison Baumholder in Germany for the next two and a half years and was part of a construction platoon stationed there. But he says he got to work on Army projects all over the country.
“I spent the majority of my time in Stuttgart doing a construction project,” he said. “We were putting an obstruction wall along one of the Autobahns.”
Tune into KSN News at 10 every Wednesday for our Veteran Salute
Stiles may have been in Germany as the Cold War played out, but he says that didn’t distract him from the country’s beauty and from having fun in his early 20s. But he also worked on projects that focused on Russian aggression.
“We would go to Spangdahlem Air Base, and our mission was to show support to the base,” he said. “Like, if the base was to get bombed or something, we were trained to go in and fix the runway.”
Stiles was sent back to the U.S. six months before the Berlin Wall came down and finished out his career stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, installing fuel and water pipelines.
“We would mainly work at night because it would be so hot during the daytime,” he said. “We’d work with the headlights of our trucks.”
Stiles got out of the Army in 1991 as an E-3 and came home to Wichita, where he found a career as a truck driver, but these days, you can find him working as a mechanic at Boeing. He says he’s happy to be home but grateful for how his Army experience broadened his horizons.
“Back then, there was no cell phones, no computers,” he said. “I was thousands of miles away, and if I wanted to call home, it was $2 a minute. So I got out of the nest.”
If you want to nominate a veteran for our Veteran Salute, send an email to connect3news@ksn.com or fill out our online nomination form!
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to KSN-TV.