Grady T. Birdsong was raised in Kansas before enlisting in the United States Marine Corps in 1966. After serving two tours in the Northern I Corps region of Vietnam during Tet of 1968 and the DMZ in 1969, he traveled the world, enjoying a successful career in engineering, business development, marketing and technical sales in the telecommunications/data systems, information technology systems and the optical and fiber systems test industries. Additionally, Grady is the author of A Fortunate Passage with two EVVY awards from Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA). In 2010, Grady and Bob Fischer became Marine Corps Veteran Advocates for the Rocky Mountain Hyperbaric Institute, at a time when Ryan Fullmer and Eddie Gomez were struggling to establish their brand new HBOT clinic in the industrial area of Boulder, Colorado. It was his early filming of the clinic's first successful TBI-PTSD veteran's treatment that generated the first significant donor funds, earning $135,000. These funds enabled the HBOT clinic to move to its current site in the Professional&Medical Center in Louisville, CO, and also to provide a nearby home for the forty-day treatment of out-of-town veterans. Now retired, Grady lives with his wife, Pamela, in the Denver area, where he enjoys his grandchildren and spends his time writing, volunteering, and hunting big game. Grady is a graduate of Regis University in Denver, Colorado. Both authors have an ongoing commitment to veterans of all wars and continue to advocate, inform, educate, and raise nonprofit funds. Both remain Semper Fidelis.
Bob Fischer is a 1955 Naval Academy graduate and career Marine Corps officer who retired in 1982. He was Captain of Marines on the U.S.S. Saint Paul CA-73, the 7th Fleet Flagship, from 1961 to 1963, when he studied four guerrilla wars in Southeast Asia and obtained the Malaya Jungle School Syllabus at Johore Bahru. He used the syllabus to establish the 2nd Marine Division Counter-guerrilla Warfare Center at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. There, 20,000 Marines, Navy Seal, and Special Forces Teams were also trained. His CIPA award-winning book Guerrilla Grunt documents this experience. He was also a task force advisor (Covan) for the Vietnamese Marine Corps from 1966 to 1968 and wrote his book Covan about this experience. From 1977-80, as Commander of the Defense Electronics Depot, Kettering, Ohio, his workforce set the Defense Logistics Agency's all-time performance record. For this he was awarded the Defense Superior Service Medal. In 2010, he attended a presentation by the Rocky Mountain Hyperbaric Institute and its nonprofit Rocky Mountain Hyperbaric Association for Brain Injuries, where he learned about their recently established Healing Our Heroes fund. His involvement with other Marine veteran organizations motivated him to become a Veteran's Advocate for the clinic. Joining Grady Birdsong, they filmed the first veterans who received hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) in the original Boulder clinic and raised funds by presenting the unique HBOT story to groups in the Denver area. For his efforts, he was named Colorado American Legion's Veteran Advocate of the Year in 2012.
