First Lt. Brandon R. Dronet

Marine 1st Lt. Brandon R. Dronet of Erath served with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 464 from New River, North Carolina, and was deployed to Djibouti with the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. On February 17, 2006, two CH-53E helicopters went down in the Gulf of Aden off northern Djibouti during a training mission. Ten service members died: eight Marines, Dronet among them, and two Air Force airmen, Senior Airman Alecia Good and Staff Sgt. Luis Melendez Sanchez. The cause was still under investigation when the names were released.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.1 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 14 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 17 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 17 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• Private Farrell J. Vice — steps away
• The 1964 Fall of the Erath Water Tower — steps away
• The Erath Sugar Company — steps away
• Acadian Prairie Settlement — 1.1 mi