Cornum, Rhonda

Educational and Military History

Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1954, Rhonda Cornum grew up in East Aurora, New York, near Buffalo. Cornum earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and nutrition at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She joined the Army in 1978 where she worked at an Army research facility in San Francisco, California. In 1982, Cornum attended the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (military school in Bethesda, Maryland) and became a military doctor in 1986. She completed a General Surgery Internship at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

In 1987, Cornum, an accomplished military aviator (who has flown almost every type of military aircraft), applied for and became a finalist for candidacy in the United States Astronaut program but was not ultimately selected. Instead, that year as Chief of Aviation Medicine she honed her professional skills as a flight surgeon for Army Aero Medical Center at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Four years later, flight surgeon Cornum went to the Persian Gulf with the Army's 101st Airborne Division during Operation Desert Shield/Storm. During an ill-fated rescue attempt of an injured United States Air Force pilot who had crashed in enemy territory, Iraqi combatants shot down the Black Hawk helicopter carrying Cornum and seven crew members.

Incredibly, she and two crew members survived a devastating crash that had the aircraft falling from the sky and careening toward the ground at 140 miles per hour. Cornum was severely injured with a bullet lodged in her shoulder, two broken arms and significant damage to the ligaments in her knees. She could not walk, so her captors roughly removed her from the wreckage, threw her in a vehicle and took her to a prison in Basra, Iraq. She was held as a prisoner of war for eight days and released March 5, 1991. During her imprisonment, she was interrogated and sexually assaulted by one captor, crucial facts she revealed one year later in She Went to War, her POW story named by the New York Times as one of the most notable books of 1992. She was one of two American servicewomen taken prisoner by the Iraqis during this military conflict.

After the Persian Gulf War, Cornum did what most prisoners of war don't-she remained on active duty and trained in urology surgery. Cornum did not avoid service in war zones. In 2000, she became the Medical Task Force Commander to Bosnia. By the time the second Iraq War began in 2003, she had become the commander of the Army's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC). The Landstuhl military hospital in Germany is the largest military hospital outside the United States. She helped treat and care for 26,000 military members, including those who were severely wounded during battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. She is one of three female medical doctors in the Army on active duty. General Cornum is the Army's Director of Comprehensive Soldier's Fitness, a program designed to help soldiers to become stronger, more resilient, and less likely to succumb to post-traumatic stress disorder. This new Army psychological training regimen will help to individually and collectively bolster emotional, spiritual, and mental health so that servicemen and servicewomen can better deal with the traumas of war and deployments, and other types of crises.

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