CORNUM, RHONDA
Name: Rhonda Cornum Rank/Branch: Maj/US Army Unit: (Flight Surgeon) Age: 36 Home City: Freeville, NY Date of Loss: 27 February 1991 Country of Loss: Kuwait Loss Coordinates: Status: Released POW 03/05/91 Acft/Vehicle/Ground: helicopter
Other Personnel in Incident: Troy Dunlap; William Andrews (released); five crewmen and passengers (all killed); perhaps one other missing.
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 09 March 1991 from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK 2002.
REMARKS: OPERATION DESERT STORM
SYNOPSIS: On February 27, 1991, an American F16 fighter/bomber joined in air support for an allied tank battle near Basra. During the fighting, the aircraft was shot down. The pilot of the aircraft, Capt. William Andrews, safely ejected the crippled plane and reported that besides an injured leg, he was fine.
One rescue effort for Andrews failed. An Army search and rescue team was flown in by helicopter. Onboard the aircraft was its crew, the search team, and a flight surgeon, Maj. Rhonda Cornum. The helicopter was shot down, and five bodies were located. According to some news sources, three individuals remained missing from the aircraft.
When darkness fell, Andrews was to hide and wait for morning rescue. When morning came, Andrews could not be found.
On March 6, 1991, Andrews, Cornum, Dunlap, and Stamaris were released by the Iraqis. Cornum and Andrews were carried on stretchers with leg injuries. Cornum had suffered two broken arms, an injured knee, and a broken hand in the crash of the helicopter.
Dunlap's family was startled and elated when his name appeared on missing lists. On February 2, an Army representative came to the family home in Karnak, Illinois, and said Dunlap had been killed. Two days later, the Army changed his status to missing.
===================== The Columbus Dispatch Sunday, January 4, 1998
LOVED ONES STILL SEEK ANSWERS FAMILIES OF MIAS QUESTION GOVERNMENT'S RESOLVE ON ISSUE Ann Fisher Dispatch Staff Reporter
A new year of hope and labor to learn the whereabouts of her father awaits Mitch McGouldrick Guess.
Nearly 30 years ago, Air Force Col. Francis McGouldrick Jr. was lost in a midair collision over Laos during the Vietnam War. A few years later, Guess, then 12, bought her first MIA bracelet and began in earnest a search that has spanned the balance of her life.
She gladly would search another 30 years, the 40-year-old Guess said. So it hurt when she read a recent newspaper report that interest in MIAs in Vietnam has waned in Washington's political and diplomatic circles.
"My husband was reading the paper on Sunday, and he looked at me and said, 'Oh boy, I don't think you're going to want to read this,' " said Guess, of Dublin.
Of course, she read it.
"It was like a knife in my heart. I thought, it's been 29 years of what? All of this waiting and waiting, and then they tell us we're done," she said.
Mike Sasek, a spokesman for the Pentagon MIA/POW department, disputed the news reports.
"The search continues at the same pace that it has been," said Sasek, of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs Office, adding that the government devotes about $100 million a year to the effort.
As many as 135 are employed in the Washington office, and another 170 work in the Hawaii-based Joint Task Force Accounting field office.
The fate of 2,099 Americans involved in the Vietnam War is unknown, Sasek said. Of those, 113 are from Ohio.
About 8,000 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War, and 78,000 are unaccounted for from World War II.
"It's a very large, very important priority and a very dedicated group of people," Sasek said.
John Wheeler of Reynoldsburg said the money and the personnel of which Sasek spoke are part of an elaborate public relations front.
Wheeler has followed the government's progress for years, since his brother, Marine Corps pilot Eugene Wheeler, was declared missing in action in Vietnam on April 21, 1970.
"The monies they say they've spent to obtain data is misleading. That money has been spent on PR and people who sit in Washington, just to have the families of MIAs appeased as best they can without obtaining information," said Wheeler, 59.
Reaction to the newspaper report runs a gamut of emotions among some families of service personnel still missing in action and among those whose loved ones' remains have been found since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.
"I have two feelings," said Patricia Zook, 65, of West Liberty in Logan County. "I think a lot of the families are going to be very distressed because it's their loved one.
"I also agree that it's been long enough. Our loved ones, as far as I'm concerned, are in heaven, and they're taken care of."
Zook, a retired schoolteacher, has her own stake in the issue. On Oct. 4, 1967, contact with Air Force Maj. David H. Zook Jr., 37, was lost when the small, unarmed plane he was flying north of Saigon to drop leaflets collided with a larger U.S. plane.
The Air Force eventually promoted him to colonel, and, in 1978, declared him "presumed dead." Two years ago, Mrs. Zook learned the Air Force thought it might have her husband's remains. They're still not sure, however, she said.
The government spends about $47,640 per Vietnam MIA every year in its attempt to find them.
Liz Flick said it's been worth the effort. Reports that politicians are losing interest in the fate of MIAs angers her.
"My first reaction was I wanted any of those (people) who say we should stop looking to face a family and tell them that," said Flick, state and regional coordinator for the National League of Families of Prisoners Missing in Southeast Asia.
"All you have to do is go to a funeral of a loved one who's been returned, and you realize how much that means to the family. Until you have something definitive, there's no closure."
Helen Purcell, 85, of Mount Gilead, said she knows that feeling.
The remains of her 30-year-old son, Air Force Capt. Howard Philip Purcell, a B-26 bomber pilot, were identified in 1996 through DNA and dental records. Word came 33 years after he was reported missing on Sept. 3, 1963.
Purcell said she was astonished at the crowd that gathered Nov. 3, 1996, at the Trinity United Methodist Church in Mount Gilead for a belated funeral for her son.
"It has made a difference because we all feel that it's finished," Purcell said.
Since the Vietnam War, closure has become more important to Americans, Flick said. Her organization, founded in 1969, still sells $5.50 stainless steel bracelets that bear the name, rank and date the MIA was lost.
Before then, families had nowhere to turn but the government for support and information.
During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, government officials referred concerned families of troops to the league, Flick said. The military also publicly vowed not to leave anyone behind in that war, she said.
Ella May Cates remembers the feeling of not knowing a loved one's fate when her granddaughter was reported missing in action in the Persian Gulf War. Army Maj. Rhonda Scott Cornum, a flight surgeon and pilot in the 101st Airborne Division, was in a helicopter that was shot down during a search-and-rescue mission for an injured U.S. pilot. Five of the eight crew members were killed.
For four days, Cates didn't know whether Cornum, since promoted to lieutenant colonel, was dead or alive. She originally was listed as MIA then reclassified as a prisoner of war before her release after four days.
"It was horrible," Cates said of the interlude before learning Cornum was alive. If the military had abandoned efforts to find her, "I would have been furious," she said.
Still, Cates said she is of two minds about whether efforts should continue on behalf of MIAs from a war that ended 23 years ago.
"Sometimes people have to accept things. I know it would have been very hard for us. Of course you would be angry. But this many years afterward, what good would it do anybody? Sometimes I think closure is in your mind."
Public pressure to solve the remaining mysteries of the Vietnam War is largely what spurred those promises to quickly find MIAs and POWs during the Gulf War, Flick said. "If our group has done nothing else but that, it will be an achievement," she said.
=======================
Tuesday, January 16, 2001, Seattle Post Intelligencer
By RANDALL CHASE THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
RALEIGH, N.C. -- The mission -- to rescue a downed pilot -- was going very wrong. Enemy fire riddled the helicopter carrying flight surgeon Maj. Rhonda Cornum, and the aircraft was plunging to the Iraqi desert.
She felt strangely calm.
"I remember very distinctly thinking as I was crashing, 'I have had a great life,' because I thought it was ending then," Cornum said. "I really got to do more stuff than most people get to do, so I should not complain."
Five of her fellow soldiers were killed and Cornum, seriously injured, became one of two American servicewomen taken prisoner during the Gulf War.
Ten years later, the pain and fear of the experience haven't dimmed her zeal for Army life.
"I feel exactly like I felt 10 years ago, when I thought I was going to die in the middle of the desert," said Cornum, now a 46-year-old colonel in charge of a field hospital unit at Fort Bragg, N.C. "Every day is a gift. I feel really lucky."
Cornum is a wife, mother and physician whose Gulf War exploits earned her the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Purple Heart and -- for better or worse -- a role representing women in the military.
She spent a week as a prisoner of war, enduring abuse from her captors with stoicism.
After the war, Cornum testified before a presidential commission on women in the military, and air combat roles for women subsequently were expanded.
She also spoke out against Virginia Military Institute's men-only admissions policy before the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1996.
Her 1992 autobiography, "She Went to War," was declared one of the most notable books of the year by The New York Times. Her yellow POW uniform and a sling she wore on her left arm became part of an exhibit at the National Museum of American History in Washington. Cornum makes occasional public appearances.
Still, she doesn't consider herself a crusader for women in uniform.
"I guess if I'm a crusader for anything, it's equal opportunity for everybody," she said. "If you want to go do something, then you need to go identify with the activity first, not your gender. You shouldn't think of yourself as a female colonel.
You should think of yourself as a colonel who just happens to be a woman."
Cornum never envisioned herself in the military while growing up in upstate New York, coming of age in the '60s and early '70s.
"I lived in a log cabin and had my kid at home and raised chickens and goats," she recalled. "I wasn't a druggie, but I wasn't exactly establishment."
Born in Dayton, Ohio, Cornum grew up in East Aurora, N.Y., and attended Cornell University, where she earned a graduate degree in nutrition and biochemistry.
She never gave the Army a second thought until she was approached by a man in uniform at a scientific conference and offered a research position.
So at 23, the young mother donned a uniform.
She earned her medical degree in the Army in 1986 from the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Md.
At the time Cornum was shot down, there was no official role for women in combat. The issue had come up a few weeks earlier, however, when Cornum was preparing her battalion medical plan. It included the possibility that she, as the flight surgeon, might have to enter the combat zone on a rescue mission.
"I remember the executive officer looked at me and said, 'Do you suppose the colonel knows you're a woman?' I told him, 'Well, I don't know, but if he hasn't figured it out by now, let's not tell him until the war is over,' " she recalled.
Upon returning from the Persian Gulf and recovering from her injuries, which included two broken arms and a gunshot wound, Cornum attended command and staff college in Alabama.
Cornum's husband, Kory, is an Air Force doctor. Her daughter, Regan, is 24.
Cornum has been stationed at Fort Bragg since July as commander of the 18th Airborne Corps' 28th Combat Support Hospital, the modern Army equivalent of a MASH unit.
In March, she will be sent to Bosnia for six months.
Only one thing has shaken her desire to stay in the Army -- the chance that former Gen. Colin Powell would run for president.
She said she might have quit the service so she could work on his campaign.
"It's not that I'm a Pollyanna. I do occasionally get frustrated," she said. "But there's no place that I think I would be less frustrated. Where else could a 46-year-old woman who is also a physician and a surgeon get paid to jump out of an airplane?"