The Grit Factor by Shannon Huffman Polson

Author:Shannon Huffman Polson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2020-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

—5—

Build Your Resilience

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

—Alain de Botton

On February 27, 1991, Major Rhonda Cornum was in the back of a Black Hawk helicopter flying fast and low across the Iraqi desert, so low that they would have collided with an American convoy of trucks crawling across the landscape below if the pilot hadn’t pulled up in time. The helicopter’s crew of eight was responding to the call that an F-16 had been shot down, and the pilot had a broken leg. Cornum, a flight surgeon for the 229th Attack Aviation Regiment, was on board to administer medical aid to the downed pilot.1

Just forty-five seconds after they’d passed over the American convoy, green tracers streaked up from the ground “as if we were a lawn mower that had run over a beehive, and the bees were coming up to sting,” as Cornum wrote in her memoir, She Went to War.2 The soldiers on the door guns returned fire. One of the shell casings from the machine gun hit Cornum in the face as she lay on the floor, waiting for one stray round to rip through the floor from below.

Then something big hit the helicopter. The aircraft rocked. The engine strained.

Cornum heard the pilot yell, “We’re going in!” She grabbed on to the aircraft. She wondered if it was the end. The helicopter crashed at 140 knots onto the desert floor. Everything went dark.

Cornum remembers it was daytime when they crashed, and when she came to it was night. She pushed her way through the wreckage to find her way out of the mangled fuselage. The pain was almost unbearable. Cornum reassured herself by thinking, “Nobody’s ever died from pain.”

With a PhD in biochemistry from Cornell University, Cornum had been recruited into the Army to work in a research facility in San Francisco. She never expected to deploy.

“I was the least likely person to see combat,” she says. “I really joined because I wanted to do research and I didn’t want to teach.” She ended up liking the Army, particularly the camaraderie and the mission focus.

When Cornum pushed her way out of the wreckage of the Black Hawk, she couldn’t stand up or even turn over. When she tried a second time to stand up, she found herself looking up into the barrels of five Iraqi rifles. She noted the soldiers’ good uniforms and concluded that they were members of the Republican Guard. Not hearing any other noise, she assumed she was the sole survivor.

One of the soldiers reached down and grabbed Cornum by her right arm. A flash of pain burned through her body. She screamed. The pain told her that her arm was broken, and that his tug had dislocated it as well. Her other arm was also broken. Cornum had been shot, but wouldn’t know it until later. The soldier took her by the hair and dragged her behind him.

Cornum, eventually put upright, was forced to walk into a subterranean bunker. In

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