OK, let's answer the prurient question right up front.
Yes, Army Maj. Rhonda Cornum was sexually molested by one of her Iraqi captors in her first hours as a prisoner of war in the Persian Gulf. No, she was not raped. And if that is your only interest in American military women, you can turn straight to Page 49 and pore over all five paragraphs of the episode.But be warned: Cornum offers no comfortable cliches about even that part of her experience. And she is quite capable of taking prisoners herself. On an early mission in Operation Desert Storm, "Doc" Cornum held her 9mm pistol to the head of one Iraqi soldier to keep his attention. Dip into Cornum's book on any page and you, too, just might find yourself unable to walk away from her.
Most of us probably best remember Cornum as the gaunt-faced, shyly smiling woman, bundled in canary-yellow POW garb and her two broken arms swinging in front of her, descending the airliner steps to a hero's welcome by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Her Black Hawk helicopter had been shot down on a rescue mission behind enemy lines and Cornum, an Army flight surgeon, was captured by Iraq's elite Republican Guard. And her fate - one of two American women to become POWs out of the 41,000 serving in the gulf - had triggered again our national argument about women's place in the U.S. military and in combat.
Cornum's book also will provoke controversy. She shows all too clearly that women like her can do more than cope in the warrior's world. They can make it their own and share it with men.
"It's going to be OK," Cornum whispers to the young sergeant, Troy Dunlap, as the two kneel in the desert sand encircled by Iraqi soldiers. It is the beginning of the kind of bond that some think can't exist between men and women soldiers.
Over the eight days of their shared captivity, macho and gung-ho Dunlap does for Cornum all the things her broken arms won't let her do - feeding her, covering her in their cold cell. They keep up each other's spirits up in the darkest times. Their relationship, a potent mixture of gender differences and military tradition, is profound and poignant.
"Dunlap had enough male ego that he was not going to appear weak in front of a woman or an officer," Cornum, the major, says. "I certainly was not going to appear weak in front of a sergeant."
Cornum's story, fast-paced and action-packed, is full of vivid detail, from the blood pasting shut one of her eyes to the taste of an orange in a Baghdad hospital. Much of it is hair-raising, like her moments of fear and frustration awaiting interrogation as she hears Dunlap being slapped in the next room. Some of it is even funny, like a wonderful scene in which Cornum directs an elderly, strait-laced Islamic guard in how to get her - broken arms and all - out of her flight suit so she can go to the bathroom.
Her experiences as a POW are interwoven with the rest of Cornum's life. On one level, this is a soldier's diary; Cornum's love of the Army colors all 224 pages. But it is also the diary of a mother, who writes reassuring letters back home to her 14-year old daughter, Regan. Of a wife who is more outraged by an Iraqi's theft of her wedding ring than scared of being killed. Of a doctor who volunteered for combat because she believed "more people would come back alive if I went." Of an optimist who turns herself into "a human radio antenna" to project love from her prisoner's bed to her husband, Kory, an Air Force flight surgeon, in another part of the war.
Maybe that's why Cornum's book is something special. Unlike most stories about warriors, here we meet a whole person and she is fascinating. "She Went to War" is Cornum's story - riveting, enlightening, entertaining, inspiring.