The Grit Factor

—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 ...