The U.S. Brain Surgeon Volunteering at Ukraine’s Most Frantic HospitalNEWS | 25 May 2026Rocco Armonda and I were draped in sea-blue surgical scrubs, standing over an open skull. Beneath us, on an operating table, a brain pulsed through a roughly six-inch hole carved by a bone saw. Armonda gently probed the glittering mass, picking out shrapnel.
We were at Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro, Ukraine, the closest major medical center to the front lines. The man on the table, a Ukrainian soldier in his 20s, had been struck by Russian artillery hours earlier. This was Armonda’s fifth surgery of the day—and he didn’t even work there.
Armonda is a 61-year-old neurosurgeon typically based in Washington, D.C., where he works at two major hospitals. When the war began, he was horrified by the images coming out of Ukraine and used his connections to organize shipments of much-needed medical aid. Then he heard about Mechnikov and went to volunteer in 2023. I met him there during his second visit, in February 2024. He was astonished by the chaos and brutality he’d witnessed, even though he was no stranger to war zones.
In 2003, Armonda deployed to Iraq as a U.S. Army neurosurgeon with the first wave of American forces. He was stationed at a field hospital in the middle of the desert as part of a team called the Skull Crackers.
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The worst day of his deployment was August 19, 2003. A suicide bomber plowed a truck rigged with explosives into the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people and wounding more than 100. “We had civilian patients coming to us with the whole assortment of injuries,” Armonda told me. “They had blunt trauma from the building falling on top of them. They had blast trauma from the explosion. They had penetrating trauma from the glass.”
This article has been adapted from Martha Raddatz’s new book, The Hero Next Door.
Many of the injuries that Armonda witnessed in Ukraine were even worse. In Iraq, militants used powerful but crude explosive devices; two decades later, Armonda had to deal with the carnage wrought by cluster bombs and thermobaric explosions. Andriy Sirko, the chief neurosurgeon at Mechnikov, told me that no hospital in the world has more experience operating on patients with penetrating brain injuries: Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, his staff has performed roughly 2,500 such surgeries.
“What we had over 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Armonda said, “is basically what they’ve had here in just two years.”
When I arrived at Mechnikov, a line of ambulances waited outside in the bitter cold to unload patients. The hospital was handling more than 1,600 people each day. Casualties were pouring in from Avdiivka, a town in the eastern Donbas region that the Russians had captured a few days earlier. Soldiers and civilians lay side by side, many of them critically injured by artillery shells, drones, or cruise missiles. Some were double or triple amputees.
On my trips to Iraq and Afghanistan as a war correspondent, I had learned about the importance of the “golden hour,” the advantage of a wounded soldier getting to a triage center within 60 minutes. But medical personnel couldn’t safely fly in eastern Ukraine; they had to drive, occasionally while drones attacked them. A two-hour trip was considered a marvel. “Sometimes it takes 12 hours,” Armonda said. “Sometimes it takes a day to get the patients here.”
Armonda was deeply impressed by the staff at Mechnikov, but he worried that the place would become overwhelmed. Many medical professionals had left to protect their families when the Russians invaded, leading to severe staffing shortages. Those who stayed, Armonda noted, worked constantly without knowing when they would be able to stop.
During his time in the military, medical teams served six- or 12-month combat rotations, only occasionally extending to 18 months. The doctors had always known when they were heading home. “Here, it is their home,” Armonda said. “It’s their home that’s under attack. I never had to worry about a missile or an artillery round coming and hitting my family while I’m at work. I never had to worry about my family scurrying down into a cellar or a basement for an air-raid siren, and then having your house destroyed or loved ones killed. They live that every single day.”
From a young age, Armonda spoke about military service and medical care as his twin callings. He was obsessed with the TV show M*A*S*H, about a combat-support hospital in Korea, where his godfather had served as a U.S. Army dentist. Armonda’s maternal grandfather served in the Italian Carabinieri before fleeing to America when Mussolini came to power. Both men inspired Armonda to become a military doctor.
At 17, in the fall of 1982, he enrolled at West Point. He had no idea what he was getting into, but he quickly realized he belonged. He married his first wife one day after graduation, and went on to become a neurosurgeon at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he spent more than 100 hours a week. His marriage didn’t survive his near obsession with work. After getting divorced, he married his current wife, Heidi, an experienced trauma nurse.
In 2013, after 31 years in the Army, Armonda left the military and went to work at the largest hospital in the D.C. area. In the spring of 2022, soon after Russia’s invasion, Armonda heard from fellow Army vets that Ukraine’s neurosurgeons needed equipment and supplies, so he started soliciting donations. Soon people were dropping off gear at his house—stents, spirals, coils, flow diverters. Volunteers helped him ship them to Ukraine’s hospitals, including Mechnikov. That’s how Armonda met Sirko, the chief neurosurgeon.
In a series of virtual meetings, Armonda offered Sirko treatment advice. Then, in early 2023, Sirko invited him to Dnipro. He was on the ground four weeks later.
When Armonda told his wife that he was thinking of going to Ukraine, she delicately pushed back: At this stage of their lives, after all the deployments, was it really necessary to go back to a war zone?
The couple had four children ranging from 17 to 25, and Armonda also had two older daughters from his first marriage. They had long ago come to terms with their dad’s sense of mission. His 26-year-old daughter, Gabriella, was 5 when he first deployed to Iraq. She wrote a letter to President George W. Bush asking, “When will my daddy come home?” When a staffer sent a card thanking her for her interest in the White House, Gabriella immediately wrote back: “You didn’t answer my question!!”
In Ukraine, I asked Armonda why he’d gone to a war zone where no U.S. troops were fighting. “At West Point, we swore an oath to the Constitution to defend the United States against enemies foreign and domestic,” he replied. “Russia is an enemy against the United States, against democracy, against human rights, against all of civilization. And if there’s ever a place and a time where America needs to lead, this is the place.”
I had known about Armonda long before I met him in Ukraine.
Many of us who worked at ABC News in January 2006 have a vivid memory of the last Sunday of that month. Before dawn, I woke up to a frantic call from Kate Felsen, one of our producers in Iraq. Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, had been injured in an IED attack in Baghdad. Between sobs, Kate explained the situation and pleaded for any additional information I could glean from my contacts in the military.
First I called General George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli, his deputy. “We’ll treat them like our own,” Chiarelli told me from Baghdad. He seemed hopeful based on the information he was getting from the field.
In a daze, I got dressed and raced to our studios for a scheduled appearance on This Week With George Stephanopoulos. As I entered our lobby in downtown Washington, my phone rang. It was Chiarelli: “I just got an update on Bob.” His voice was quieter this time. “I am really sorry,” he told me. “I think the early reports were perhaps too encouraging.” There was a long pause. “It doesn’t look good,” he said, his voice starting to shake. “I’m not sure he is going to make it.”
I froze and closed my eyes, my journalistic armor shattered. Tears came quickly. It took me a moment to compose myself enough to thank him and end the call. Ten minutes later I was on the air with George, fighting to steady myself.
“Good morning, everyone,” George said. “We have to begin today with some news that has hit close to home for all of us here at ABC … ”
Doug’s prognosis was good, but Bob was still in surgery while I was on the air. He had been rushed from the blast scene to a nearby field hospital, where doctors removed more than a quarter of his skull to ease the pressure on his swelling brain. From Badghdad, he was flown to a military hospital in Germany. He stayed two days, until doctors managed to stabilize him. Then they called Armonda.
At the time, Armonda was working at the neurosurgery ward at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He’d returned from Iraq two years earlier. Because of his experience there, he had become a go-to physician for American troops coming home with significant brain injuries.
Soon after, Bob arrived at Bethesda Naval in critical condition, connected to a tangle of tubes and in a medically induced coma. His wife, Lee, remembers Armonda entering the room with a box of Kleenex and taking a seat beside her. He gently explained the severity of Bob’s injury but noted that the most important parts of his brain were intact.
Bob had benefited from Armonda’s expertise even before getting to Bethesda Naval. Armonda had, in a sense, already saved his life.
Shortly upon arriving in Iraq, Armonda had realized that the standard procedure for treating severe brain trauma wasn’t working. To prevent swelling, surgeons would typically remove a portion of the skull called the bone flap, treat the underlying blood clot, and then restore the bone flap soon after. But the swelling in many of Armonda’s patients wouldn’t peak until several days later. Soldiers were dying on their way home.
Armonda started performing a more aggressive procedure that was usually reserved for cases involving a stroke. He would remove a larger portion of the skull—sometimes nearly six inches—and keep it off for a longer period. U.S.-based military doctors questioned whether such an intervention was necessary. But his approach improved patients’ results almost immediately.
More soldiers survived, and about 60 percent of them regained functional independence, compared with about 10 percent of head-trauma patients in civilian hospitals. Techniques that Armonda helped pioneer in Iraq eventually became the standard for soldiers and civilians around the world with penetrating brain injuries.
By the time Bob arrived at the field hospital in Baghdad, the aggressive procedure had already become common thanks to Armonda. Bob’s doctors opted for it, and he survived his trip across the Atlantic.
But Bob’s life was still in danger when he got to Bethesda Naval. More than 100 small rocks, and countless fragments of metal, had penetrated his face, neck, shoulders, and extremities. The most serious threat remained: a grape-size rock that had entered the left side of his throat, sheared off part of his jaw, ripped across his neck, and lodged just below his right ear, less than a millimeter from his carotid artery. The rock would have to be removed in one piece, unlike a tumor, which could be picked apart. Any mistake could have been fatal, but Armonda and his team got the rock out in a mere 90 minutes.
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After 36 days, Bob finally emerged from his coma. A few weeks after he was discharged from the hospital, I went to visit him in Connecticut. I braced myself for the sight of my friend. I knew that part of his skull hadn’t been replaced, and that he was still relearning how to speak.
When I knocked on the Woodruffs’ door, it swung open quickly. And there was Bob, wearing something like a bicycle helmet, scars visible across his body. An immense smile spread across his face. “Hey, girlfriend!” He beamed. For the next hour, I marveled at his recovery. His gait was slow and his speech was halting, but the funny, bright, and charismatic friend I knew and loved was still there.
A year after the attack, Bob was back on the air at ABC News and traveling the world.
In February 2025, Armonda packed up more medical gear and headed back to Ukraine. U.S. support for the war effort was waning, but that only deepened his commitment.
Sirko, the surgeon at Mechnikov, celebrated his 50th birthday during Armonda’s trip. Standing by his side was the man he now calls his “blood brother.” Sirko credits Armonda with having inspired about 10 other American neurosurgeons to come to the hospital. His arrival, Sirko said, “was the greatest and best gift for me.”
“Without exaggeration,” he told me back in 2024, “I can say that thanks to Rocco’s help, thousands of wounded civilian and military lives have already been saved.” That tally is still climbing.
*Illustration Sources: Courtesy of Rocco Armonda; Kostiantyn Liberov / Libkos / Getty; photooiasson / Getty; BeyzaSultanDURNA / Getty
This article has been adapted from Martha Raddatz’s new book, The Hero Next Door.Author: Martha Raddatz. Source
