Military Spotlight: Leo Kroonen

By Sydney Kroonen

For Coronado locals—those with the privilege of growing up surrounded by military veterans and active service members—patriotism is a trait learned early in life, and eventually, a reason to consider a military career. Though this linear progression from young patriot to solider has become somewhat of a norm, it is not the case for all of our local war veterans. For some—namely Commander and Orthopedic Surgeon Leo Kroonen—the road to the military looked much different.

“A big part of my decision [to join the Navy] was that it was a good way for me to pay for medical school while also having a likelihood that I could end up spending a part of my career in San Diego,” said Kroonen. After graduating from Stanford University with a Bachelors in Human Biology, he enrolled at MCP Hahnemann University’s College of Medicine (a program that has since been absorbed by Drexel University Medical School).

Although the majority of the following four years of his life were spent in schooling, Kroonen received periodic military training along the way. Before moving into his apartment in Philadelphia, he spent six weeks in Newport, Rhode Island at Officer Indoctrination School, where he and other commissioned professionals learned the basics of being an officer.

Kroonen returned to military training in the summer after his first year of medical school, this time in Panama City, Florida with an experimental dive unit. On base, he worked with other doctors who conducted experiments in a large water tank that simulated the pressure and conditions of deep ocean environments—researchgathering periods that often involved sending recruits to live in the water tank for months at a time. Through this program, he and his coworkers studied the physiologic effects of living at depth.

Despite being exposed to realistic simulations of dangerous scenarios throughout training and his time in Florida, the reality of military work did not fully sink in until September of 2001 when the Twin Towers were hit. At the time, Kroonen was an intern at Navy Medical Center in San Diego.

“When I joined the Navy, the U.S. wasn’t really involved in any global conflict, so it didn’t feel like a dangerous thing. I was like there’s no war, we don’t do war anymore. 9/11 totally changed things.”

The aftermath of 9/11 played a key role in shaping the subsequent part of Kroonen’s military career. After finishing his internship in 2002, he began his General Medical Officer Tour with the Marines at Camp Pendleton—during which he was presented with the possibility of deployment to Iraq. Wanting to be prepared for the looming danger of biological warfare in Iraq, he first took a trip to Fort Detrick in Maryland to be trained in treating chemically-induced injuries.

Though the trainings were helpful in preparing one skill-wise, no briefing could quite prepare the to-be deployed for the fear that comes with warfare. For Kroonen, this meant invading a foreign country in the middle of the night.

“We were in the armored ambulance with some stretchers, a couple of cormen, and a driver. We rolled in [to Iraq] in the middle of the night under scud missiles. I had never been so scared in my life,” said Kroonen. “Listening to the radio the whole time, I was hearing all of this military jargon, and then every once in a while you would hear ‘Contact right! Contact right!’ and people would start shooting and blowing stuff up and I was thinking how the heck did I get here?”

Fortunately, Kroonen and his coworkers made it into Iraq with minimal casualties, stopping at various points along the way to interact with local communities and provide medical support. After traveling for three weeks and getting as far as Samara, they settled down in a train station in southern Iraq where they established an aid station.

At the base, Kroonen’s day-to-day duties involved a lot of waiting for injured soldiers to be dropped off or treating those that had already been delivered. Being a Role 2 care facility, most of the injuries were quick fixes or temporary adjustments to minimize the pain until the soldiers could be transferred to a Role 3 facility.

It was during this period that Kroonen deepened his sense of patriotism—particularly as he witnessed the hard work and bravery of the Marines.

“If you ask me who I really love in the military, I would say the O3-11 Lance Corporal, because those are the guys whose lives are really on the line. I was so impressed by all the 19-year-old enlisted guys who were out there fighting in the trenches for us. You get a different level of respect for that when you see it happening firsthand,” said Kroonen.

After seven months in Iraq, Kroonen and his team turned over their station to the Dutch military and returned home. For Kroonen, this experience was relieving to say the least.

“I remember the military did a lot of preparation telling us ‘You might find that when you return home, crowded places like the mall might feel over stimulating,’ but I came home and was like I love the mall. I was happy to be somewhere I had known before.”

In the next few years, Kroonen was accepted into residency then fellowship in Pennsylvania, during which he also fathered a daughter and a son.

Kroonen’s international military endeavors picked up again in 2011, when he was asked to deploy again, this time to Afghanistan. After completing a brief training in Fort Jackson, North Carolina, he and his team were flown out to a base in the desert. On this trip, Kroonen served as a Role 3 care provider, treating high-severity injuries on a relatively protected base. He describes his surrounding including a TGI Friday’s, a barbershop, and other amenities, and feeling safe on the miles-wide base in which the hospital was at the very center.

The scarier side to this deployment was not the surroundings, but the injuries themselves. Kroonen performed surgery on several soldiers that were near-death—the most famous of which being Travis Mills. As the doctor on call the night he was admitted, Kroonen and his team provided treatment to stabilize Mills after he had lost all four limbs.

After several busy months of performing surgery, Kroonen returned home in June of 2012. In the years following, he served as a doctor at both Navy Medical Center and Kaiser Permanente in the reserves, eventually retiring from the Navy in 2017 with 21 years of service credit.

In his time in the military, Kroonen learned several important lessons—the most surprising of which was about himself.

“I didn’t go into the Navy to be a patriot, but in hindsight, that is what I am most proud of. I was in Iraq and Afghanistan to do something, I did it, and it saved lives. I helped people who really needed me,” he says.

Kroonen has been able to use many of his learned traits from the military in his everyday life since then. Currently, he serves as Head of the Orthopedic Department at Kaiser Permanente. In this role, he has been able to apply many of the leadership skills he learned as a military officer—proving particularly helpful at the onset of the pandemic.

“When COVID hit, I watched everybody that I worked with at Kaiser in this sense of panic. People were fearful, and for some people, it was paralyzing. But literally as it was happening, I was thinking I’ve seen this before, this ‘oh crap, sh**’s about to hit the fan.’ But it didn’t scare me, and I felt like I could do it. I had heard it before from my general, and I thought okay, this is my turn now.”

Kroonen has and continues to apply these leadership skills both at work and in his community. Over the years, he has coached a youth soccer team, served on the Executive Board at Coronado Aquatics Club, and started a surf club for his coworkers. And in what time remains in his busy schedule, he keeps in touch with his friends from the military—connections through which he continues the patriotism he found in protecting his country.