Spotlight on John H. Corns, BA’58

Relaxing was never an option for John Corns. After retiring from the U.S. Army in 1993, he began a new career as a novelist, having published four books since 2002.

Corns’ latest book, Owain’s Own, is based on the life of Confederate Col. James M. Corns. Col. Corns commanded the 8th Virginia Cavalry Regiment in which his cousin, also John’s great-grandfather, served as a private. The story shares the journey of the colonel and his family from the short-lived Southern victory at Scary Creek, W.Va., in 1861 to the Southern defeat on the South Branch of the Potomac River in 1864.  

Corns first penned Lotti’s Gift, set in the lumber town of Cass, W.Va., in 1919. Soon afterwards came The Bench, a novel set in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, and then, Through Buffalo Gap, set in the 18th century. This novel told the story of the European Settlers’ expansion against Indian resistance from the Shenandoah Valley to the Ohio River.

After graduating from Marshall, Corns joined the U.S. Army, beginning a career of more than 35 years. His impressive career includes serving as detachment commander in the Green Berets, leading his Special Forces team into the highlands of Vietnam; as a major in the Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta; and completing his field command experience as commanding general of the U.S. Army, Pacific.

He served as the secretary of the Army’s deputy chief of legislative liaison to the U.S. Congress as a brigadier general and as the inspector general of the Army in the rank of lieutenant general during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. He was recognized in 1998 as the most senior military officer who had graduated from Marshall’s Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC). In the early 2000s, he was a member of the board of the Yeager Scholarship Program. He was honored in 1983 as a Marshall Distinguished Alumnus.

John speaks with special fondness of his experience at Marshall, and expresses deep appreciation for the role of his Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which for six semesters provided room and board as he served as house manager, comptroller and president.

“When you arrive at Marshall as a freshman with only a $300 scholarship awarded by the South Charleston Lions Club, and just a promise of a job in the second semester, every dime to meet college expenses is appreciated. Two fine Huntington small businesses provided me work over those four years, and I will never forget those owners who hired me. Sometimes I regard those years at Marshall as the most hard-working of my life. I later had brief experiences that were more dangerous, and at times there was no sleep at all, but that was war. At Marshall, I was simply realizing that period of life in which one enjoys the greatest freedoms—those semesters of undergraduate study.”

Corns and his wife, Carol, live in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He is working on his fifth novel, based on the life of his maternal grandfather, a participant in the southern West Virginia mine wars of 1920/21.

—With contributions from John Corns