Representative Tammy Duckworth and her Bar Brawl

“You should have seen the other chick.” That’s how Chicago area Democratic Representative Tammy Duckworth jokingly responds when people ask her about what caused her disability; “It was a bar brawl,” she says with her disarming smile.

Tammy Duckworth Actually she was commanding a Black Hawk helicopter in the Iraq War, serving in her National Guard unit as Major Duckworth, when enemy fire landed in her lap. Both her legs were blown off and one arm was severely damaged. After a long recovery she left her civilian job with Rotary International (service clubs who raise money to eradicate polio and provide free wheelchairs worldwide) and became the Director of Veteran’s Affairs in Illinois.

This past November she overwhelming won election to Congress, beating a Tea Party candidate who outspent her 13 to 1 and questioned her heroism. She became the first double amputee to serve in Congress and the first native of Thailand. Her Thai mother became a US citizen in her 50’s; her father was a Vietnam vet who worked in refugee services for the UN. She grew up all over the world.

She joined the National Guard while doing graduate work in Political Science at Georgetown University. Noticing that many fellow students were current military or vets, she felt the call to service herself. Her father had told her of his family’s generations of service; Duckworth’s had been in uniform since the Revolutionary War.

About half of America’s forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are National Guard units, volunteer reserve forces with civilian jobs who are subject to mandatory deployment for national emergencies and wartime service. The increased use these civilians in our problematic wars, with multiple deployments, and the disruption of their families, has been a troublesome feature of this past decade.

Tammy met her husband in the Georgetown ROTC and after graduation they both continued with the National Guard. Tammy describes her choice of helicopter aviation:

INTERVIEWER: Why helicopter pilot?

DUCKWORTH: In the Army, there are only two branches of the Army that is specialty jobs that accept women in combat they’re combat arms branches, aero-defense artillery and aviation. When I as deciding what job I wanted to do in the Army, all of the cadets had to put down a listing of one through 10, your top choices, whether you wanted to be a finance officer or a lawyer or a helicopter pilot or a tanker or an infantry men. But the men – the guys had to, out of their top five, three of them had to be combat branches, infantry, armor, that sort of thing. And I felt it was really kind of unfair that I didn’t have to do that as a female. So I decided that I would go for the one that had the best chance of going into combat, which was aviation. So that’s why I chose aviation, and I was lucky enough to get it.

INTERVIEWER: Did you want to go to combat?

DUCKWORTH: It’s not that I wanted to go to combat, I just didn’t want to take fewer risks than my fellow classmates who were male. So that was – nobody wants to go to combat but I just felt that I wasn’t going to try to hide away from anything that they would have to face just because I was female. So I wanted to take an equal risk, and that’s why I chose aviation. And I’ve loved flying. It’s become such a part of my identity now……

INTERVIEWER: Why do you want to stay in the National Guard?

DUCKWORTH: The explosion didn’t change who I am. I want to continue to serve. It’s just part of me and I’ve – it’s been a privilege and an honor to serve in the guard. Not a lot of people get that opportunity. And so it really is a privilege to me. I have a bond with my fellow soldiers that it’s very hard to explain. And it’s just how I choose to serve. I think – I sincerely believe that we should all give something back to our communities. Not everybody has to become a soldier. You know, you can volunteer at your church, or at the school or at your local hospital, but I feel very strongly that for everything that we have in this country, you should give a little something back of yourself. And I just choose to serve as being a soldier.

Last week Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban on women in combat. Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey recommended the change, saying “the time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service.”

Women have long contested the ban, saying it made no sense in modern warfare, that they were already serving in combat in positions like Duckworth’s, and that the ban limited their ability to rise in the services, where combat duty is required for advancement. Americans favor lifting the ban by as much as 75%, but some conservative Republicans and Christians condemned the action as a “social experiment” and a danger to the (male) troops.

Major Duckworth’s response? “Lifting the ban on women in combat is a great step forward for our nation. America's daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.”

In her moving speech at the November Democratic Convention, Duckworth said, “On November 12th, 2004, I was co-piloting my Blackhawk north of Baghdad when we started taking enemy fire. A rocket-propelled grenade hit our helicopter, exploding in my lap, ripping off one leg, crushing the other and tearing my right arm apart. But I kept trying to fly until I passed out. In that moment, my survival and the survival of my entire crew depended on all of us pulling together. And even though they were wounded themselves and insurgents were nearby, they refused to leave a fallen comrade behind. Their heroism is why I'm alive today.

Ultimately, that's what this election is about. Yes, it's about the issues that matter to us: building an economy that will create jobs here at home and out-compete countries around the world. But it's also about something else. It's about whether we will do for our fellow Americans what my crew did for me; whether we'll look out for the hardest hit and the disabled; whether we'll pull together in a time of need; whether we'll refuse to give up until the job is done.”

Some bar brawl.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter