“They carried the American flag to attack the U. S. Capitol,” the young senator from Illinois told USA TODAY. “How dare you? You know, those are the colors I wore” in his Army National Guard uniform. in a wheelchair down an underground driveway and rushed to barricade himself into his office, said he wasn’t afraid. “I knew I could take care of myself,” she said.
She’s been doing this all her life.
In his memoirs, “Every Day is a Gift,” published Tuesday through Twelve Books, Duckworth describes an astonishing journey of life. At the age of three or four in Bangkok, she ran to check that the family circle had a rice shop at the time she learned that her American father was returning to the United States without her and her Thai Chinese mother. As a teenager in Hawaii, she collected pennies and sold roses on the roadside to raise cash to buy food for her family circle.
And as a helicopter pilot deployed in the Iraq war, she suffered such serious injuries when her Black Hawk was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade that her teammates assumed she was dead. They lifted his mutilated body and turned it into a momentary helicopter so he just wasn’t. dragged through the streets like a trophy through the Iraqi insurgents.
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His legs had been ripped off, his right arm shattered and his body full of projectiles. “There are some things I obviously don’t forget, everything about landing the plane,” he said. “Don’t forget anything”, the main points of his rescue or evacuation or the emergency medical remedy that stored his life against all odds.
It’s November 12, 2004. She’s 36.
Now 53, he only learned by writing the eBook how useful his years-of-training struggles would be for this new challenge. The “bad things” that had happened to him when he was young, poverty and discrimination, had been “a type of vaccine” the hardships he would face as an adult. “A type of vaccine that prepares me for this much greater loss than I had to,” he concluded.
These tests have fostered their determination and endurance, their brutal sense of humor in the face of whims and their antennae for danger.
On January 6, on her way to the Senate to speak in the debate about accepting the Electoral College statements that would put Joe Biden in the White House, police officers on duty in the tunnels connecting the Capitol complex alerted her that pro-Trump protesters had entered the building, but still did not realize how terrible the stage would be. He was told he probably still had time to move to the Senate.
Instead, she turned around. There was only one front and he was leaving Senate ground that could accommodate his wheelchair, and senators who were already there would temporarily go down the stairs to get to safety. But if the worst had happened, if the crowd had stuck to it, Duckworth. said he might have done it and resisted it.
Doing what?
“Everything I had to do, ” he answered categorically. If I have to move slowly over my ass, I will. Whatever I have to do, I will. I’ll take care of myself and make sure he takes care of the ones I’m guilty of.
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Entrenched in her workplace with two assistants, as well as a former Iraqi translator, she saw the attack on the Capitol spread on television and her temperature rose. message that the Capitol police were about to move her to a safer place. “She would be more willing to protect herself than most of us,” Klobuchar told USA TODAY, “but she’s obviously in danger. “
When the officers knocked on Duckworth’s door, they shouted that Klobuchar had sent them, which the insurgents would not have known, so Duckworth would be sure to open the door.
She had never expected to be a senator or public civil serviceer of any kind, but a few weeks after her helicopter crash, she had a meeting with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin.
He had asked officials at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center if there were any wounded Illinois warriors interested and healthy enough to be his guest in the State of the Union in 2005. attended the speech by then-President George W. Bush, who had only just begun a series of painful surgeries and rehabilitation at suburban Maryland Hospital.
First, I had to paint to be able to sit for the required time, which is still a struggle. He borrowed a uniform that hid his IV line and a call label from another soldier named Duckworth. Durbin recalls in an interview her husband, Bryan Bowlsbey, then captain of the Illinois National Guard, by his side.
That night, at the Capitol, she answered a question from a Chicago reporter about the anti-outdoor war protesters (“I think that’s what she was fighting for, to protect her right to protest”), she said she was “astonished. “having been taken to other senators, then fainted from exhaustion on the bus ride back to the hospital.
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Durbin, a Democrat, would see a possible political career for Duckworth before her. The following year, he called to urge him to look for a seat in the open space in Illinois. She ran and lost. She was appointed director of the Illinois Veterans Administration and then undersecretary of the federal VA. In 2012, he ran for the House of Representatives and won. In 2016, he claimed a Senate seat previously held by Barack Obama.
Last year, she was on Biden’s short list as a possible vice president.
The Democratic presidential candidate had promised to elect a woman as a vice presidential candidate, and Duckworth on the long list and then on the short list. He eventually chose California Senator Kamala Harris instead. “A disappointment, ” admitted Duckworth. ” I went all the way I had a 50-50 chance of being elected. “
One of the considerations is the possibility of controversy over his birth in Thailand. As the daughter of an American father, top legal scholars say she would have rejected a president’s constitutional requirement to be a “birth citizen,” a challenge that had arisen in the past. arizona Sen. John McCain and several other presidential candidates.
But he knew that the front parties would have asked the questions about his birthplace, which would have created a distraction for Biden’s campaign. That said, he does not rule out his own candidacy for the presidency, in which he could deal with this head-on factor.
“Perhaps if he’s smart for the counterattack, ” he said of a possible candidacy for the White House. See a mission. ” I’m thinking of developing in Southeast Asia after Vietnam; everyone wanted to be us,” he said. “We had those ideals; we had unique values, and one may realize the American dream. I’d like to check to bring us back to them. We’re not here right now. “
When he arrived at USA TODAY’s Washington office for an interview, Duckworth expertly moved from the back seat of his van to the sidewalk of his wheelchair when he suddenly learned that he had put his shoes on his prosthetic feet. crooked, pointing in opposite directions.
She had run out of her house that morning, a confusing procedure due to her 6-year-old daughter’s requests that her mother stay in the house. Abigail is the eldest of her two daughters. When Maile, now 3, was born, Duckworth became the first on-performing senator to give birth, prompting a strangely heated debate with some of the senior members of the Senate about updating regulations to allow a gun bath in the chamber.
Of course, Duckworth has no sensation on her prosthetic feet, but she feels a constant phantom pain, feeling that the plants of her feet that she no longer has are on fire, as if she were tiptoeing in the warm sand. He’s tired, the pain gets a lot worse, “like they’re pouring melted lava into my veins and electrocuting me in my legs. “
She also has the feeling that she can move her toes. He doesn’t care about that feeling. ” It’s comforting,” he says with a smile. “It’s like they’re still there. “
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She has her feet on the ground about the loss of her legs, more likely to realize the humor than the pathetic involved. In this case, he took off his tempered shoes and put them on his right foot. electorate in southern Illinois, noted that some were surprised to see “this legless Asian girl” who intended to make them up in the Senate.
She also talks obviously about her politics. While congratulating Biden on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the interview complained about the shortage of Asian-americans and Pacific islanders in senior positions in his administration. “They look at Kamala and say, “Well, she’s Asian. “duckworth (Harris’ mother emigrated from India) said. “I don’t think that’s enough. “
Last week, she and Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono threatened to vote against one of Biden’s non-minority applicants in protest, recoiling after the White House agreed to appoint a high-level liaison for the AAPI community.
Despite her ties to Biden, it’s a sign that she’s not one to walk away from a fight, even with a friend.
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Duckworth also expressed fear about the number of veterans and active-duty army who were arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol.
Alarm, but no surprise. ” I’m not surprised they’re massive supporters of the MAGA,” he said. When he visited army operations centers and veterans’ hospitals in recent years, major televisions were tuned to Fox News, he said. a message she considers toxic. ” Many of those other people don’t consume news, they consume propaganda. “
She encouraged Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to revive the Pentagon Channel for the army public, also known as the Department of Defense News Channel, broadcast undeniable news and data until it ceased operations in 2015, and also suggested that it use the Uniform Code of Military Justice. to set rates opposite existing army members and eligible retirees who joined the crowd.
They violated his oath to the Constitution, he said. Nothing more important to her. She described her military service as a “privilege. “
Do you regret what he does?
“If you said to me right away: ‘Tammy, snap your fingers, go back to the first day of flight school, go through everything, go through everything; you’ll live the first 12 years, but you’ll be’. in Iraq and you will lose your legs, ” he said without hesitation. “I’d say, ‘Sign me up!