Tammy Duckworth and incumbent Joe Walsh are in a nationally-watched race for Congress in Illinois’ west suburban 8th District.
Historically, military service has been a badge of honor among candidates running for national office symbolizing dedication to our country.
According to her campaign manager, Kaitlin Fahey, Tammy Duckworth’s dedication goes beyond military service.
“Tammy didn’t agree with the decision to invade Iraq in 2003,” Fahey recently told a DePaul graduate seminar in political reporting. “She joined because it was her duty.”
Duckworth was dispatched to Iraq in 2004 as a helicopter pilot. Nov. 12 of that year, the Black Hawk she was piloting was hit by enemy fire, just below the cockpit.
The next thing she remembers is waking up in the recovery unit at a Baghdad field hospital; She had lost both of her legs.
Duckworth comes from a line of veteran service.
Ladda Tammy Duckworth was born in Bangkok, Thailand, and spent the majority of her young life moving around Asia with her family. Her mother is a Thai woman of Chinese descent, and her father, Franklin Duckworth, a World War II vet working for the United Nations and multinational corporations. Her father traces his lineage back to an ancestor who fought in the American Revolution.
After undergraduate work at the University of Hawaii, Duckworth studied international affairs at George Washington University, where she also joined the ROTC. In 1996 she affiliated with the Illinois National Guard.
Duckworth decided to fly helicopters, she has said, because back then it was one of the few jobs with combat potential for women. She was eventually appointed the first female platoon leader in her unit. While Duckworth recovered from her injuries at Walter Reed army Medical Center in Washington, was visited by some inspiring war veterans, including Bob Dole, an injured World War II vet, and Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee and Vietnam War veteran.
It wasn’t long until she met her home-state senator, Dick Durbin, who invited her to the 2005 State of the Union address. There, she arrived in a wheelchair with a hidden IV under her dress uniform.
“I couldn’t believe how energetic this woman was,” said Durbin, now a Senate majority leader.
Seeing a potential star in the making, Democratic leaders such as then-Congressman Rahm Emanuel convinced Duckworth to run for Congress in 2005 as a Democrat against GOP conservative Peter Roskam. She lost by 2 percentage points.
But the defeat apparently did not dim Duckworth’s passion to serve. She ran the Illinois veterans’ bureau from 2006 to 2009. After Barack Obama was elected president, he appointed her assistant secretary of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
At the VA, Duckworth faced the challenge of reintegrating war veterans back into the economy, with their unemployment rate-and suicide rates-uncommonly high.
Duckworth has successfully pushed for tax credits for companies that hire veterans in Illinois. Nationally, she has increased services for homeless vets and established the Office of Online Communications, where respected ex-military bloggers address the troops’ daily questions.
“Everything I do in Veteran’s Affairs goes back to the day I was shot down,” Duckworth told Time Magazine while at the VA. “My guys saved me, and I feel I owe them. I owe every single day the best thing I can do, because they could’ve left me behind.”
In 2011, Duckworth resigned from her post at the VA to make another run for Congress in Illinois’ re-drawn 8th District-a district tailored by map-making state Democrats to be more favorable to her. In her platform, she has expanded beyond the betterment of veterans’ affairs, including student loans and government spending. Duckworth admits she is still paying down $70,000 in student debt.
“My strength is in finding ways to make the government work for the people,” she tells voters. “Finding waste, or money that is not being properly used… or finding opportunities that are out there and making them work for the community.”
Duckworth faces an incumbent – Joe Walsh – with a reputation for incendiary rhetoric. He has called President Obama a “tyrant” and Duckwork “nothing more than a handpicked Washington bureaucrat.”
Yet Duckworth keeps a smile as she arrives at events, seated in a wheelchair, revealing her titanium legs – one painted camo-beige – and the other red white and blue. She gets up with her cane when it’s time to address voters.
“You can keep going,” she has told reporters. “You can go through when I went through and continue to serve and continue to do more. We just have to be there for each other to get there.”
Story from DePolitics2012.com, featuring work by DePaul communications graduate students.
