rickjnewman:
Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois recently won her state’s Democratic Senate primary, which means she’ll challenge incumbent Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican, in the November general election. Analysts expect it to be a close race, especially since Republicans have more incumbents up for reelection in this year, and are expected to lose some Senate seats.
Duckworth is a former Army helicopter pilot who served in Iraq and lost her legs in 2004 when a chopper she was piloting got hit by a rocket-propelled grenade north of Baghdad. I profiled Duckworth in my 2012 book Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success, focusing on the ways adversity motivated her to take new risks and try things she might never have tried otherwise. While not endorsing Duckworth as a political candidate, I present her story as an inspiring and instructive tale of grit and resilience. Here’s the complete chapter on Duckworth from Rebounders:
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CHAPTER 12
OWN THE
SUCK
Sometimes a setback is an inconvenience. Sometimes
it’s a major disruption. Sometimes it’s even bigger than that. Severe hardships
can be the toughest tests we face in life, capable of neutralizing ambition and
wrecking years of careful planning. People who overcome traumatic adversities
often do it by applying habits learned through lesser setbacks. In the same way
that small triumphs can help build incremental layers of confidence and
toughness, overcoming major hardships can generate newfound capabilities that
may not emerge any other way.
One day toward the end of 2004, 36-year-old Tammy
Duckworth awoke in a hospital room, wondering where she was and what had
happened. As consciousness came and went, she heard doctors and nurses talking
about a helicopter crash. It came back to her in fragmented, terrifying
snapshots. Iraq. Heat. Sky. Dust. A deafening flash. Screeching machinery.
Blood. Fear. Something terrible had happened, and she had been in the middle of
it. For days, in the hospital, she felt an overwhelming sense of dread as she grasped
at comprehension. But over the following months, Duckworth would transform
shock, horror, pain, and a crippling new disability into an intensified sense
of purpose. Modest goals grew into more ambitious ones. Her pace of
accomplishment accelerated. Barriers to advancement that had once seemed
imposing no longer got in the way. Above all, Duckworth developed the
confidence to try bold and difficult things because the risk of failing no
longer intimidated her.
Captain Tammy Duckworth, call sign Mad Dog 06, was
a Black Hawk helicopter pilot assigned to the Illinois National Guard’s 106th
Aviation Battalion when it was sent to Iraq in 2004. Her unit was based
northwest of Baghdad, near the notoriously dangerous Sunni Triangle, during a
time of intense fighting. The Black Hawk was a utility helicopter used for
transporting troops and supplies, and it could be vulnerable to ground fire if
hovering or flying at low altitude. It was the same type of chopper that got
shot down during the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia in 1993, an event that
inspired the book and movie Black Hawk Down. By late 2004, Iraq had become far
bloodier than Mogadishu, with more than thirteen hundred American troops killed
and ten thousand injured in the campaign that had begun with the U.S. invasion
the year before. As Duckworth’s unit arrived in Iraq, the violence was getting
worse. American forces had become engaged in an open-ended war against insurgents
and terrorists who were hard to identify and maddeningly difficult to stamp
out. The Sunni Triangle, a swath of desert the size of New Jersey, had become
the hive of the insurgency, with brutal urban combat in cities like Fallujah
and Baqubah.
Duckworth knew the risks. When first sent to Iraq
in March 2004, she figured she’d either come home at the end of her one-year
tour completely intact or die in the line of duty. Surviving an injury wasn’t a
possibility she thought much about. “My biggest fear was that I was going to
burn to death in my aircraft,” she told me. “In aviation, throughout the course
of your career, you’re going to know people killed in accidents. I had friends
who had burned to death, being trapped in their aircraft. You don’t usually
survive an accident.” Through the first eight months of her tour, she had been
fired on a few times, but never hit. She spent more time than she preferred on
the ground, helping plan and oversee missions, which reduced her exposure to
hostile fire. But she had gone to Iraq to fly, not to give briefings in a fortified
command post. So she was enthused when assigned to fly an all-day mission on
November 12, 2004. As a captain, she’d be the senior member of her four-person
crew.
Duckworth and her crew started flying around 7: 00
A.M., ferrying troops and supplies around Baghdad in support of a big battle
raging near Fallujah, about forty miles west of the Iraqi capital. Everybody
was on high alert, but the day had been uneventful until late afternoon, when
the crew wrapped up the last of their logistical runs and began heading back to
their base. When they were just ten minutes from landing, Duckworth heard the
alarming metallic sound of small-arms fire strafing the side of her aircraft:
tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Almost simultaneously, a blinding fireball tore through
the floor of the helicopter’s right front quarter, where her feet were, and
blew straight through the top of the aircraft. Duckworth later learned what it
was: a rocket-propelled grenade, powerful enough to disable a tank and destroy
a helicopter if it hit in the right place. Duckworth instinctively tried to
press the foot pedals that controlled the helicopter, to get it on the ground.
But the pedals had been blown off. So had most of her right leg, and her left
leg below the knee. Her right arm was shattered and useless. Body armor had
protected her vital organs, and while her face was somewhat burned, the
ballistic shield affixed to her helmet had deflected much of the heat and
shrapnel from the RPG, possibly preventing her from being blinded.
Somehow the Black Hawk continued to fly, but it
wasn’t Duckworth who was flying it anymore. The pilot in the left-hand seat,
Chief Warrant Officer Dan Milberg, had taken over the aircraft. He had been
scorched by the blast but was otherwise unharmed, and the RPG had missed the
helicopter’s rotors and other vital machinery, even though it wrecked the
avionics. Milberg quickly landed in an overgrown field. Tall elephant grass
suddenly poked through the hole in the bottom of the helicopter, filling the
cabin on Duckworth’s side. Insurgents would often race to capture the crew of
an aircraft if they managed to shoot one down, since Americans were prized— and
usually doomed— captives. But the crew of a second chopper that was part of the
same mission immediately called for help, and two more helicopters quickly
arrived and began providing cover overhead. Duckworth’s other two crewmates,
Staff Sergeant Chris Fierce and Specialist Kurt Hannemann, were injured, but
Fierce started putting out fires as Hannemann got into defensive posture, in
case any ground attackers arrived. It took just a few minutes for the crew of
the second chopper to land in the field, get Duckworth and her crew onboard,
and head toward the safety of the base.
Duckworth spent the next eight days heavily sedated,
as doctors worked to save her life. After emergency surgery in Iraq, the army
transported her to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.,
which had become a huge convalescent ward for soldiers recovering from injuries
sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan. Duckworth’s husband, Bryan Bowlsbey, was a
fellow Army National Guard officer who happened to be in Maryland for his
brother’s wedding, and he was there to meet his unconscious wife when she
arrived. Duckworth’s father had recently suffered a heart attack and was in the
hospital in Hawaii, where her parents lived, but her mother flew in, and other
friends and relatives began to show up. Bowlsbey began emailing updates on her
condition to dozens of friends and colleagues. When the requests for
information became overwhelming, he started to post updates to a website that
friends and family could monitor.
As Duckworth fitfully regained consciousness, she
didn’t know she had lost her legs, partly because of phantom pains in
appendages that her brain thought were still there, even though they weren’t.
Her husband and one of the doctors told her the awful truth as soon as she
seemed awake enough to comprehend it. “She received the news with poise and
stoicism,” her husband wrote on the website. Though she struggled to express
it, something bothered her even more than the news about her legs. During
brief, foggy moments of awareness, she heard doctors and nurses refer over and
over to a crash. To aviators, the word crash suggests that an aircraft got
destroyed because of poor flying or a mistake by the pilot. That was a
devastating thought. Duckworth knew her helicopter had been hit by hostile
fire, and she remembered landing. But everything else was fuzzy. If the
helicopter had truly crashed, that meant she must have screwed up somehow,
making her responsible for a blown emergency landing. Her crew chief, Sergeant
Fierce, had been seriously injured, nearly losing one of his own legs. She felt
it was her fault. “I was devastated,” Duckworth recalled. “The worst thing any
soldier can find out is that they let down their buddies. It meant that I had
failed as a pilot. That I didn’t do a good job flying, and crashed the
aircraft. That was probably the furthest down I’ve ever been in my life.”
While coming to terms with her injuries and
everything else about her condition, Duckworth tried to conceal the shame she
felt about the helicopter crash. But it leaked out. One day in the intensive
care unit, tears were rolling down her cheeks, and her husband quickly tried to
console her. “Honey,” he said, thinking she was mourning the loss of her legs,
“everything’s going to be fine. You’re alive. They’ve got all these therapies
now. We’ve got lives in front of us.”
“I’m not worried about that,” she said, sobbing.
“I let down my guys. I crashed the aircraft. It’s my fault. How am I going to
face my crew? How am I going to face myself?”
“What are you talking about?” Bowlsbey asked,
perplexed.
She explained how she didn’t remember all the
details, but figured that while landing, she must have rolled the aircraft,
causing her own injuries and hurting her crewmates as well. Her husband
explained that the facts were quite different. The RPG had destroyed the
controls on her side of the helicopter, and while she might have thought she
was flying it after the grenade hit, she wasn’t. The other pilot, Dan Milberg,
landed the chopper, which didn’t roll. Then Milberg carried her out of the
chopper and into the field. Fierce had been injured by the blast from the RPG,
not by a crash landing. He was likely to recover. To completely convince her,
Bowlsbey emailed her unit back in Iraq, and they sent a photo of the wrecked
helicopter, showing the extensive damage caused by the projectile. When
Duckworth saw that, she realized that Fierce’s wounds and the lost aircraft
weren’t the result of poor performance in the cockpit.
A few weeks later, the army official who had been
running the Baghdad emergency room where Duckworth underwent her first surgery
tracked her down at Walter Reed, when he made a trip there. She didn’t remember
him, but he had a vivid memory of her. “You came into my emergency room giving
orders,” he told her, “propped up on your one arm, saying, ‘I want the status
of my crew.’ And, ‘How are my men?’ I had no idea how you could be alive and
awake and talking to us, because you had no legs and you were white as a sheet
and you had no blood in you. And I put you out. I just wanted you to know that.”
Duckworth had no recollection of that, but hearing
it made everything easier. “That was a defining moment,” she told me. “Knowing
that until I died, literally, I was doing my job, looking after my men. I was
living up to the codes and standards of being a soldier and an officer. I
didn’t let my men down. The relief was tremendous.”
Duckworth had never experienced personal trauma or
anything remotely close. But she still felt like she knew what she needed to do
in order to recover. When she was finally able to speak, after waking up in the
hospital, the first thing she said to her husband was, “I love you. Put me to
work.” Like James Blake, Jack Bogle, and many other Rebounders, she had learned
early on that hard work was a reliable formula for overcoming challenges, even
when she lacked other skills that might have made success easier. Duckworth and
her brother Tom had grown up overseas, in places like Jakarta, Bangkok, and
Singapore. Her father had been a career serviceman who landed on Okinawa during
World War II as a terrified sixteen-year-old marine, and later transferred to
the army, where he became an officer and fought in the Vietnam War. For most of
her life, Duckworth had called her stoic father “Sir,” even after he retired
from the military and worked as a civilian for the United Nations and several
multinational companies. Her mother was an ethnic Chinese woman who had grown
up in Thailand, and was a “tiger mother” long before the term became trendy.
She insisted that her daughter excel, even though she wasn’t a naturally gifted
student. Duckworth earned mostly As in school— but mainly because she did four
to five hours of homework every night. As a kid, she learned how to work
through intimidating challenges by setting a series of manageable, intermediate
goals— breaking a thick schoolbook down into several ten-page segments, for
example. That simple habit stuck with her when she joined the army. During road
marches, she’d sometimes volunteer to carry the unit’s radio or its M-60
machine gun, along with her own weapon and thirty-pound rucksack, just to prove
she was as tough as her male colleagues. Since she weighed only about 120
pounds, the heavy load would leave her struggling. “I was never the fast
finisher,” she said. “I would tell myself, Okay, I’m going to go to that tree.
And when I get to the tree, I’m going to go to the next thing. I’d usually
finish in the rear of the formation.”
That stepwise mentality helped her get through
flight school and, ironically, put her in the cockpit of the doomed Black Hawk
years later. When she got to flight school in 1993, Duckworth knew she needed to
get assigned to the Black Hawk, the army’s frontline helicopter, if she wanted
a career as an aviator. But only a few of those slots were available. Most of
the students would get assigned to the UH-1 “Huey,” an older and less capable
chopper the army was phasing out. She asked the sergeant major in charge of
assignments what it would take to get one of the Black Hawk slots. He ticked
off all the technical material she’d need to master and told her she’d also
need to demonstrate crack flying skills and graduate at or near the top of her
class. So in addition to the training missions and classroom instruction,
Duckworth logged three or four additional hours in the flight simulator every
night, racking up more simulator time than anybody who had gone through that
particular flight school. She scored highest in her class on the check ride,
the detailed flight test that comes at the end of a key part of the program,
earning the coveted Black Hawk assignment. Duckworth was the only woman in the
class, and when another student suggested that she must have curried favor with
the instructors, the class leader— a grizzled veteran who had commanded a tank
company during Operation Desert Storm— shut him up. “She’s been in the
simulator every night,” he snapped. “If you’d been in the simulator every
night, you’d get a good score, too. So back off.”
Duckworth relied on that old habit of setting
attainable, intermediate goals almost from the moment she awoke in the
hospital. A few days after the attack, she developed an unusual allergic
reaction to the morphine that doctors were giving her. One of the doctors told
her husband that he had read about patients who were “narcotic-naïve,” which
meant their bodies rejected opiates, such as morphine, typically used as
painkillers. The doc had never seen such a case, though; most people had some
exposure to narcotics— often through recreational use— that conditioned their
bodies to the kinds of chemicals administered for medical reasons. Duckworth,
however, was so straightlaced that she had never tried any kind of drugs— even
though she went to college at the University of Hawaii and had friends who grew
pot in their closets. “I should have smoked a few joints in college,” she joked
later. “I would have had a better time.”
It was anything but funny, however, when she had
to switch to a different painkiller, because she had to be completely weaned
off one medication before doctors could administer another. That forced her to
endure five murderous days when she’d essentially be on no pain medication at
all. “I went through five days of extreme, excruciating pain,” she told me. “It
took literally everything I had to breathe and to keep going. I wasn’t sure I was
going to make it through each day.” But she broke each day down into smaller
segments, and she felt sure she could make it through each minute, so she
battled the pain by looking at a big clock on the wall and counting to sixty as
each minute ticked by. At first, she counted “one dead Iraqi, two dead Iraqis,
three dead Iraqis.… ” But then she realized she was yielding to rage, and
besides, it wasn’t a typical Iraqi who had shot her legs off with an RPG. It
was a bloodthirsty militant who may not even have been an Iraqi. So she counted
“one dead mujahideen, two dead mujahideen …,” but that wasn’t right either: The
mujahideen were a brand of Islamic fighters from an earlier era, not from Iraq.
The whole tiring thought process drained her anger a little, and she just
started to count “one one thousand, two one thousand.… ”
That worked well enough, except there were still moments
when the pain was so crushing that it took all of her strength just to breathe.
At one point, she knew that even counting to sixty might sap her of the energy
she needed to stay alive. “Unless I shut down, I was going to die,” she
recalled. “I couldn’t last another sixty seconds. So I looked at my husband and
said, ‘I’m not going to make it if I don’t shut down. I’m circling the wagons
and I’ll be back.’” Her panicked husband thought she was giving up and telling
him she was about to die. But Duckworth did as she promised, conking out for a
while, then waking up a few hours later.
Duckworth began taking the other small steps that
would help her recover while still in intensive care. One of the nurses told
her she needed to start rehabilitation right away and asked what parts of her
body she was able to move. At the time, Duckworth didn’t even have the strength
to push the electronic button that would deliver more painkiller if she needed
it. But she figured out that she could move her left wrist. So that became her
first rehabilitation exercise. She’d move her left wrist, in three sets of ten
repetitions, the same sort of regimen as if she were lifting weights or doing
pushups. When she left the ICU after a couple weeks, she began to work
intensively with physical therapists— known as “physical terrorists” to the
many wry patients at Walter Reed— even though doctors were still rebuilding her
right arm and she had several more surgeries to endure. Some goals were modest,
like regaining enough use of her right arm to tie a ponytail. She had to learn
how to get into an electric wheelchair, motor around in it, and get in and out
of the shower. She wanted to drive again. And right away, she wanted to know
what it would take to pilot a helicopter with artificial legs. The answer
started with a lot of mundane, and often painful, exercises. She welcomed them,
doing four repetitions if the therapist told her to do three, and adding weight
or resistance on her own whenever she felt she could move to a higher level.
The sooner she recovered, the sooner specialists would be able to fit her for
prosthetics, and that was the path back toward the life she wanted.
“Rehabilitation was my new mission,” she said.
Duckworth asked her husband to hang a copy of the
Soldier’s Creed, a statement of principles the army requires all soldiers to
memorize during basic training, near her bed. It’s common to hear members of
the military, brimming with can-do determination, insist that “failure is not
an option.” But the Soldier’s Creed contains a different idea. It says, in
part, this:
I will always place the mission first.
I will never accept defeat.
I
will never quit.
I
will never leave a fallen comrade.
The creed, notably, doesn’t say, “I will never
fail.” Instead, it says, “I will never accept defeat,” no doubt because there
are many failures in military affairs, which is often the art of accomplishing
the difficult. Defeat would be yielding to those failures and giving up.
Duckworth read the creed often, especially during agonizing moments when she
was on the verge of blacking out from the pain. It helped remind her that her
recovery was her new mission, and that soldiers don’t quit. “There were a lot
of times when I couldn’t even read down that list,” she said. “You’ve got to
find your personal motivation, and that was mine.”
The atmosphere at Walter Reed helped Duckworth
overcome moments of despair and stay focused on rebuilding her life. The army
fit amputees with prosthetics more quickly than most civilian care centers, as
part of the emphasis on purposeful action that’s meant to raise the odds of a
successful rehabilitation. Within six weeks she got her first set of artificial
legs and started doing the intense training it would take to learn how to walk
on them— part of her ongoing mission. She also benefited from the camaraderie
with other patients, many of them fellow amputees. Injured soldiers practiced
the same edgy banter in the hospital as they did in the field, and it was oddly
comforting. For a while, the patient in the therapy bed next to Duckworth was a
triple amputee who had lost both legs and an arm. If Duckworth had a down day,
he’d chide her: “What, you feel bad because you have no legs? Gee, you call
yourself an amputee? You’ve only lost two limbs.” Others would joke about the
doctors messing up their tattoos when cutting off their legs. Duckworth got
into the spirit of the macabre humor, sometimes wearing T-shirts that read,
“Dude, where’s my leg?” Or, “Lucky for me, he’s an ass man.” When humor didn’t
lift her spirits, she’d look around the ward and realize there was always
somebody worse off, like brain-injured patients or others who had been even
more incapacitated than her. “On the days when you were just exhausted and you
didn’t want to do any more and you were grumpy and whiny and bitchy, all you
had to do was look over and there was somebody else struggling,” she said.
“You’d realize, I just have to shut up and do this.”
Walter Reed also had “peer visitors” who would
show up voluntarily to chat with the patients and give them a glimpse of life
after recovery. She got to know Tom Porter, a Korean War veteran, who was tall
and confident and erect and usually toured the ward with his wife, Eleanor.
Porter would make small talk, and after earning a bit of trust, he’d reveal
that he was a double amputee standing on artificial legs. “I lost my legs when
I was twenty,” he told Duckworth. “I’ve had a family. I’ve had a business. I
have grandkids and great-grandkids. I got this pretty thing here”— pointing to
Eleanor—“ to marry me after I lost my legs. I’ve lived more without my legs
than with my legs, and my life has been great.”
Those fellow survivors helped Duckworth believe
that she, too, could have a rich life, whether disabled or not. “My peer
visitors showed me that there was a way out,” she explained. “When you first
wake up with the amputations and the pain, you’re in this hole. Your peer
visitor, your buddy, climbs into the hole with you and basically says, I know
the way out. He doesn’t carry you. He shows you the way out and you walk out
with him.”
As she recovered, Duckworth got drawn sporadically
into the klieg lights of official Washington. Senator Richard Durbin, from her
home state of Illinois, invited her to be his guest at the 2005 State of the
Union address by President Bush, one of the most important events on the
government’s annual calendar. She met top officials from the Pentagon, who
occasionally stopped by Walter Reed to visit with injured troops, and impressed
them with her intelligence and courage. The veterans affairs committees in the
House and Senate invited her to testify about the issues facing injured
veterans, and amputees in particular. Her poise and visibility made her a
natural magnet for the press, which led to several moving newspaper and
magazine articles about her. Duckworth had studied political science at the
University of Hawaii in the 1980s, then in 1992 earned a master’s degree in
international affairs from George Washington University, less than ten miles
away from Walter Reed. She was well schooled in public issues and comfortable
talking about them with the potentates in Washington.
Senator Durbin, a Democrat, became a kind of
mentor. Duckworth also got to know Barack Obama, who at the time was the other
senator from Illinois. After about six months in Washington, Duckworth returned
to Hoffman Estates, the Chicago suburb where they lived. Since Duckworth had
been a “weekend warrior” with the National Guard, she also had a full-time
civilian job, as a manager with the community organization Rotary
International. She figured she’d return to that, but Durbin urged her to
consider a new career in politics. She had a kind of public charisma, and her
military record would be a major asset. The idea appealed to Duckworth. Seeing
the struggles of so many injured soldiers at Walter Reed had made her
passionate about the needs of veterans, and she’d have more power to help them
if she were part of the government. Plus, a congressional seat was opening up
in Illinois’s sixth district, where long-time incumbent Henry Hyde, a Republican,
had decided to retire.
The idea of running for office also terrified
Duckworth. She was comfortable taking on tough challenges, as long as it was in
the incremental, familiar manner that had helped her excel at flight school.
But doing something new and risky— improvising, basically, like John
Ratzenberger— was something she had always dreaded. “I was all about other
people’s approval,” she told me. “Getting my dad’s approval, getting my
mother’s approval, getting the gold star at school. It was always about living
up to an expectation or a standard.” Running for office would be daring voters
to express their disapproval, as some of them surely would. It was the kind of
challenge she would have veered away from just a few years earlier. But after a
year of living without her legs, she had become more comfortable with
discomfort. She had never imagined coming home from Iraq badly injured, but
facing so many unforeseen obstacles had left her less intimidated by the
unfamiliar. Learning how to adapt to life as an amputee had been an abrupt new
challenge she had no obvious training for. But she turned out to be better
prepared than she ever would have guessed, and was accomplishing things she had
never envisioned. “I had a new sense of fearlessness,” she said, “because now,
even on my worst day, nobody was shooting at me. And I wasn’t laying in a
hospital bed counting to sixty.” She decided to run.
That congressional race, in the 2006 midterm
elections, ended up being one of the key battles in a momentous political year.
Both houses of Congress, then controlled by Republicans, were at risk of
swinging to the Democratic side. Every race mattered. Duckworth started out
with a lead in the polls, her military experience giving her strong credentials
on the important issue of national security. But as election day neared,
Republican party officials decided that the sixth district was one where they
had a fighting chance to stave off a Democratic victory. Money flooded in
during the last couple of weeks, allowing Duckworth’s opponent to boost his TV
and radio advertising. Republican supporters mounted an aggressive last-minute
phone campaign, highlighting their candidate’s tough stance against illegal
immigration— an issue that Duckworth had downplayed, underestimating voter
concerns. For all of her pluck, Duckworth was still a political novice, running
as a Democrat in a district that was largely Republican. The Democrats ended up
taking over the House and Senate without her: She lost the sixth by a narrow 51
to 49 margin.
It was just the sort of rejection she had long
feared, and for a while, it felt crushing. Despite the support of her state’s
two senators, Duckworth had been unprepared for the hardball tactics of
national politics. She felt her opponent had played dirty, and she took it
personally. “Losing that election definitely felt like a failure,” she told me.
“I wasn’t able to counter the last-minute tactics quickly enough to turn stuff
around.” For a few days, she dodged friends and supporters and nursed the
psychological wounds. “I’d sit in the tub,” she said, “because it was the only
place my cell phone wouldn’t ring. Wonderful people were calling, saying it was
a great run, and I’d sit in my bathtub and cry.” But three days after the
election, Illinois’s governor offered her another job, as director of veterans’
affairs for the state. She jumped at the chance. And on November 12— her “alive
day,” two years after she had lost her legs in the attack on her helicopter—
she flew to St. Louis to see the three crewmates who had helped her survive.
“So even though the race was a failure,” she said, “I woke up on November 12
knowing that if it had not been for my buddies, I would be dead.”
The risk she had taken by running for Congress
continued to pay off in ways she didn’t anticipate. She campaigned for Barack
Obama when he ran for president in 2008, and after he won, Obama appointed her
to be one of the top officials in the Department of Veterans Affairs, in
Washington. Part of her assignment there was to tackle the problem of
homelessness among veterans, which had mushroomed as the recession intensified
in 2008 and 2009. The army often discharged disabled veterans like Duckworth,
but she lobbied hard to stay in, and the army agreed, so she continued to serve
with the National Guard. She couldn’t fly helicopters anymore, but she was
still a trained aviator, fully capable of staff work, like helping run a
command post. She got promoted to major and then lieutenant colonel, and did
regular rotations at the National Guard’s operations center in Washington.
Duckworth also enjoyed the supercharged motivation that turns some injured
people into inspirational overachievers, completing the Chicago marathon in the
wheelchair division, relearning how to scuba dive without the benefit of her
once powerful legs, and even getting certified as a private pilot, which was
less demanding than flying a military helicopter.
Still, her injuries were an ongoing struggle, and
there were constant reminders of lost privilege. She nearly lost her damaged
right arm to a persistent infection. When she returned to a Black Hawk flight
simulator to test her piloting abilities with artificial legs, it was so
demanding that it made her feel like she was back on her first day at flight
school. Walking on her artificial legs could be exhausting, so she got in the
habit of reserving them for speeches, presentations, military duty, and other
times when it was important to project what the army calls “command presence.”
And she learned to allow herself the occasional mournful moments that came with
the loss of small joys. “There are times when I want to be able to look pretty
for my husband,” she said. “I want to wear heels again. The reality is, it
sucks.”
Being in Washington gave Duckworth the opportunity
to become a peer visitor herself back at Walter Reed, where she’d often visit
female amputees like herself, or pilots with serious injuries. She gave it to
them straight. “I can only tell people that it’s going to suck,” she explained.
“You’re going to have really bad days. Days when you can’t stop crying. Days when
you wish this hadn’t happened to you. You have to recognize those things for
what they are. You have to acknowledge them. But you can’t let them overwhelm
you.
“In Iraq,” she continued, “we had this phrase:
‘owning the suck.’ It sucks being over there. It sucks being deployed. You’re
out there tromping, and you’ve got your gear on, and your feet are blistered,
and it’s raining on you, or it’s freezing, and you’re lying in the mud with
your weapon on guard duty. Know that it sucks. Acknowledge the suck. Own it.
But keep doing your job. Because you have to do your job. So I can only tell
people that it’s going to suck. It’s going to hurt. And it’s your pain, whether
it’s a physical pain or a sorrow. It’s yours and nobody else’s. Just own it.
Take command of it. Don’t let the pain or the sorrow own you. You own that
suck. It’s yours.”
Sometimes, when she delivered that message at
Walter Reed, she could see a flash of recognition on a young soldier’s face.
She’d walk in wearing her artificial legs, the way Tom Porter had, to
demonstrate that a crumpled but determined survivor could build a vigorous and
accomplished life. Wearing one of her smart-alecky T-shirts— like, “It’s just a
flesh wound”— could help break the ice. But some soldiers didn’t want to hear
it, and Duckworth knew that a few of them would never own the suck. The suck
would always own them. She could usually tell, because they were the ones
wallowing in self-pity. And she struggled to come up with a convincing reason
why they shouldn’t feel that way. Some were still teenagers. Their lives were
wrecked. She couldn’t plausibly tell them otherwise. She was there to offer
encouragement, not to judge anybody. But she also knew that self-sufficiency
started with one small step, then another, and the toughest cases were the ones
without a sense of mission about their own recovery. Sometimes that happened
when parents or other loved ones helped too much, taking the sense of mission
away. “If your parents are there saying, Oh, my poor baby, let me do this for
you, it takes away your strength,” Duckworth told me. “The tough thing is to
struggle and learn how to do it yourself. Sometimes we have to step in and
encourage the moms to let them struggle. Some respond well, but some never get
it and their loved ones are the worse for it. Sometimes they’ll take their child
out of the hospital and move him someplace and isolate him even further. Those
are the guys we have a really rough time with.”
Duckworth acknowledged many moments of despair in
her own life as she struggled to recover from her injuries and learn how to
live with them. But when I asked if she ever felt sorry for herself, like some
of the troops she encountered as a peer visitor, she said no. “I earned my wounds,”
she said proudly. “I earned these amputations. This wasn’t an accident. I
didn’t get drunk, drive down the road, and crash into a tree. These wounds are
the equivalent of wearing a medal on my chest. I earned these wounds because I
served my country. So I don’t ever feel sorry for myself.”
After serving more than two years in the Veterans
Affairs office, Duckworth left in the middle of 2011 to prepare for another run
for Congress in the 2012 elections. This time she’d have stronger advantages.
She’d be running in a newly created district more hospitable to her political
party. She’d have better name recognition, which would help with fund-raising
and voter appeal. She’d be more experienced at politics and the peculiar ways
of Washington. She’d also have a deeper sense of empowerment, which had accrued
to her since 2004 as a collateral benefit of struggle. Losing again, she knew,
would suck. But she also knew that if it happened, she would own it.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Note: Duckworth won election to the House in 2012, representing Illinois’s eighth congressional district. She was reelected in 2014. She announced her plan to challenge incumbent Sen. Mark Kirk, a Republican, in March of 2015 and won the Democratic primary in Illinois a year later. The election is on Nov. 8, 2016.
Photo credits, in order of appearance: AP Photo/M. Spencer Green; AP Photo/Charles Dharapak; Reuters/Jason Reed.