Veterans called upon to serve again: A former helicopter pilot is among those fighting for a seat in Congress on anti-war platform

The Guardian
Feb. 21, 2006

The last contender to arrive for "love your candidate" night is the Democrats' best new hope in Chicago. She rolls up in a wheelchair just before the speeches begin, with her handbag strapped to the handles behind her.

Tammy Duckworth was a helicopter pilot and a major in the Illinois National Guard until a rocket propelled grenade hit her chopper north of Baghdad on November 12 2004 and exploded in her lap. Both legs were blown off and her right arm badly mangled. Ms Duckworth spent a year in hospital, but she is now out and often wears a pair of hi-tech metal prosthetic limbs while she campaigns to win a seat in Congress on an anti-war platform.

"I usually wear my legs to these events. I can walk about a mile on a treadmill with them, but tonight I just got tired and came in the wheelchair," she said in an interview after the candidates meeting in a Chicago hotel.

She insists it was not her horrific injuries that turned her against the Iraq war, but earlier misgivings about the justification for the invasion.

"I had always felt the decision to invade was a bad decision," she said. "But I'm very proud of my service in Iraq. It's your duty to go, and I owed it to the men I trained and who trained me. I was not going to let my buddies go off to war without me."

Ms Duckworth represents one of the most striking phenomena of this year's election, liberal warriors. There are 10 veterans of the "war on terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan up for election in November's congressional elections, and all but one of them is running as a Democrat.

Setting standards

That statistic says something about the new veterans, and the creeping tide of disillusionment among US officers with the Bush administration's conduct of the war. "Our politicians have not lived up to the sacrifices that have been made," Ms Duckworth said. "We should be holding politicians to the same standards."

The liberal warrior trend also says a lot about the Democrats, who are actively courting veterans in an attempt to inoculate themselves against Republicans who accuse them of being unpatriotic.

Alongside Ms Duckworth's contemporaries, there are another two dozen veterans of earlier wars running for Congress as Democrats, making it altogether the party's biggest phalanx of ex-soldiers in half a century. They have even established a loose-knit network calling itself the "Band of Brothers".

Among the most recent graduates of the Gulf War is Tim Dunn, a lieutenant colonel in the marine reserves who served in Baghdad as a legal adviser to the special tribunal trying Saddam Hussein, and who is now competing in a Democratic primary in North Carolina. Andrew Duck was an army intelligence officer and is standing in rural Maryland. Chris Carney is a lieutenant commander in the naval reserve who was a special Pentagon adviser on intelligence and terrorism who is facing a Republican incumbent in north-east Pennsylvania.

None of the Band of Brothers has as much publicity and heavyweight backing as the one sister among them. Ms Duckworth was talent-scouted by Illinois' senior senator, Richard Durbin, and is being talked up by the state's junior senator and the Democrat's most popular rising star, Barack Obama. Her campaign is being helped by Rahm Emmanuel, a former Clinton aide, Chicago congressman and mastermind of the Democratic strategy to retake the House of Representatives.

Ms Duckworth is competing for Illinois' sixth district, a traditionally Republican constituency in Chicago's prosperous western suburbs that is now vulnerable with the retirement of its longstanding representative, Henry Hyde.

Local competition

But first, the former helicopter pilot has to fend off two Democratic rivals for the party's nomination in next month's primary: Christine Cegelis, who came close to winning the seat at the last election, and Lindy Scott, a university lecturer.

Ms Duckworth has raised far more money in recent months than the other two Democratic hopefuls put together, and she has the backing of most of the big unions. But her hardest battle is to win over the local Democratic activists.

Several dozen turned up on Valentine's day for the "love your candidate" meeting in a Chicago hotel. They were respectful of Ms Duckworth but sceptical. They pointed out she lived a few miles outside the district and grumbled that she had been "parachuted" in by the party leadership to a constituency that already had a promising candidate.

"Christine [Cegelis] has a three-year record here," said Frank Tully, a local activist. "Then along comes Tammy. We appreciate her service, but to just cast Christine aside doesn't seem right. So we're a little torn."

Ms Duckworth admits she is the favoured candidate of the national party leadership, but denies that she is its stooge: "I've never been drafted for anything. Nobody is going to make me do or say anything I don't believe in."

However, even if Ms Duckworth and some of her fellow Democrat veterans triumph in the primaries, they then have to face the Republicans, and it is still far from clear that the Democrat strategy of recruiting heroes is going to work. After all, it was hardly a magic bullet for John Kerry in 2004, nor did it help Max Cleland, a Georgia senator who lost two legs and an arm fighting in Vietnam, but was still labelled unpatriotic and even compared to Osama Bin Laden by the Republicans in a particularly nasty Senate race in Georgia. He lost his seat.

Stuart Rothenberg, a political analyst in Washington, wrote recently: "There is no reason to believe that voters will automatically see veterans as appealing candidates, or that veterans of Iraq will begin with more authority to speak about US foreign policy, national security or even the war itself."

Soon after Ms Duckworth agreed to stand for Congress, she got a call from Mr Cleland. "You got to take care of yourself," he told her.

But she assured him she was ready for whatever was coming at her. "Look, I've had an RPG blow up in my lap. I've survived against overwhelming odds and I'm still here," she said. "I'm a pretty tough chick."