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Both their pictures hang in the McKinley High School Hall of Honor, both lost limbs from grievous war wounds and both carved out careers of political leadership in the U.S. Senate.
As Hawaii war hero Sen. Daniel K. Inouye did, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Democratic senator from Illinois, is now playing a far larger role.
Inouye, who died in 2012, was one of the last giants of the Senate — and while leadership in the body is now much more fractionalized, Duckworth is both a respected worker and a politician with a good shot of being named as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee. She also is now a target of President Donald Trump and right-wing commentators, such as Tucker Carlson.
Former Congresswoman and now candidate for mayor Colleen Hanabusa worked with both Inouye and Duckworth. Duckworth sat next to Hanabusa on the U.S. House floor.
“I sat by her for two years on the floor. In fact, because of her arm, I used to put her card in the voting machine and vote for her. She was not soft on the military because of her history; in fact she was tough on them,” Hanabusa said in an interview last week.
“She is a force to contend with because of her sacrifice to her country, giving two legs and part of her arm. And now serving in the House and then in the U.S. Senate. She never forgets where she comes from,” she said, mentioning that like Inouye, Duckworth’s first stop whenever she comes to Honolulu is Zippy’s.
“She takes home fried saimin,” Hanabusa added.
At 16, Duckworth with her family moved to Honolulu. She was born in Bangkok, Thailand, her father was a veteran of the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps tracing his family’s American roots to the American Revolutionary War. She graduated from McKinley and the University of Hawaii with a degree in political science.
While later studying at George Washington University, Duckworth joined the ROTC and as she said, “fell in love with the Army.” She went to helicopter flight school because it was one of the few combat roles available to women at the time.
Duckworth in 2004 was co-piloting a Black Hawk, ferrying troops in Iraq when it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
“Duckworth’s right leg was gone in an instant, shredded in a flash of heat and a spray of shrapnel from a grenade. Her left leg was terribly injured, and her right arm was nearly severed.
She said she frantically tried to pull on the controls. She thinks she went in and out of consciousness, unaware she had lost her legs because she could still feel them,” according to interviews with her conducted by the Chicago Daily Herald.
Surgeons in Baghdad amputated the remains of her right leg just below the hip and her left leg below the knee. Sixty hours after being hit she was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where she would stay for 13 months and 20 operations. Duckworth is the first female double amputee from the Iraq war.
Ignoring her sacrifice, the Trump campaign has mounted a campaign against Duckworth, accusing her of using her military service to “deflect from her support for the left-wing campaign to villainize America’s founding.”
The GOP’s new vile campaign against an American war hero proves the recent political speculation that Duckworth is a powerful Democratic candidate for vice president. Trump and his cohorts have reason to fear her.
Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays. Reach him at 808onpolitics@gmail.com.
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