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Nov. 10--On Sunday Tammy Duckworth will celebrate "Alive Day."
That's what she calls the anniversary of the day a rocket-propelled grenade tore through the helicopter she was co-piloting in Iraq--an attack that destroyed her legs and shattered her right arm, but spared her life.
She also plans to climb into the cockpit of a fixed-wing airplane this weekend, and begin learning to fly all over again--a return to what had been one of her favorite pursuits, before a whirlwind two years swept her from a Baghdad emergency room and into the international spotlight.
Her narrow loss to Republican Peter Roskam for the west suburban 6th Congressional District seat Tuesday has given her a chance to catch her breath, and to try to figure out what life will hold now that she is famous and, at least briefly, out of work.
In an interview Thursday, she said that her brush with death makes it easier to get over a political disappointment.
"I've always said that with what I've been through, nothing that could happen on a campaign trail will be as bad as what I've been through," she said, breaking out in laughter. "Losing a campaign is no fun, but it's not like losing a limb. That's a lot more no fun."
Looking forward
Duckworth, 38, devoted her first day after the defeat to family, naps, phone calls and e-mails. By Thursday she was looking forward, at possibilities large and small. She talked of celebrating her first "real traditional Christmas" with her husband since 2002, the year before she learned her Illinois Army National Guard unit would deploy to Iraq.
"Maybe we'll actually pull out all the ornaments," she said.
But she also acknowledged that she is a "full-speed-ahead kind of person."
She said she plans to finish up a doctorate in public health, studies interrupted by her military deployment. She is also entertaining offers to parlay her campaign experience into ways to focus on health-care policy or veterans advocacy.
And she is helping raise money to open a Fisher House--a place for military families to stay while loved ones undergo hospitalization--at Hines VA Hospital outside Chicago.
She did not rule out running for office again.
"I am someone who is very mission-focused, and I am looking for another mission," she said.
Even flying, for her, remains a mission.
Saturday at Schaumburg Regional Airport, she hopes to begin lessons in a two-seat airplane. The first benefit, she said, will be "just to get the joy of flying back in me again."
But she also is a major in the National Guard--she has 14 years experience and once a month, she heads to Springfield where she inspects ground and air units on safety.
And although the odds may be long, she hopes to get re-accredited to fly helicopters some day. Military cockpits, by regulation, cannot be modified for her prostheses, so she would have to find some other way to pass the physicals and flight tests, a process that could take years.
"I don't want that to be my last flight in a Black Hawk," she said, referring to the near-fatal crash outside Baghdad with the self-deprecating humor she often flashed on the campaign trail to defuse any awkwardness about her disability. "I can do much better landings than that last one."
"I don't know if I'll succeed at it, but I've got to give it a shot," she added. "If I try and fail at getting back on flight status, that'll be OK for me, because at least I tried."
Catching a senator's eye
That good-natured determination in the face of huge obstacles first caught the eye of U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin 10 weeks after her helicopter was shot down.
He invited her to President Bush's State of the Union address in early 2005, and recruited her to run for the traditionally Republican congressional seat long held by retiring U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde--a campaign she launched five days after getting out of the hospital.
As a candidate, she was a physical manifestation of the price many soldiers are paying to fight in the Iraq war--and that attracted national and eventually international media attention.
"I knew she had a great life story, but I had no idea she would be such a dynamic, strong candidate," Durbin said Tuesday night, as Duckworth supporters were still awaiting returns at her Oakbrook Terrace election night celebration.
She fell two percentage points short, the closest a Democrat had come to winning the seat in decades. Roskam's successful defense of the open slot was one of the few bright spots for Republicans nationally in the face of a tidal wave of Democratic support.
Duckworth said she is "deeply disappointed" in losing, but content that "we did everything we possibly could" to win and push for a new approach to the war.
"I'm just so optimistic for our country's future to know that we have an opportunity to get both sides to sit down together and try to work out some of the problems we have in this country," she said.
This "Alive Day," she will travel to St. Louis to meet up with members of the Missouri National Guard crew she flew with in Iraq on that ill-fated mission, including Chief Warrant Officer Dan Milberg, the senior pilot.
"Dan Milberg was the man who saved my life that day," she said. "He landed the aircraft, and he carried me to safety."
She also will see the crew of the rescue helicopter that flew her to safety, and, for the first time, she will greet the emergency room nurse who last saw her in Baghdad with "a breathing tube down my throat" just before she went under for the initial operation.
Together, they all will have dinner and catch up. Maybe they will tell war stories. Maybe they will talk of campaigns, old and new.
"You can choose to spend the day of your injury in a dark room feeling sorry for yourself or you can choose to get together with the buddies who saved your life, and I choose the latter," Duckworth said.
jbiemer@tribune.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, Chicago Tribune
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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