By The Huffington Post News Editors
When images of joyous Iraqi voters with purple thumbs were broadcast around the world in January 2005, Tammy Duckworth watched with heartfelt tears from her hospital bed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Just months earlier, the Army captain had been shot down over Iraq while flying a Black Hawk helicopter. Nearly a decade later, now-Rep. Duckworth (D-Ill.) walks the halls of Congress on Army-camo-and-American-flag prostheses.
Duckworth, the first female double amputee in the Iraq War, very nearly gave her life in a war she didn’t believe the U.S. should be fighting, but she says she is proud to have helped clear the way for Iraq’s first democratic election in more than half a century. The Iraq War also set her on a path to become an assistant secretary of veterans affairs under President Barack Obama, a powerful speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention and now a vocal Capitol Hill force on foreign policy, national defense and veterans’ issues.
Almost 10 years to the day Operation Iraqi Freedom began, the congresswoman, Illinois National Guard lieutenant colonel and Purple Heart recipient spoke with The Huffington Post to reflect on the lessons of the Iraq War, taught at such grave cost.