YouSaid · the spoken record

Tammy Duckworth

lines on the record
79
first
2016-12-19
most recent
2016-12-19
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “I was. I was and when the war happened and I thought, uh-oh, and I had just been in command of my National Guard unit in Midway. I was in command on 9-11. I personally was in on 9-11. I was in Scotland on vacation and I came back within 48 hours. But I was the commander. I had been in command for two years and then I got extended by another year. And I just left command when my unit got the mobilizing note. So I left command.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It was my decision. Well, mostly like seventy percent my decision. So I got my commission and I chose to apply to fly helicopters and I got to do that. I switched from the Army Reserves to the National Guard. I was in the Army Reserves for a while flying out of Naval Air Station Glenview. For about five years, and when all of that shut down in Glenview shut down, my Army Reserve Unit decommissioned. And so I moved over to the Illinois National Guard. And I was just a graduate student working on my PhD student with that dream that, you know, someday I'm going to join the Foreign Service and go work in our embassies and in ROTC. And then I got a job at Rotary International in Evanston, helping Rotarians around Asia, actually my territory was Asia. And still in the reserves, still flying and doing my thing in the National Guard.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “No, I felt that I could never, that was never good enough. I felt that I could never make him proud of me. And he never said he was proud of me until after I lost my legs. And just a couple weeks before he passed away, we were in the hospital together at Walter Reed. He'd had a heart attack just not long before I'd been wounded. And then he came to visit me. And the next day after he showed up, he had a heart attack. And so he was checked into the cardiac ward at Waltery, and I was in the amputee ward, and I came down and showed him my new prosthetic for one of my legs, and he said, you know, I am proud of you. It's the only time he ever said that.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “You think you can make it? That's all he said. You think you're going to make it? And then he never said a word more until my commissioning and then he showed up with gold plated second lieutenant bars for me. And then he never said anything again until I was in Iraq. And then I found out that he had been sending my pictures and my letters home to the local newspaper, but he never talked to me about it. Just asked me, You think you're going to make it? That's all he said.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “And they encouraged me to try ROTC. They just said, look, you want to join the Foreign Service? You don't have to get a commission, but you should know what America's military power does. What is NATO? What's the Warsaw Pact? What's going to happen to the Warsaw Pact? And you need to understand the difference between a division and a platoon. And so I said, okay, and I had just been laid off for my job. So I had the summer free. And I went off to basic training and I fell in love.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It was out of left view, David, really. I thought I was going to go be an ambassador. I wanted to join the Foreign Service, so I ended up at George Washington in the International Affairs Program because they had the highest pass rate for this foreign service exam in 1990-91 when I was going to school there. And I was in my classes in the Berlin Wall was coming down, and we were watching Czechoslovakians fleeing for the border on those trains when Ceausescu let the train let the borders open. And I look around in my classes and I realize that the people that I knew and got along with the most were either veterans who'd served or were people who were in the National Guard reserves officers currently.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “He did. So, what he did was he used his veterans' preference and got a job at the Department of Agriculture, where he stood on a chicken plant assembly line, a processing plant, and inspected, did the USDA inspections as the chickens went flying by on a conveyor belt.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, he skipped meals he didn't eat so that we would eat and A level of desperation you don't understand until you see a proud man who served his country for as long as my dad did except a lie from his daughter, from me, from his kid, knowing that we both knew it was a lie, and that is I would save my milk and my apple or something from my school lunch and bring it home and say, oh, daddy, I wasn't hungry. Or the kid next to me didn't really want to eat his. And you want, you know, here's extra milk. Would you drink milk? And sometimes that milk, that apple was all my dad ate that day. And he would accept it. And he would accept that lie. We both knew full well that I was skipping meals for him and he was skipping meals for me.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Out of the payphones, a 10 cents a dime, or whatever. Then he knew his two kids would eat the next day because school lunch and scoop reference were 25 cents each meal for the two of us, so 50 cents apiece. And he knew his kids would at least get a meal the next day, two meals.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Slowly while we were on food stamps and we were hungry, I worked after school in high school. I was the only one who had a job. My mom took in sewing. She did alterations for a high-end boutique she had done. It's ironic because she started life as a child laborer sewing hats in a factory in Asia in Thailand and she ended up, you know, that's how we ended up surviving was with her sewing. My dad got a job for Tips Only as a doorman for a department store and he would wander around trying to find in Hawaii there's a grocery store, kind of like an oldie here where to use a shopping cart you have to put back then a dime into the shopping cart when you return it you could get the dime out he would wander around trying to find those shopping carts or return it to the nearby grocery store and he could find”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “He was deeply ashamed. He was deeply ashamed that he needed to be on food stamps. He was deeply ashamed that he had to get help from charities. He dug himself out of the Great Depression. He went to college. I mean, it was on the GI bill, but he had made something of himself and not back where he was or in many ways he thought worse because he dragged his kids and his family into it with him was I think it was devastating to him. just struck to the heart of who he was as a person.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “But we also ended up there because all the money in the world we had left only bought us three one way tickets to Hawaii from Thailand. And then when I really felt different was when I started going to graduate school and I ended up at George Washington and then I came out to Illinois. And for the first time in my life, I was a minority. And I never been a minority. I grew up in Asia. I'm Asian, you know, half Asian. I've been a minority in that. I was Amerasian. But Know, I wasn't too different. I spoke the language and everything.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I spoke tito I was eight in the home and then I started going to American schools and I spoke English so I spoke with this accent but my dad did a really intelligent thing both in terms of thoughtfully doing it and also because we were desperately poor and we had no money was he moved us to Hawaii He moves with his Hawaii first, and he just felt that that was the best place to take his kids, his American kids, because it was going to be the best assimilation for us as being Asian Americans. And so I didn't feel outside because everybody in Hawaii is a multicultural society. It's dominant by Asians. And so I never felt that.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “shown by the work that our Peace Corps volunteers were doing and our diplomats in USAID and all of that and people want it to be like us and even as I was growing up in the 80s overseas people wanted to do business with Americans and they wanted to send their kids to American schools and it just made you so proud and I was so proud of my country and then I came back and I wanted to serve And I thought I was going to serve either in the peace corps or the foreign service. So it's really interesting to see definitions of American patriotism today and to be very much almost a militant one, I guess.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Oh, I think it definitely did. And I think because my dad worked for the refugee programs in the United Nations programs, my patriotism, I mean, it gave me a level of patriotism that I don't think kids grow up with here today now. I was so proud to be an American David, to follow my dad who do refugee camps and see American Peace Corps volunteers bringing in aid and American, like my dad bringing aid to refugees as Vietnamese boat people were fleeing the country and the Cambodians were fleeing communism and the Laotians and they were all trying to get to the US. And it really informed who I am today because America just lost a war and I saw a power in our country that was not military base. I saw a power that we had that was based on ideals and our values and who we are as a people. And that was really”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It was surreal. It was surreal because here I was an American citizen I'd grown up American. I went to American schools, the Singapore American School, International School of Bangkok, Jakarta International School, all American style schools. But yet I'd never lived in the state. While I was home and I felt native, I also felt in many ways like an immigrant. There was so much new that I didn't know about how to use Coin-operated payphones and food and all sorts of stuff. So it was really interesting. It was both belonging and not belonging at the same time.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think so. I think so. I think, but once he got back, the nation had changed so much from when he'd been back here in the 60s. And by the time we came back, it was the late 80s and it was such a fundamentally different country that he settled right in. And he settled right into the veteran community. And really, I think felt accepted. He helped found the American Legion Post in Centerville, Virginia, where he and my mom ended up living for a while. So I think he reconciled a little bit.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Memories as a child, and I lived in Indonesia for a little over seven years, like eight years, Singapore, Thailand, back and forth. My dad by this point was working for multinational corporations, and it took him losing his job and us going through my folks' life savings. I mean, he literally refused to come back to the States until we had no money left whatsoever. And that's when we finally came back to the States.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “While my parents tried to make it exciting and not so scary, and so we watched the tracers from the bombs and the firefights and as if they were fireworks. And my dad taught us to not be scared of it. But our home was guarded by armed soldiers. And I remember going with my mom to the market and suddenly being shoved onto the floorboard, not knowing why. And it turned out that the market had been bombed and there were mass casualties everywhere and she didn't want us to see. But I watched Nam Pen devolved from this beautiful colonial city into just a wreckage. And those are some of my earlier...”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I did, so I grew up all over Southeast Asia. And my dad, because he worked for the UN Development Programs and Refugee Programs at various times, it meant that I was in Cambodia until two weeks before the Khmer Rouge took over. He brought us everywhere. I left on the last commercial flight out. My earliest, some of my earliest childhood memories were sitting on a rooftop in Nom Penophal building, watching bombs going off across the river.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “She was working in her parents. I guess they had a little general store of some sort that her family owned and he just hung around and scared away all of the local suitors so that he was the only one left this American and she ended up marrying him. So it worked out for me. I always joke with Vietnam vets that I'm the product of American GIs going on R&R.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “She's Thai. Yeah, she's Thai. So he was going back and forth between Vietnam and Thailand and Laos, even though officially we were not in Laos. So he was doing a lot of that and fell in love with her Came back and got married. And”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It's fundamentally different, and I make it a point anytime I meet a Vietnam vet to thank him for it, because they're the ones who taught this country to love her warriors, even if you don't love the war. And it was a Vietnam vets who did that. And so my dad went to work for United Nations refugee programs and development programs in Asia.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “After his first tour of duty, he came back to the US and got spit on and caught a baby killer. And for someone who served his entire life in the military and came from a family that served just about every generation going back to the Revolutionary War has had a member of my family in uniform. He felt deeply betrayed. He had been married before his children from his first marriage were in college. They caught him a baby killer. And so he left and he swore he'd never come back to the States. Painful? Yeah. He was incredibly patriotic, incredibly patriotic, incredibly loved this country, but he just wasn't, it was such a deep hurt for him.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “week or two of World War II, but he was wounded and he got the purple heart as far as we know. And so he just didn't talk about it. He just did it. And after his service ended in Vietnam, he ended up staying in Southeast Asia where he worked various projects. But his military career had been as a signal officer. So during the Korean War, he served in France, for example, and he was rewiring France, putting up telephone lines for the Army. And he did the same thing in Southeast Asia. So post.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think he's a last vestigeous of that World War II generation. They just don't talk about it. They just do it. And he was one of these kids who lied about his age and ran away from home or not so much ran away from home. He grew up dirt poor and literally joined the Marines because it gave him clothes and shoes and food. And so he ended up literally, I think probably the last”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Who's also a career military man? So I found out a lot about what my dad did in the service, including his time right at the end of World War II from my husband much later. He never talked to me about it. Why do you think that was?”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “He never talked about it. He really never talked about his military service to me or my brother. He only talked a little bit about it later on in life to my husband.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “I grew up in Southeast Asia. My dad was a multiple war man. He comes from a long line of military service and he ended his army career in 1972 or 73, I think, but with his second tour of duty in Vietnam. So his first tour of duty was fairly early. And he had switched to reserve status by like 1967, 68. And after his service.”

    2016-12-19 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 106 - Tammy Duckworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source