[Mb-civic] Female Iraq Vet Takes on Politics & Boomers: The Real Greatest Generation

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

After War Injury, an Iraq Vet Takes on Politics

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 19, 2006; A01

CHICAGO, Feb. 18 The smiling candidate in rimless eyeglasses and a long
woolen skirt maneuvers carefully among tables and chairs as she works a
crowded Starbucks. She is taking small steps, and the reason for the
slight awkwardness in her gait is not instantly clear.

Reaching to shake hands with a voter, she says: "You may have heard of me.
I'm the Iraq war vet who's running. I was injured over there." Talking
with another, she says: "I actually lost both my legs. I can walk because
I got really good health care."

Tammy Duckworth, Democratic candidate for Congress, cannot escape the
catastrophic wounds she suffered as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq. And,
for the purposes of her candidacy, she does not want to. For better or
worse, her injuries are her signature, her motivator and, she hopes, her
ticket into the consciousness of voters in the Illinois 6th District.

"I can't avoid the interest in the fact that I'm an injured female 
soldier," Duckworth, 37, says in an interview at her campaign 
headquarters in Lombard, west of Chicago. "Understand that I'm going to
use this as a platform."

That is just what a pair of influential Illinois Democrats expected when
they recruited her to seek the seat surrendered after 32 years by
Republican stalwart Henry J. Hyde. Sen. Richard J. Durbin and Rep. Rahm
Emanuel appealed to Duckworth when she was still recovering from her
injuries, dissing the up-and-running campaign of fellow Democrat Christine
Cegelis, who took 44 percent of the vote against Hyde in 2004.

Duckworth, who considers the Iraq war a mistake, is among about a dozen
veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan running for federal office this
year, at last count all but one of them Democrats. The party leadership is
calculating that candidates who wore the uniform can offer a credible
counterpoint on national security to Republicans who have dominated the
debate from the campaign trail to Capitol Hill.

That's fine with Duckworth. She sees the race -- and pretty much 
everything else since Nov. 12, 2004, when an insurgent's 
rocket-propelled grenade exploded at her feet -- as a second chance. "I
know this sounds really corny, but I've just got to be more," Duckworth
says. "I've got to be more than I was."

At the same time, Duckworth constantly wrestles with the reality of what
she no longer is, the moves she can no longer make.

A self-described girlie girl whose favorite color is pink, she watches
"America's Next Top Model" and laments not being able to wear feminine
shoes. She has ordered special prosthetic "runway feet" that will allow
for a two-inch heel.

Then there is the matter of her missing lap. One leg is only 2 1/2 
inches long.

"I can't actually hold a soda between my knees in the car," she says.
"It's really hard to use a laptop when you only have half a lap."

She half smiles as she says this, able to find wonderment in discovering
the novelties of her new self. The smile builds into a laugh as she adds:
"But there are positives. My feet don't get cold."

Duckworth still wears pink. She has a baseball jersey that reads, "Dude,
where's my leg?"

The daughter of a retired Marine, Duckworth was born in Bangkok, where her
father, Franklin Duckworth, did U.N. refugee work and married Lamai
Sompornpairin, an ethnic Chinese. She spent much of her youth in Southeast
Asia. She joined the ROTC while earning a master's degree in international
affairs at George Washington University.

Moving to Illinois to pursue a doctorate, she signed up with the 
Illinois Army National Guard, asking to train as a Black Hawk pilot. This
was partly because she hoped to taste combat, partly because she wanted to
show she could match the men.

In her civilian life, she was a manager for Rotary International. As an
Army captain, she rose to command 42 soldiers. She was about to transfer
when the unit was called to duty in Iraq. She persuaded her superiors to
reverse the move, saying, "There was no way I was going to let them go
without me."

Of being a pilot, Duckworth says: "I love controlling this giant, fierce
machine. I strap that bird on my back and I'm in charge of it and we just
go, and it's just power."

On Nov. 12, 2004, after a stop in Baghdad's secure Green Zone for 
chocolate milkshakes, stir-fry and Christmas ornaments, Duckworth was
right where she wanted to be, flying above the treetops at 130 mph.

Chief Warrant Officer Dan Milberg was at the controls when the grenade
hit.

Milberg landed the chopper and mistook Duckworth for dead, she said, but
helped haul her body, slippery with blood, to a second Black Hawk. Eight
days later, she awoke from unconsciousness at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center.

For days, husband Bryan Bowlsbey had been at her bedside, repeating over
and over: "You were injured. You are at Walter Reed. You are safe."

Unaware she was missing most of both legs, she asked why her feet hurt.

One person who had been to war, and had suffered for it, helped her see
the future. He was former Army Lt. Robert J. Dole, wounded World War II
vet and later Senate majority leader, who often visited Walter Reed
without fanfare.

After a long conversation with him in early 2005, Duckworth understood
that she had more to accomplish. She thought about the public service of
veterans such as Dole, John F. Kennedy and Sen. Daniel K. Inouye
(D-Hawaii), and their Vietnam War-era brethren, Sens. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) and John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

Her public career began shortly after Durbin invited wounded Illinois vets
to attend last year's State of the Union address. Duckworth, promoted to
major, soon was calling Durbin's office to get help for military families,
which led to congressional testimony on military health care.

In March, Duckworth took her first steps on her first set of artificial
legs. It took her two minutes to walk 12 feet. She felt exhausted, and
elated.

It was summer when Durbin asked her to consider a fresh career. She 
realized the target was the Illinois 6th, whose boundary lay three miles
from the home that friends and strangers remodeled to accommodate her.

She asked herself, "Did I want to do this to my private life?" Still weak,
still learning to walk, still trying to strengthen a badly damaged arm
that she almost lost, Duckworth chewed it over for two months with her
husband, whom she describes as a true partner: "He annoys me. I annoy him.
He chews gum with his mouth open. I leave my legs lying around on the
floor."

With a boost from her new political friends, Duckworth formally 
announced her candidacy on Dec. 18 on ABC's "This Week with George 
Stephanopoulos." In just two weeks, she raised $120,000, giving her more
money than Cegelis or the third Democrat in the primary, evangelical
Christian Lindy Scott.

Campaigning now under the tutelage of some of the most experienced 
Democratic strategists in Illinois, Duckworth stresses bread-and-butter
issues. She speaks of the expanding reach of the alternative minimum tax
and the rising cost of health care. She points out that she still has
$70,000 in student loans and has fought through a health crisis.

Duckworth casts abortion and end-of-life decisions as private matters that
should lie beyond the federal government's reach. If she wins the March 21
primary, she will face state Sen. Peter Roskam, a well-financed
conservative Republican in a historically Republican district.

Whatever happens, she is confident she will be fine. "What the past year
has done," she says, "is give me a fearlessness."

Duckworth is the first to say her campaign is about more than Iraq, but it
is her opinions on the war that some questioners most want to hear. She
tells them she supports the troops and believes the United States must
persevere long enough to give Iraqis a chance.

But she believes the decision to invade was an error, and a badly 
executed error at that.

"I think it was a bad decision. I think we used bad intelligence. I 
think our priority should have been Afghanistan and capturing Osama bin
Laden," Duckworth says. "Our troops do an incredible job every single day,
but our policymakers have not lived up to the sacrifices that our troops
make every day."

Asked whether she feels she lost her legs on an unworthy mission, she
replies: "I was hurt in service for my country. I was proud to go. It was
my duty as a soldier to go. And I would go tomorrow."

Duckworth has a recurring dream, often after watching news coverage of the
war. She is back in Iraq, at the controls of her Black Hawk or doing desk
duty in Balad. She has her legs. It took eight months for her dream
personality to accept that the good health would evaporate at daybreak,
but now she finds the sensation gratifying.

"In my dream, I usually know: 'Oh, I have legs. Cool. I'm going to run
around.' "

That's how Duckworth feels about her second chance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/02/18/AR20060218
01295.html?nav=hcmodule
------------------------------


Boomers: The Real Greatest Generation
Who contributed more -- the heroes of World War II or the revelers at
Woodstock?

By Leonard Steinhorn
Washington Post Sunday Outlook
Sunday, February 19, 2006; B03

It makes the headlines nearly every day, and the tone is usually 
resentful: Beware of those soon-to-retire baby boomers, all 80 million of
them, who are about to place a huge burden on the rest of us. The first of
this whiny, entitled generation are turning 60 this year, and they'll be
demanding even more special treatment in old age than they've gotten the
rest of their lives.

But imagine if the generation getting ready to retire wasn't the baby
boomers, but the World War II generation -- or the Greatest Generation, as
it's popularly lionized. No one would be calling those Americans a burden
or a drag. If they were retiring today, we'd be writing columns full of
praise for their sacrifice and discussing what our nation owes them and
how it's our moral duty to support them.

Why the different attitudes toward these two generations? Why is one
idealized as heroic and giving, while the other is disdained as
self-indulgent and taking? It's time to reassess. The true test of a
generation should be what it's done to make America better. And in that
regard, boomers have an important story to tell. It's a story about a more
inclusive and tolerant America, about women's equality and men's growing
respect for it, about an appreciation for cultural diversity too long
denied, about a society that no longer turns a blind eye to prejudice or
pollution.

The boomers' problem is not that they haven't accomplished a great deal;
it's that we take their accomplishments for granted and don't give them
any credit. But if we look more closely at the legacies of both the
boomers and their parents, we might see that the boomers are a far more
consequential group than many admit. We might see, in fact, that they have
advanced American values in ways the Greatest Generation refused to do.

Today, no one questions what the World War II generation gave to 
America, and that's as it should be. Its members sacrificed their lives
and futures to defend our country. They were heroes then, and they deserve
our continuing gratitude. But the reality few acknowledge is that, mission
accomplished, they returned home to preside, by and large without
complaint, over an American society vastly inferior to the one we know
today.

Our view of the 1950s is clouded by nostalgia. We have a Norman Rockwell
image of that era, one of tightknit neighborhoods and white picket fences.
But for too many Americans, this was no golden age. In the storied years
of the 1950s, we told women to stay home, blacks to stay separate, gays to
stay closeted, Jews to stay inconspicuous, and those who didn't conform or
prayed to a different God to feel ashamed and stay silent.

Greatest Generation blacks who fought Hitler were forced to sit behind
German POWs at USO concerts, and when they returned home the new 
suburban
neighborhoods -- emblems of the American Dream -- were closed to them.
Even baseball great Willie Mays couldn't find a house to buy when the
Giants moved from New York to San Francisco in 1957 -- until the mayor
intervened. Just as Jews anglicized names and decorated Christmas trees to
fit in, blacks tried to straighten their hair and bleach their skin by
using fiery, painful chemical products with names such as Black-No-More.
For them there was nothing warm or nurturing about that era.

It was a time when men with beards seemed subversive and women in pants
were questioned by police, and when the Organization Man ruled the
workplace. Children thought to be gay were sent off for psychiatric
treatment and even electroshock therapy. As for those who spoke up for the
environment, they were irritants in a nation that was on the march and
viewed smog alerts and clouds of soot as simply the price of progress.

Women of that era found themselves trapped in an apron. Want ads were
segregated by sex -- a practice The Washington Post didn't end until 1971
-- and it wasn't unusual for a description of the perfect "girl" to be
"5-foot-5 to 5-foot-7 in heels." Judges ridiculed female attorneys as
"lawyerettes" in court. A woman's job didn't count for much, as credit
bureaus typically denied women their economic independence.

The Greatest Generation largely accepted and defended this status quo.
Even in the 1990s, polls showed Greatest Generation majorities continuing
to resist racial intermarriage, working mothers and laws to protect gays
from discrimination. Through the late 1980s, a majority of white
respondents in national polls even said they would vote for a law allowing
a homeowner to refuse to sell his home to a black buyer.

In other words, if most Greatest Generation Americans had their way,
American life would have remained frozen in the '50s. They were not the
agents of change that built the far more inclusive, tolerant, free and
equal America we have today.

That task fell to the boomers, who almost immediately started breaking
down the restrictive codes and repressive convictions of the Greatest
Generation's era. From the moment pollsters began recording their
attitudes in the 1960s, boomers stood diametrically opposed to their
elders on the core issues of race, women, religious pluralism,
homosexuality and environmental protection. They saw an America that was
not living up to its ideals, and they set about to change it.

But this is a story that rarely gets told. In part that's because the
media prefer the dramatic or the epic, which leaves out a great deal of
social change. In part it's because we remain fixated on the '60s, as if
boomer history ended there. Yet nearly four decades have passed since the
'60s ended, and the ways in which America has changed are so far-reaching
and fundamental that they have transformed how we live as profoundly as
any war or New Deal.

Today, we see minorities and women contributing to society in ways that
would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. Diversity and
pluralism are now moral values, bigotry and sexual harassment no longer
get a free pass, and ethnic boundaries once considered impermeable are
breaking down in media, society and personal relationships. Half of all
teens now report dating across racial and ethnic lines -- and 90 percent
say their parents have no problem with it.

Discrimination against gays? Increasingly prohibited. Domestic partner
benefits? Increasingly accepted. Men sharing housework and child care
duties? No more raised eyebrows. Toxic runoffs and belching smokestacks?
No longer tolerated. The command and control workplace? On its way out.

So natural and comfortable are these new norms that most of us take them
for granted, as if it's always been this way. Because we live in a changed
America, we tend to forget what it was like before boomers agitated for
change.

Boomer-bashing has become a virtual cottage industry. They're labeled "the
worst generation." They're accused of infantilism and self-promotion. One
Web site described them as "a plague of self-centered locusts."

Part of what drives this vitriol is an implied criticism that boomers are
soft and overindulged because they never sacrificed in a Great War or
Depression. But millions of boomers fought bravely in a war their parents
handed them, and millions more risked arrest, uncertainty and ostracism
for protesting what they believed to be the pointlessness and duplicity of
that war. There's no reason to believe that boomers wouldn't have fought
Hitler as nobly as their parents did, and boomer antiwar protesters said
as much at the time, distinguishing between what they saw as the just and
necessary war against fascism and the misguided, deceptive and morally
ambiguous war in Vietnam.

As for the well-worn condemnation of boomer materialism, the truth is that
materialism is nothing new in America, and boomers are far from the first
and only generation to face this charge: It was conspicuous consumption in
the 1920s and keeping up with the Joneses in the '50s.

Boomers certainly haven't solved all of society's problems, and they've
created a few as well. But if we held the World War II generation to the
same standard, the word "greatest" would never come to mind. Even if we're
not a perfect America today, in so many ways we're a better America. And
for that, we owe the baby boomers our thanks.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/02/17/AR20060217
02491.html 


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