The Daily Herald: The day Capt. Tammy Duckworth was shot down

November 11th, 2014

U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth’s constituents know she lost her legs in Iraq.

The Daily Herald wanted to know more about the day that helps define her.

Daily Herald Political Editor Mike Riopell interviewed Duckworth over three months about the rocket-propelled grenade that hit her Black Hawk helicopter on Nov. 12, 2004 ­and how it colored the decade that followed.

It was the last mission of the day. “We were almost home,” Duckworth said.

In Part 1, Duckworth recounts the events leading up to the crash. In Part 2, we learn how two helicopter crews got Duckworth out of Iraq. In Part 3, Duckworth is back in control 10 years later.

The four crew members of Black Hawk 83-23856 had flown five or six helicopter missions that Friday, screaming low over the terrain at 140 mph, touching down, dropping off soldiers, picking up others and lifting off into the rainy sky again within minutes. It was less dangerous to be on the move.

Soldiers battled in Fallujah 43 miles west of Baghdad, with some of the bloodiest fighting in the Iraq War. Street combat racked Sadr City near Baghdad and Mosul in the north of Iraq. The crew’s own base in Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, was called “Mortaritaville” for its almost daily mortar attacks.

But the day’s missions had so far been routine. The Black Hawk crew’s afternoon stop in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone was a respite from the chaos of war, with the luxury of a free hour on the ground and a wide selection of menu items.

“We had a great lunch,” said Tammy Duckworth. Then 36 and a captain with the Illinois National Guard, she was the highest ranking of the four crew members. “They actually made milkshakes to order. It was, like, the first milkshake I’d had in a year.”

The base exchange was open, and Spc. Kurt Hannemann, a burly door gunner from central Illinois and the lowest-ranking member of the crew, wanted to take a look inside.

“He and I ran over, and we got some Christmas ornaments, scenes from Babylon and all these biblical scenes,” Duckworth said.

It was Nov. 12, 2004.

Ten years later, Duckworth has been newly re-elected to a second term in Congress, a career the Hoffman Estates Democrat said she had never envisioned. She and her husband, Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey are about to embark on another unpredictable journey — becoming parents. Their daughter is due in December. She has begun relearning to fly small helicopters. She finished work last month on a doctorate, fulfilling a goal interrupted when she deployed a decade ago.

Iraq sometimes colors her dreams and rushes to the front of her consciousness without warning. The men who climbed into the Black Hawk helicopter with her that day in 2004 have become trusted friends and advisers, including some she’ll call on when questions of the military or veterans come before the U.S. House.

“These are the folks who are truth-speakers for me in my life,” she said.

Duckworth and the men she credits with saving her life spoke with the Daily Herald over the course of three months.

She agreed to the interviews “to honor the men who were there. And to tell the story of what is, in a way, a typical story of troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“The effects of that service, both bad and good, last for the rest of your lives,” she said.

In Iraq, Duckworth was battle captain. Since her arrival in March 2004 at Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Balad, she’d spent most of her time inside the tactical operation center, planning and coordinating missions for other crews to fly. On any given day, she might send them to deliver soldiers into combat, or to pick them up and bring them back for rest and food. She might have helicopter crews ferry troops, supplies, officers or VIPs between bases.

She’d take the same missions herself. Duckworth flew about two days a week, both because she enjoyed it and because the constant parade of missions required everyone to help so regular pilots could get a break.

“I always made sure I had long missions,” she said. “When it was time for me to go fly, the guys hated it, the guys that flew with me a lot. Because they knew when it was time to fly with me it was going to be a 14-hour mission day.”

On this Friday, her crew was doing what one pilot called the “Baghdad shuffle,” moving people and goods between scattered bases and the capital.

“Taxi service,” Duckworth calls it.

It wasn’t as simple as that.

In the weeks before, Duckworth was in a helicopter that was shot at during the fierce second battle of Fallujah. Flying was dangerous enough that Black Hawks flew in pairs in case something went wrong.

Despite the perils, if troops needed to get around Iraq, they wanted to fly.

Flying was far safer than driving, said state Rep. David Harris of Arlington Heights, the adjutant general of the Illinois National Guard when the Iraq War began in 2003. Roadside bombs were taking lots of American lives and soldiers were attaching improvised scrap metal armor to their vehicles to try to protect themselves.

“People were getting killed all the time,” Harris said. “All the time.”

The military was an unexpected detour from the career Duckworth once had dreamed of. Working on a master’s degree in international affairs in the early 1990s at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Duckworth hoped to become an ambassador and signed up for ROTC “just to learn a little bit more about the military,” she said.

“I fell in love with the military,” she said. “I even loved the drill sergeants yelling at me. … I just loved the challenge, you know. I loved running around lost in the woods. I loved being on the rifle range.”

She joined the Army Reserves in 1992. In 1993, she went to flight school at Fort Rucker, Ala., and married Bowlsbey, who had been in ROTC with her. That year, U.S. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin lifted the restriction on women flying in combat.

More than 10 years later, working on a doctorate at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Duckworth voluntarily deployed with the Illinois National Guard.

And there she was in Iraq, living in a room in a portable trailer similar to a shipping container on a base that held 17,000 other military men and women.

In Baghdad that afternoon in November 2004, Duckworth and her crew were getting ready to leave the Green Zone. The rain had stopped and the sun was out. Next stop, Balad. Home, such as it was.

Then Duckworth got a radio call. Some soldiers were waiting in Taji, a base 20 miles north of Baghdad. Could Duckworth’s crew pick them up and ferry them to Balad?

“I looked at the crew, and they were tired. They wanted to go back,” Duckworth said. But the crew members agreed they should go get the soldiers. “It’s dangerous for them to be on convoys.”

It was a relatively routine decision, one of several that changed the course of that day.

“We swung by there … and they weren’t even there,” Duckworth said. “They hopped some other flight. So we picked up a stray colonel.”

Flight controllers plotted a route from Taji to Balad. The routes varied so American helicopters wouldn’t be flying over the same spot all the time, which would make them easier marks for insurgents.

The stray colonel hopped in Duckworth’s sister helicopter, and they started home.

Flying a helicopter is a full-body exercise. Duckworth sat in the right pilot’s seat of the Black Hawk, strapped in and surrounded by advanced equipment on the panel, both feet on pedals and her hand on the control stick between her legs.

She wore a helmet that protected her hearing from the scream of the helicopter rotors and rush of the wind outside. They flew with the doors off.

In the left pilot’s chair sat Chief Warrant Officer 4 Dan Milberg, an experienced Black Hawk pilot who flew helicopters in Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf more than 10 years earlier, when Duckworth was still in college. He was the kind of pilot Duckworth looked up to — the pilot in command. That afternoon, Milberg tired of Duckworth hogging the controls all day.

Milberg called Duckworth a “stick pig” and took over flying.

Hannemann, the gunner, sat behind Milberg. Sgt. Christopher Fierce was behind Duckworth, also manning a mounted gun.

They ripped across the sky just 15 feet above a vast grove of date palm trees near the Tigris River, wind rushing into the helicopter and the rotors screaming. They stayed low to the ground so they would appear to the enemy on the horizon only for an instant before they zipped past and were gone.

The flight wouldn’t take long.

“We were almost home,” Duckworth said.

Their sister helicopter was flying to Duckworth’s right. On that second helicopter, Spc. Matt Backues was manning the machine gun on the left side.

He saw a trail of smoke rising from the trees toward Duckworth’s helicopter.

It was a rocket-propelled grenade.

Backues saw the bottom of the right side of her cockpit explode.

On board, the impact was devastating.

“We were approximately 15 miles northeast of Taji airfield, when I heard what I recognized as gunfire underneath my aircraft,” Milberg wrote in an account two days later. “It sounded like three rounds and I thought that I felt the impact from the gunfire. I immediately heard an explosion come from the right side of the cockpit. I felt heat and small particles of debris on my face.”

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.

The blast blew out the clear bubble at the bottom of the cockpit, destroyed the window above her head and severely damaged the helicopter’s flight system stored behind her seat.

His helmet on and the helicopter noise deafening, Hannemann heard a pop. Seated behind Milberg, he looked to his right. There was shrapnel on the floor of the Black Hawk. Thick black smoke obstructed his view of the cockpit, and the radio in his flight helmet was silent. Hannemann could tell Duckworth was hurt, and he didn’t know if anyone was still flying the helicopter.

Duckworth was trying.

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. She tried to push on the pedals even though the sophisticated controls used to fly the 5-ton helicopter had failed. She tried to pull on the stick, which likely was no longer connected.

Behind her, Fierce had been hit by shrapnel that tore into his right leg below the knee.

The crew members could not speak to or hear one another.

Duckworth didn’t realize that just to her left, Milberg was still flying the helicopter. Fighting for control using the cyclic, the control stick that governs pitch and direction, Milberg at first saw nowhere to land.

“It was a sea of trees,” Milberg said. Then, “out of nowhere, here was this long, narrow opening in the trees.”

“As I made the approach I started feeling more severe feedback in the cyclic and felt a lateral vibration in the aircraft,” Milberg wrote in the days after. “I realized that there was a single tree in my flight path, so I used my cyclic to clear it and then continued the approach to the ground.”

Backues describes that single tree as a major obstacle to a smooth landing, but Milberg’s helicopter gymnastics gently set the crippled Black Hawk in a rutted field.

It all happened in a fury of smoke, heat and noise.

“Honestly, I didn’t know if anybody landed it or if we just got lucky,” Hannemann said.

As the haze settled over her, Duckworth noticed tall grass poking up through the helicopter. Why is that there, she remembers thinking, not understanding that part of the bottom of the cockpit was gone.

Milberg was unhurt. He immediately was consumed with the need to get everyone out of the helicopter in case of a fire or approaching enemies. He looked to his right.

“I looked over at CPT Duckworth and saw her slumped forward against the instrument panel,” he wrote in his report. “I saw that she was unconscious and had black residue on her face.” He thought she was dead.

Ten years later, that grim mental “snapshot” resurfaces at times, and especially on anniversaries like Wednesday. With it comes a rush of emotions, nearly as fresh as in that moment, he said.

“I can feel that feeling of dread and despair and sadness.”

With two gaping holes in the cockpit and most of its flight systems destroyed, the Black Hawk Army helicopter hunkered in a clearing in northern Iraq — on the ground but hardly out of danger.

“I just knew the bad guys were in the tree line coming to get us,” pilot in command Dan Milberg said. Sitting next to Milberg, Capt. Tammy Duckworth was unconscious and bloodied after taking the brunt of the exploding rocket-propelled grenade.

The person who fired it could not be more than a half mile away, and the helicopter’s injured crew was an easy target in the grassy field.

Milberg told Specialist Kurt Hannemann, the door gunner from central Illinois who was sitting behind him, to take his weapon and stand guard. Hannemann grabbed his M4, got out of the Black Hawk and ran to set the perimeter.

Milberg turned to Sgt. Christopher Fierce, behind Duckworth.

“I told him that he had to get away from the aircraft,” Milberg wrote in a report two days later.

But Fierce’s right leg was ripped up and broken and he couldn’t walk. “I helped him move a few feet from the aircraft where we fell to the ground,” Milberg wrote.

It was Nov. 12, 2004, exactly 10 years ago. The Black Hawk had been on its last mission of the day, flying north out of Baghdad fast and low alongside its sister helicopter. A stop at the coalition forces’ base at Taji took little time and the two crews were on their way home to Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Balad, the base 50 miles north of Baghdad where Duckworth had arrived eight months earlier.

As Milberg scrambled to help Duckworth and Fierce, Hannemann alone would have to confront their attackers if they showed themselves. But he was too close to the helicopter.

“I told him to take up a position away from the aircraft,” Milberg said.

“Then he realized that I was injured, too,” Hannemann said. “He saw the blood on the back of my flight suit. I could tell he was even more frustrated because he kind of threw his hands up.”

But help was arriving. Pilot Pat Meunks landed the Black Hawk’s sister helicopter nearby.

Its crew ran to help, but rough terrain and grass as tall as 6 feet hampered them. Milberg and Specialist Matt Backues, an auto body mechanic from Missouri, unbuckled Duckworth and lifted her out of the aircraft, “took a couple of steps and then fell,” Milberg wrote. A colonel who’d just hopped aboard in Taji minutes earlier stepped in to help.

Later, “when we were going through debriefing, we asked him: ‘Sir, how long have you been here?'” Backues said. “And he looked at his watch.” The colonel had just arrived in combat that day.

Getting the Black Hawk crew to safety had taken just minutes, but it’s a lasting memory for those involved.

Except Duckworth.

For her, it’s one blessed blank moment in the pain and struggles that would last for months to come. She was unconscious but not dead, despite losing half her blood, both legs and, it seemed at the time, her right arm.

“I go to these events and people stand up and they applaud,” said Duckworth, a Democrat from Hoffman Estates who was just elected to her second term in Congress. “And I’m like: Look, I just got shot down and I passed out from blood loss. And I would be dead if these guys had not been there to take care of me. Or I would be dead if they had made a different decision, which was to not recover the body. And they chose to spend extra time on the ground to get me out of there.”

They never considered otherwise. Her evacuation in Meunks’ helicopter was the beginning of a long path of survival.

A medical helicopter in Taji whisked Duckworth, Fierce and Hannemann to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad’s Green Zone, near where the helicopter crew had enjoyed a lunch break of made-to-order milkshakes and stir fry just a short time before.

As it turned out, it was Duckworth’s last meal in Iraq.

Surgeons in Baghdad amputated the remains of her right leg just below the hip and her left leg below the knee. They stabilized her right arm as much as they could and sent her to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. From there she was dispatched to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where specialists and her husband, Major Bryan Bowlsbey, were waiting.

She arrived late on Nov. 14, no more than 60 hours after the grenade hit her.

She stayed for 13 months.

At first she was virtually helpless, with one usable limb. She felt so much pain she counted slowly to 60 over and over again, marking off each minute she had to endure for days.

She recited the Soldier’s Creed to herself for comfort and strength.

“I am an American soldier,” it says in part. “I am a warrior and a member of a team. I serve the people of the United States, and live the Army values. I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit.”

She got a Purple Heart.

Her move into politics came gradually. Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin of Springfield invited her to join him at President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address on Feb. 2, 2005, less than 12 weeks after she was injured in Iraq.

A few weeks later, she testified before Congress about military health care benefits. Her notoriety was growing, but by summer 2005 her dream of returning to life as a military pilot was at an end.

“I found out that I wasn’t going to be allowed to fly for the Army any more,” she said.

“If we were in another incident and Dan got hurt, I wasn’t going to be able to drag Dan out and carry him to safety,”

When Durbin called, asking if she would run for Congress, “I guess I was ready.”

Saying yes, she placed herself in a different line of fire.

The 2006 campaign against Republican Peter Roskam of Wheaton was brutal and negative and ended with a Roskam victory. Duckworth’s second run, in 2012 against Republican Joe Walsh of McHenry, was also vitriolic. This time she won.

Life as a freshman lawmaker tends to be far less dramatic than life as a Black Hawk pilot. A recent afternoon found her greeting west suburban mayors at a buffet at Jimmy’s Charhouse in Elgin.

She used a wheelchair and wore just one prosthetic leg, the left one with a gray cuff peeking out from her skirt, a shiny metal shank, a tan foot and a small, stylish shoe. Putting on her right leg allows her to walk, but wearing the prosthesis printed with a swirl of red, white and blue on the calf can cause days of shooting phantom pains in a knee that she no longer has.

When it was Duckworth’s turn to speak, she wheeled alongside the podium and used her arms to push herself out. She held onto the podium with both hands and hopped into position. The topics of the day — the status of some federal legislation and big road projects like the Elgin-O’Hare Expressway — would not make for a long speech, and she gave the talk balancing on one prosthetic leg.

Duckworth constantly feels tingling as if her feet were asleep and a few shakes might wake them back up. “I can feel my feet right now,” she said that day. “The balls of my feet burn continuously. It’s all the time.”

During a House hearing in 2013, Duckworth tore into a business owner accused of claiming service-disabled veteran status based on a 1984 ankle injury from when he played football at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School.

“Your left foot? It hurts, yeah?” she asked the man. “My feet hurt, too. In fact, the balls of my feet burn continuously, and I feel like there’s a nail being hammered into my right heel right now. So I can understand pain and suffering and how service connection can actually cause long-term, unremitting, unyielding, unstoppable pain. So I’m sorry that twisting your ankle in high school has come back to hurt you in such a painful way, if also opportune for you to gain the status for your business as you’re trying to compete for contracts.”

Duckworth’s record on behalf of veterans has brought her praise and criticism. After she lost to Roskam in 2006, former Gov. Rod Blagojevich named her to lead the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs, which she left in 2011.

When a scandal broke earlier this year about long delays in getting doctors appointments at Veterans Affairs hospitals and clinics, Duckworth’s Republican opponent in the Nov. 4 election, veteran Larry Kaifesh of Carpentersville, laid part of the blame on Duckworth.

Duckworth criticized the VA’s bureaucracy while defending her role and, initially, the role of VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. Eventually, she called on her former boss to resign. That same day, he did.

The passage of a decade has given Duckworth new perspective.

“I’m not going to let some guy who got lucky with a (grenade) decide how I live my life,” she told the Daily Herald while she was still at Walter Reed in 2005.

“I mean, it did,” she said recently. “I’m in politics.”

She wishes she’d had a chance to fight back that day 10 years ago in Iraq.

“If I’d gotten the better of that guy, I would have found out where that guy was and shot back,” Duckworth said.

She and her crew never saw who fired the grenade.

Matt Backues’ helicopter circled the area as he stood at his gun, scanning the trees around the stricken Black Hawk. There was no one to shoot at.

Even today, Duckworth’s inspiration comes from other soldiers, especially those she knows best.

“Kurt, even though he was shot and scared and bleeding and going into shock, still walked toward the enemy and tried to do his job.”

Milberg established order out of chaos during an ordeal that can’t easily be erased from his thoughts.

“He said: ‘Tammy, getting you out of there was like the opening scene of ‘Saving Private Ryan,'” Duckworth said. “He said, ‘You were just bloody and covered in tissue. And we dropped you. And we dragged you. And we picked you up. And we stumbled. And we dropped you. And we fell. And, you know, it was just a nightmare to get you out of there.”

As they worked, Backues looked up and saw two other Black Hawk helicopters fly over. The crew chief on one of them would later become his wife.

After landing at Taji airfield, and after Duckworth, Hannemann and Fierce were rushed away, the others were left to contemplate.

“We taxied back to a parking area and shut down,” Backues said. “And that’s when it kind of hit me. And I was just like, trying to process everything. Because it happened so quick and so many things happened in that short amount of time that it just took a little bit to think through.”

Backues called Duckworth this summer, eager to surprise her with some news.

His wife Judy was pregnant.

Duckworth responded excitedly with a secret. She was pregnant, too. She and Bowlsbey are expecting a daughter in December, they announced publicly in September.

While Duckworth says she’s not the hero of her story in Iraq, members of the crew say what she’s done since makes the aftermath easier for them.

“The fact that she has been successful and done so well and is about to have a baby,” Milberg says, “she’s made my life so easy.”

U.S. Rep. Tammy Duckworth’s first public speech on a tightly scheduled late-August day had nothing to do with Iraq.

At Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Duckworth was to speak to local business representatives at an event about getting contracts with the federal government. Then her staff would whisk her to the next appointment, keeping to the busy schedule of a freshman lawmaker.

A laboratory executive introduced her, quickly summing up the story that has helped shape the identity that ultimately drove her to politics: “Following her recovery from a helicopter crash in the line of duty …” he said.

One of those words makes Duckworth cringe, though she understands it’s shorthand many people use in telling her story.

The Black Hawk helicopter didn’t crash.

“We managed to land it,” Duckworth said. “Dan managed to land it.”

It didn’t crash, even though a rocket-propelled grenade ripped through the helicopter a decade ago on Nov. 12, 2004, shredding Duckworth’s legs, ripping gaping holes in the cockpit and destroying the Black Hawk’s sophisticated flight controls.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Dan Milberg set the helicopter down in the only clearing in sight among endless date palm trees, probably saving the entire crew from death.

Duckworth was the one who had been piloting the Black Hawk during most of that day’s missions around Iraq. Weeks later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., in a haze of jumbled memories, she was seized by fear and guilt that she had done something to cause the injuries to her crew and herself.

“She thought she had crashed the helicopter,” Col. Randy Sikowski, Duckworth’s boss in Iraq, said. “She didn’t know what had happened. That’s a big deal for a pilot. You don’t want to be the one that screwed something up. And I think for her to find out she didn’t do anything, it was the enemy that made that choice, that was significant.”

These days, as Duckworth marks the 10th anniversary of the grenade attack by celebrating her “Alive Day,” she counts the soldiers who served with her among her closest friends and advisers — especially when issues concerning veterans or the Middle East come before Congress.

In September, she broke Democratic Party ranks by voting against legislation to fund, train and equip Syrian rebels to fight Islamic State militants. A year ago, she supported moving ahead with military intervention after the Syrian government used chemical weapons against rebels, but urged caution.

“One of the people I called was Dan. I said, ‘Dan, this is what I’m thinking. Am I crazy?'”

“It’s just really easy for folks who haven’t been sitting in a broken helicopter in a field while bad guys are coming for you to say, well, just send troops in,” she said.

“I really feel like we need more vets to say, ‘OK, this is the true cost. And I’m willing to go and die, but this better be worthy of that.'”

Duckworth ended her 23-year service in the military this year, anticipating a second term in Congress and the birth of her daughter in December.

She arrived at Camp Lincoln in Springfield for her monthly Illinois National Guard weekend drill at the end of September, wearing two prosthetic legs and a camouflage uniform.

She walked through the narrow, spartan halls of the office building where she does her desk work planning for responses to natural disasters like floods and tornadoes.

The electronic knee of her right leg made walking on her two prosthetic legs more difficult than usual. It is calibrated to her height, weight and gait, but the weight of the baby she is carrying had confused the electronics.

Unknown to all but her inner circle, Duckworth had quietly laid the groundwork to retire. She had started coming to grips with the decision two years ago. It was tough to acknowledge she wasn’t as useful to the Illinois National Guard as she had once been.

“This has been the first year I could imagine taking off the uniform. My only regret is that my daughter won’t get to see me serving. That’s sort of the one sad thing,” she said. “But it’s time.”

At a morning assembly that Saturday, a routine announcement was made asking who was drilling for the first time. One man raised his hand.

Who was drilling for the last time? Duckworth raised her hand.

That’s how many of her Guard friends found out she was leaving.

“It was kind of neat to see a lieutenant where it was his first drill,” said Duckworth, who retired as a lieutenant colonel. “I think back to 23 years when it was my first drill. So I was very jealous of him.”

Duckworth’s husband, Major Bryan Bowlsbey, remains in the National Guard. In February 2007, just over two years into Duckworth’s recovery, he deployed to the Middle East. Several of her crew members also have been sent to fight again.

The damaged Black Hawk Duckworth and her crew left sitting in the tall grass in Iraq a decade ago was blown up by the U.S. military. Details of the damage caused by the insurgent grenade are lost to history.

Duckworth’s home base in Balad and the base at Taji, where she was evacuated after her chopper was hit, eventually were turned over to Iraqi Security Forces. Islamic State militants have overrun Mosul and swept through northern Iraq, imposing strict Islamic rule and forcing nonbelievers to flee or die. Balad and nearby towns frequently are under attack. The Iraqi Ministry of Defense sought to rally its retreating forces at Taji, hoping to quell an enemy advance to Baghdad.

Days ago, President Barack Obama ordered 1,500 additional U.S. troops to Iraq to help train Iraqi and Kurdish soldiers to fight Islamic State militants.

“I don’t think any of us thought that we would still be at war 10 years later,” Duckworth said.

Yet, she misses her life as a soldier.

“I am deeply, deeply, deeply envious of the guys who are still flying,” Duckworth said. “I am lonely and I miss the camaraderie of being in my unit, being in my company. I feel like an outsider to that.”

While still under doctors’ care at Walter Reed in 2005, Duckworth already was plotting to get back in the air.

Midway through her 13-month recovery, she got a pass to get out for four days.

She wanted to go to Wisconsin.

Duckworth and Bowlsbey had camped each of the previous dozen or so years at the Oshkosh air show, a huge summer gathering of aviation enthusiasts in central Wisconsin.

“This is what we do, and we’re going to continue our normal lives.” Bowlsbey said. “She told the doctors she was going to go to Oshkosh and sleep on the ground.”

Duckworth researched tents that could be easily set up and accessed by a person in a wheelchair.

“He can’t put up camp furniture and he can’t put up a tent,” Duckworth said of her husband.

“I fix helicopters!” he replied.

So the two went to Wisconsin, and she spent the weekend talking to aviators about what it would take for her to get back off the ground.

After five years of physical rehab and practice, Duckworth started flying planes again, and the two pilots are so in love with flying they’ve toyed with naming their expected daughter Piper after the plane they own together.

Now, 10 years after she lost her legs in Iraq, Duckworth has started the process of flying helicopters again. She’s grounded while pregnant but says she wants to continue soon. It’s tricky. The pedals are important.

In Virginia, Hawaii and elsewhere, Duckworth has tried some basic maneuvers in small helicopters.

“When I got back in a helicopter, it felt like home,” she said.

Duckworth points to her time in the hospital as one reason she’s been able to come full circle, overcoming some of the demons that haunt some soldiers who come home from war.

“They have the same experiences, but I got to spend 13 months in the hospital where, every day, somebody, I mean literally dozens of times a day, people ask you: ‘Tell me about what happened,'” Duckworth said. “They make you tell the story over and over and over and over and over and over and over again so that it just becomes a chapter in your life. It doesn’t become the chapter of your life.”

“That’s in a weird way an advantage I had over guys who didn’t get physically wounded,” she said.

While Duckworth and her crew keep in touch, they don’t always share what happened 10 years ago in Iraq with others.

Kurt Hannemann, the gunner who stood outside the Black Hawk preparing to defend it as Duckworth was evacuated, doesn’t talk much about the day with his friends and Army buddies, he says. He still wears the uniform, now as a Black Hawk test pilot based at Midway Airport in Chicago, charged with making sure the helicopters are running smoothly and diagnosing the problems when they aren’t.

Matt Backues, who helped carry Duckworth’s limp and bloodied body to his helicopter in the rescue, wears khakis and a blue polo shirt as a top mechanic for Priester Aviation at Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling.

“I don’t always tell the full story or anything. But some of my co-workers know,” Backues said. “My family and friends know. Some know more details than others.”

Milberg is a police officer in suburban St. Louis and finished a deployment to Afghanistan over the summer with the Missouri National Guard.

Sikowski is chief of the joint staff with the Illinois National Guard.

The image of Duckworth slumped against the Black Hawk controls is just one of the mental “snapshots” Milberg has of that day in Iraq. It’s a word the whole crew comes back to, as if the memory a decade later plays as a slideshow in their heads, complete with the chaotic sounds and smells of the day.

The members of the crew who talked to the Daily Herald say they cope with the memories well, but that’s of course not true for every soldier who has been to war.

Duckworth says her message to veterans is that it’s normal to be troubled by war because war isn’t normal.

“It’s OK to talk about it. It’s OK to ask for help,” she says. “For the guys who are sitting there maybe overwhelmed by the experience, I think it’s important for me to say, you know, I still dream about being in Iraq. And I wake up and I’m exhausted. That doesn’t mean I have PTSD. It means that I have this experience in my life. And I can be a member of Congress and I can function and do my job, and you can, too. So it’s OK if you watch something on TV and you go to bed and you live an entire day in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

Most years on Nov. 12, members of the crew from that defining day in Iraq get together for dinner, catch up and tell war stories.

Last year on that date, she thanked each of them by name in a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

She says it’s the only day of the year Milberg will let her tell him “thank you.”

“The most precious thing for me is to still have them in my life because they know me and who I am,” she said. “The more public my professional life has become, the more I treasure the friends that I had and my Army buddies who knew me before I entered this public realm.”

That first “Alive Day” in 2005, Milberg called Duckworth at Walter Reed as she was going through a treatment to help save her right arm.

“It’s almost 4:30 in Iraq,” Milberg said then. “In five minutes you’re going to be shot down.”

“Another year,” Duckworth said, 10 years later. “What did I do this year to earn this?”

Read the original series:

• Part 1, Duckworth recounts the events leading up to being shot down.

• Part 2: How two helicopter crews got Duckworth out of Iraq.

• Part 3: Duckworth is back in control 10 years later.