Vet Duckworth recounts darkest hour

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Duckworth talks with Airman 1st Class Johann Diakunczak, 25, a security forces specialist with from the 379th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron.


Vet Duckworth recounts darkest hour
By Kent Harris, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, October 31, 2007


VICENZA, Italy — Tammy Duckworth went through several days of excruciating pain while recovering from Iraq war wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

“Apparently, morphine does nothing for me,” the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs said Monday while on a visit to Caserma Ederle. “Except make me hallucinate and talk to people in the room who aren’t there.”

So until her caregivers found the right combination of medication to help ease her pain, she endured. “I didn’t know if I could survive a day,” she said. “But I knew I could survive another minute. I spent about five days basically counting to 60.”

But the former Black Hawk helicopter pilot said that worse than the loss of her legs was the feeling that she had failed her crew. She kept on overhearing snippets of conversation referring to the helicopter “crash.” Because she couldn’t remember most of what happened after getting ambushed on Nov. 12, 2004, she feared the worst.

“I was devastated, because I thought I had hurt my crew and let them down,” she said. “I felt I deserved to lose my legs for doing that.”

She found out later there was no crash. She and the crew of the doomed chopper — hit by automatic weapon fire and a rocket-propelled grenade — managed to get it down in one piece. She survived through the gallantry of her crew and other helicopters nearby, but the weapons fire mangled her legs.


Rest of article at: http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=49912