A Conversation with Tammy Duckworth

When Senator Harkin was retiring,
and I was in the House and running for

the Senate, he called me over and he said,
"Tammy, I'm handing the reins over to you."

(laughing)

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It has just sort of fallen to me to

champion ADA issues, being a wheelchair user.

And then, Senator Harkin was retiring
and I was in the House

and running for the Senate,
he called me over

and he said,
"Tammy, I'm handing the reins over to you."

(laughter) "I'm handing the torch to you.
You need to be the torch bearer

and you need to really represent
the entire disability community

because you, frankly, would't be here
had the disability community

not been there
before you even became disabled."

And he was absolutely right.

I find myself being the go-to person
on a lot of the ADA issues

as they come up in Congress.

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I said, yes, I was honored.

I mean, to be able to be handed
the mantle from

Tome Harkin is quite the honor.

And you know,
I don't know that I can fill his shoes,

but I try everyday to make sure
I do my best to represent the community,

but also to just fight for basic common--

and this is what I did in the Army,
I fought for freedoms,

I fought for people's rights.
And this is just a basic human right,

to be able to access the life
that you want to access,

and live the life that you want to live

and to be not be confronted by barriers
at every turn.

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I have been working on burn pit issues
for a very long time, and it started

from just my own experience
being exposed to the burn pits in Iraq.

We used to fly into Baghdad.

(cough)

We were stationed in Balad
and we would fly into Baghdad

into the the Green Zone.

And if you were on the ground
looking up, it always, just the sky,

always just looked a little overcast.
It didn't look anything, you know,

ominous, but flying through about a
50 foot, 100 foot layer of basically

brown skies, in the sky.

We used to burn the air crew's lungs
and you would go through there like,

Oh man, my eyes are watering,
my lungs are burning, and I always said

there was gonna be
some respiratory illnesses.

And then I started working on
Agent Orange issues within the VA,

and it was under President Obama
and Secretary Shinseki

that we finally

granted benefits to veterans
based on presumptive benefits.

So, if you develop (inudible) heart
disease, if you develop leukemia B,

and you were in Vietnam,
we're going to presume that it's

because of your Vietnam service.

We no longer force veterans to,
you know, prove that their illness

was caused by Agent Orange,
which is presumed.

And then, so that really started me
working on burn pits

after we were successful
with the Agent Orange campaign.

And so it's pretty much been
continuous ever since, and I'm really glad

we got the contract passed.

There's more work to do,
but it's a great, great, great, great,

first start.

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