Dan Milberg is a retired Army helicopter pilot who voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016, and does not wish to vote for him again. But before he can consider pulling the lever for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he needs to know who his running mate will be.
“It might be someone too progressive,” said Mr. Milberg, who lives in Robertsville, Mo.
The one person who would put him at ease, Mr. Milberg said, is the pilot whose seemingly lifeless body he lifted from a helicopter in 2004, her legs blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade not far from Baghdad: Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.
It is not so much the event that indelibly marked both of their lives and earned Ms. Duckworth a purple heart that draws him to her, Mr. Milberg said. Rather, he continued, she “is moderate enough that I think she can be appealing.”
Ms. Duckworth is among more than one dozen women who have been considered by the Biden campaign to join his ticket, and she is among a smaller group asked to submit documents for vetting. But she is rarely talked up by Washington’s consultant class.
She is not one of the Democratic senators who ran for the top job this cycle and then became part of the vice-presidential search. She is not from a battleground state; vice-presidential candidates often are. She is not among the running-mate contenders who are black; many leading Democrats feel Mr. Biden should choose a black woman, in part because of the growing public attention to and support for fighting systemic racism. Her politics are in some ways abstruse; she largely votes with her party but she is not particularly identified with any progressive cause, other than an often bipartisan distaste for protracted foreign entanglements.
But presidential candidates generally try to find a running mate who can both complement and highlight their own political qualities, and in that sense, some experts say, Ms. Duckworth fits the bill.
“Let’s say Biden makes this all about restoring decency in America — you are looking at people you think can help solidify that,” said Joel Benenson, a chief strategist for President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns.
“Tammy Duckworth has some policy chops,” he said. “She is obviously someone who has been prominent enough to speak at the last three Democratic conventions. She served in the House, she won a Senate seat and she brings credentials around armed services and veterans. She is center left, and you know I think that is where Biden is.”
Ms. Duckworth, who has two daughters, was the first senator to give birth while in office and the first to bring her newborn to the floor for a vote. Her mother is Thai of Chinese descent, and her father was a white veteran who fell on such hard times that Ms. Duckworth once helped support the family while growing up by selling flowers on the side of the road in Honolulu.
Her background and experience could prove a boon in places around the country that resemble Southern Illinois, firmly Trump territory but where she too has prevailed.
“I can push back against Trump in a way others can’t,” Ms. Duckworth said in a telephone interview from her car last week as she waited to attend a Juneteenth demonstration in Grant Park in Chicago.
“I can say, ‘Listen, that American flag is the same flag that would drape my father’s coffin, my coffin, my husband’s coffin and my brother’s.’ It has draped them for generations,” she said. “No one respects that flag more than I have. But I will respect the right to protest it, too.”
Two people with knowledge of the vetting process say that Ms Duckworth’s early interviews with the Biden campaign were impressive enough to make her a contender.
Ms. Duckworth, 52, was born Ladda Duckworth in Bangkok. Her father, who served two tours in Vietnam, moved the family around Asia as a program director for the United Nations and for the private sector. “I got to see America in many ways through the eyes of other nations,” she said. (She is fluent in Thai and Indonesian.)
He moved the family to Hawaii after losing his job, when Ms. Duckworth was in her last year of high school. The family was forced to live in a low-rent hotel in Waikiki with the financial help of a 90-year-old woman who volunteered at the local American Legion, making do with food stamps, school lunches and her odd jobs. “I learned about the kindness of people,” she said.
After graduating from the University of Hawaii, she headed to Washington to pursue a master of arts in international affairs at George Washington University, largely because she wanted to join the foreign service. While there, she joined the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps in part for the class credits.
“I didn’t crave to join the military,” she said. “But I just absolutely fell in love with the Army. Even during basic training, I, many times, locked myself in the latrines to cry my eyes out. But because it was so hard in the Army, it didn’t matter that I was a little Asian girl. It was all about, Can you shoot straight? Can you show leadership abilities?” She moved to Illinois and joined the Illinois National Guard in 1996.
Her colleagues in the military described Ms. Duckworth as deliberate and serious when in uniform, but jovial and even silly during downtime. “You’d be lying under the helicopter out in the sand,” Mr. Milberg said, “any subject could pop up and we would be making jokes and carrying on.”
In 2004, Randy Sikowski was an operations officer in the Illinois National Guard charged with finding commissioned officers for a mission to Iraq, and Ms. Duckworth was the first to raise her hand. The unit was stationed in Balad, known as “Mortaritaville” because of the constant incoming fire.
The day of the event that would change Ms. Duckworth’s life forever was “a pretty generic one,” Mr. Milberg said. They buzzed around moving people and supplies, stopped at a base in Baghdad to pick up some Christmas presents, then had a milkshake before making one last-minute pickup.
Ms. Duckworth had been doing the flying all day so Mr. Milberg requested to take the last flight, enjoying his gentle dives between the palm trees. Suddenly, about 15 minutes from their destination, three large noises and a pop echoed through the helicopter, which started shaking violently.
Mr. Milberg managed to land the aircraft on a small strip of open woods. Only then did he look over.
A grenade had punctured the floor of the cockpit near his partner.
“I saw Tammy leaning against the instrument panel. Her head was resting on it, facing me. Her face was grayish colored,” he recalled. “I pretty much thought the worst.”
He and others dragged her to safety through a large field.
“We were running through this stuff trying to carry her,” he said. “We would fall, get back up, walk two steps, fall.”
Mr. Sikowski did not see the woman he recruited for that mission again until the following year, when he went to see Ms. Duckworth at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “I will never forget coming around the corner,” he said, choking back tears. “Tammy was in a wheelchair. I still remember what she said to me: ‘I don’t know how you made it there after I left.’ She was worried about me.”
That summer, Kevin Conlon, an activist who raises money for Democrats, got a call. “A person says, ‘This is Captain Tammy Duckworth. I am calling from Walter Reed Hospital. I was in Iraq, I got shot down, but I want to run for Congress. Can you help me?’”
Ms. Duckworth was already on the radar screens of Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who had seen her testify at a hearing on military health care just a few months after her injury, and Rahm Emanuel, at the time a congressman in charge of the Democratic Party’s recruitment efforts for the 2006 election.
Mr. Emanuel was also making a big effort to get veterans to run.
“She is very methodical,” he said “We started to get to know each other before I actually recruited her.”
Ms. Duckworth narrowly lost that first bid in 2006 for an open seat in the Chicago suburbs to Representative Peter Roskam, a Republican. Weeks later, she was named director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2009, she moved to the post of assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
In 2012, the Tea Party stalwart Joe Walsh, a first-term congressman, saw his House district redrawn to be more Democratic. Ms. Duckworth made another run, and she easily won.
Mr. Walsh still gripes about that 2012 race, describing it as one that Ms. Duckworth was “handpicked” to win. The Democrats, he said, “set her up with a wonderful congressional district that was impossible for me to win.”
Representative Cheri Bustos, another Illinois Democrat, said Ms. Duckworth has not had it easy. She recalled seeing her at a lunch event struggling with her tray and her lingering injuries. “It occurred to me to ask her, ‘Tammy, are you ever in pain?’ And she looked at me with a smile and said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s Tammy. She never complains.”
Four years after her first House win, just a few months after having her first child, she easily defeated Senator Mark S. Kirk, a Republican, in a race for the seat once held by Mr. Obama.
In the Senate, Ms. Duckworth is best known for working on veterans and military issues, like a bill to help reduce veteran suicide and to help returning veterans find jobs in the private sector.
Her dramatic military story endears her to audiences, but her hardscrabble upbringing and life as a working mom are what help her connect. “Once they let a soldier through the door at the Corn Growers Association, then I get to talk to them about everything else,” she said.
But she does not shrug away her brush with death.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t wake up and think of Dan carrying me through the field,” she said. “I wake up every day thinking I am never going to make Dan regret saving my life.”
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