Each Day Is a Present: A Memoir

In
Each Day Is a Present, Tammy Duckworth takes readers via the superb—and amazingly true—tales from her incomparable life. In November of 2004, an Iraqi RPG blew via the cockpit of Tammy Duckworth’s U.S. Military Black Hawk helicopter. The explosion, which destroyed her legs and mangled her proper arm, was a turning level in her life. However as Duckworth exhibits in
Each Day Is a Present, that second was only one in a lifetime of extraordinary turns.

The biracial daughter of an American father and a Thai-Chinese language mom, Duckworth confronted discrimination, poverty, and the horrors of warfare—all earlier than the age of 16. As a toddler, she dodged bullets as her household fled war-torn Phnom Penh. As a teen, she offered roses by the facet of the highway to avoid wasting her household from starvation and homelessness in Hawaii. By these experiences, she developed a fierce resilience that may show invaluable within the years to return.

Duckworth joined the Military, changing into one in all a handful of feminine helicopter pilots in the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She served eight months in Iraq earlier than an rebel’s RPG shot down her helicopter, an assault that took her legs—and practically took her life. She then spent 13 months recovering at Walter Reed, studying to stroll once more on prosthetic legs and planning her return to the cockpit. However Duckworth discovered a brand new mission after assembly her state’s senators, Barack Obama and Dick Durbin. After successful two phrases as a U.S. Consultant, she received election to the U.S. Senate in 2016. And he or she and her husband Bryan fulfilled one other dream when she gave beginning to 2 daughters, changing into the primary sitting senator to offer beginning.

From childhood to motherhood and past,
Each Day Is a Present is the outstanding story of one in all America’s most devoted public servants.