Tammy Duckworth

Ladda Tammy Duckworth was born on March 12, 1968, in Bangkok, Thailand, to American Frank Duckworth, a Marine veteran working in refugee resettlement, and Lamai Sompornpairin, a Thai Chinese woman from Chiang Mai. The family moved across Southeast Asia and the Pacific during her childhood, and she finished high school at McKinley High in Honolulu in 1985. She earned a bachelor's in political science from the University of Hawaii in 1989 and a master's in international affairs from George Washington University in 1992.

Duckworth joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps as a graduate student and was commissioned into the Army Reserve in 1992, choosing aviation. She trained as a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot, one of the first women in the Illinois Army National Guard to fly the airframe. While completing doctoral coursework at Northern Illinois University, her unit was activated, and she deployed to Iraq in 2004.

On November 12, 2004, a rocket-propelled grenade struck her Black Hawk near Taji, Iraq, severing both legs and damaging her right arm. She received the Purple Heart at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and recovered while completing her doctorate in human services in 2015. Governor Pat Quinn appointed her to head the Illinois Department of Veterans' Affairs in 2006, and President Barack Obama named her assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in 2009.

Duckworth won Illinois's Eighth Congressional District seat in 2012 and won her U.S. Senate seat in 2016, taking office on January 3, 2017. In April 2018 she became the first sitting senator to give birth in office and prompted a rules change permitting infants on the Senate floor. She married Major Bryan Bowlsbey in 1993, and the couple have two daughters, Abigail and Maile.

The name Tammy is an English diminutive of Tamara, ultimately from the Hebrew tamar, meaning date palm, a tree associated in the Hebrew Bible with grace and fertility. She has carried the name as a feminine middle-given name placed first, a common American practice for women who go by a casual short form rather than a longer first name.