Tulsi Gabbard

He's like, oh, you can stay home.

You're doing great work in the legislature, all this other stuff.

I said, you don't understand.

I am not staying back and waving goodbye to you guys.

as you get on that plane.

So I suspended my reelection campaign.

Wow.

They found a job that needed filling in what was called the Charlie Med, the medical company in that brigade combat team.

I got trained for that job that they needed filling, was logistics and operations, essentially.

And so left office and went on that deployment.

And...

to say it changed my life is an understatement.

Just every day being confronted with that heavy human cost of war, the very first task that I was responsible for every day.

I was the brigade surgeon operations officer, basically.

And the very first task that I had every day was to go down a list of names of every single American who had been injured in combat the previous 24 hours.

We had close to, I think, around 2,500, 2,600 soldiers from our base

Hawaii National Guard brigade combat team in four different battle spaces in Iraq.

This was in 2005.

Oh, yeah.

A lot going on.