Tulsi Gabbard

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.

And so I went through that list every morning looking to see if there were any of our soldiers who had been killed.

hit and injured the day before.

And, you know, comms are not always great.

We didn't always know who are, where are they?

Are they getting the care they needed?

And so I was tracking them down, figuring out what was going on.

What did they need?

Were they getting the care that they needed?