‘Where Do You Think I Lost My Legs?’ Senator Tammy Duckworth Hits Back at Trump’s SecDef Nominee for Saying Women Shouldn’t Serve in Combat 

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) took exception to comments from President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Defense.

Trump chose former Fox News host and combat veteran Pete Hegseth for the role on Tuesday, raising eyebrows among Democrats. That includes Duckworth, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which will hold hearings on Hegseth’s nomination. Duckworth is a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot who served in Iraq, where she lost both her legs and the partial use of her right arm when a rocket-propelled grenade struck her helicopter.

On Wednesday’s edition of The Source on CNN, host Kaitlan Collins played a clip of Hegseth speaking against women serving in combat.

“I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles,” he said. “It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”

In the same clip, Hegseth railed against “woke shit” in the military.

“He’s not qualified to serve as secretary of Defense,” Duckworth responded. “And obviously, he’s made these comments about how he doesn’t think women should be in combat, and that he wants to be able to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… We can’t go to war today without our women military members. And yet, he wants to judge the military at a time when we have a significant recruiting crisis. Again, I mean, it’s beyond ridiculous that he’s being nominated.”

Collins responded by noting Duckworth’s service and asked, “What did go through your mind as a woman who has served when you heard him saying that women should not be in combat roles?”

The senator replied by stating that there are currently 225,000 women serving on active duty, adding:

Our military cannot go to war without our female service members. This is not the Revolutionary War where there’s some sort of a line in the sand, and combat is on one side, and the rest of us can stay behind, and that’s not combat.

I would ask him, where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight? I’m pretty sure I was in combat when that happened. You know, it just shows how out of touch he is with the nature of modern warfare if he thinks that we can keep women behind some sort of imaginary line, which is not the way warfare is today.

Watch above via CNN.