This was the passage that smelled a little funny to me:
As Gabbard was settling into her political career, in 2003, she did something surprising: she joined the National Guard, and, when her brigade was shipped to Iraq, she volunteered to go, even though her name was not on the mandatory-deployment roster. She served as a medical-operations specialist on a base in the Sunni Triangle, and also as a military police officer, before attending officer-candidate school in Alabama, where she excelled; a second deployment took her to Kuwait. She often cites her time in the Middle East when asked to explain her political reinvention. By the time she ran for Congress, in 2012, Gabbard was presenting herself as a more or less orthodox progressive, pro-choice and pro-same-sex-marriage. “Experiencing as a woman, firsthand, the impacts of countries that are acting as moral arbiters for their people—it really caused me to rethink the positions I held,” she says. This realization was well timed, because it enabled her to win a Democratic primary in a state that was increasingly blue.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it felt to me like her decision to join the military, and her subsequent flip on social issues, were both motivated by her political ambitions.