officer gunnel, you talked about your tour in iraq and what have you. thank you for your service. can you give the committee a sense of comparing those two experiences with what you experienced on january 6th? >> sure. back when i was in iraq some time on a convoy mission to provide mutual support or taking care packages and whatnot to all the detachment. we went to roadside bomb infested, ied convoys. my fears were minimal around that time. it was not as constant. i know we knew at that time that we could run over an ied and that was it. at least we knew that we were in a combat zone. here in our country in our very own capitol, we are being attacked not once, but multiple times. >> can you pull the microphone to your chest? >> sorry. not only were we attacked one time, but it was multiple times over and over, different people. they hit us. they got tired of hitting us and then they switch, somebody else rotating in. as my colleagues also had said, we were at the lower entrance tunnel and we didn't have a chance to rotate ourselves until later on after an hour and a half later. w

in the crypt, i encountered sergeant gunnel who was giving assistance to an unconscious woman. i helped to carry her to the house majority leader's office where she was administered cpr. as the afternoon wore on, i was completely drained,both physically and emotionally and in shock and total disbelief over what had happened. once the building was cleared, i went to the rotunda to recover with other officers and share our experiences from what happened that afternoon. representative rodney davis was there offering support to officers. when he and i saw each other, he came over and he gave me a big hug. i sat down on the bench in the rotunda with a friend of mine, who is also a black capitol police officer and told him about the racial slurs i endured. i became very emotional and began yelling "how the blank could something like this happen? is this america"? . i began sobbing. other officers came over to help me. later on january 6th, after order and security had been restored in the capitol through the hard work and sacrifices of law enforcement, members took the floor of the h

let me go back to yesterday and capitol police officer gunnel when he talked about self-sacrifice.clip] >> my thinking was we cannot let these people in no matter what, even if it cost me my life -- it costs meet my life. that bloody hand you saw, that is me in there. and both my hands were bleeding bad. and at no point in time did i stop to consider because the attacks were so relentless that all you had to do -- all i thought was i need to survive this if possible but i am willing to sacrifice myself to prevent this, the attackers, from coming in. i swore an oath to protect the public, members of congress and the united states constitution, and that is what i was doing that day regardless of my personal safety, along with anyone else that was there that day. they were calling -- calling us traitors even though they were the ones committing treasonous acts that day. it was demoralizing for people, whatever your party is, to call this attack, to continue to minimize it like nothing happened. it was an attempted coup that was happening at the capitol that day, and if it had been ano