WATCH: ‘It was carnage. It was chaos,’ Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards says of Jan. 6 attack

Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards said in her opening statement June 9 before the House Jan. 6 committee that on the day of the attack and in the days that followed, she was called a number of names, including “Nancy Pelosi’s dog,” “incompetent,” “hero,” and “villain.”

Watch Edwards’ remarks in the player above.

“In actuality, I was none of those things. I was an American, standing face-to-face with other Americans, asking myself many, many times, how we had gotten here,” Edwards said.

She recalled her grandfather, a marine who fought in the Korean War, and “would like to think that he would be proud of me, proud of his granddaughter that stood her ground that day and continued fighting, even though she was wounded, like he did, many years ago,” Edwards said.

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“I am my grandfather’s granddaughter, proud to serve my country.”

Edwards detailed the severe injuries she sustained trying to defend the Capitol from insurrectionists, telling the House Jan. 6 committee one of the things she remembers most is looking out and seeing “the absolute war zone the west front had become.”

Edwards was attacked by rioters multiple times as she tried to protect the Capitol that day. She was tear gassed and knocked down to the ground, at one point losing consciousness. At another time that day, she held the line against the rioters with Officer Brian Sicknick, who she described as “ghostly pale.” Sicknick collapsed the evening of the attack, suffering two strokes and dying the next day.

“I can’t even describe what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle. I’m trained to detain a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, but I’m not combat trained. And that day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, of dealing with things that were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for.”

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“There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood … It was carnage. It was chaos,” she said.

Edwards was the first witness to testify in a public hearing, along with filmmaker Nick Quested, who documented much of the violence that day.

The hearing June 9 was the first of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee in the coming weeks. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.