Before 24 November 1985, Jackie Nink Pflug’s biggest concern was checking off the items on her daily “to-do” list. But the day she woke up in a Malta hospital bed with a male nurse by her side preparing to shave her head, everything changed.
“All I could say was, ‘Is this really necessary? I just got a perm.’ All I could think of was the small stuff and here’s this nurse saying ‘we’re trying to save your life’. So I said ‘okay’.”
That was the day Pflug was shot in the head, execution-style, during a terrorist hijacking and left to die on a runway in Malta.
Pflug told her incredible story to a crowd of 450 people at the second Women of Courage 2005 luncheon at the Mississauga Convention Centre on Wednesday. All proceeds go to Interim Place, a local shelter for abused women and children.
A native of Texas, Pflug was the only American to survive the terrorist attack on EgyptAir flight 648 from Athens to Cairo.
Now a Minnesota-based teacher and motivational speaker, Pflug, at the time, was living and teaching in Cairo with her husband when she accompanied him on a short trip to Greece while he coached a sports tournament. She cut her vacation a day short to fly home for work.
Shortly into her flight, a man with a gun stood up and yelled at passengers to sit down and shut up. Four other men joined him and started seizing passengers’ passports.
The Palestinian terrorists, who called themselves the Egypt Revolution, demanded to go to Libya. When their request was refused, the plane was diverted and landed in Malta. The terrorists then lined up passengers, shot them point-blank every 15 minutes, threw them down a 25-foot staircase and left them to die.
When it was her turn, Pflug did one thing – pray. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “I just asked for life and I knew if I lived I’d be okay and I knew if I died I’d also be okay.”
When it was her turn to be shot, Pflug said a feeling of reassurance and safety washed over her. The terrorists opened the door of the plane, pressed a .38 calibre gun hard into her head and shot her.
She lay still for five hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. When she opened her eyes, she assumed she was in heaven but it turned out to be the runway. She was still alive.
Pflug woke up with a caved head, as the bullet hit her head so hard it collapsed the right side of her skull. She lost her peripheral vision and short-term memory. Doctors said she would never work or drive and she fell into a deep depression. “I just wanted to stay home and watch TV and cry,” she said.
Still, she said, she forced herself to get dressed, go out and meet people. She told her story to numerous media, wrote a biography and helped counsel people after 9/11.
“I made a commitment to do whatever I had to do to feel whole again. I didn’t care how long it took, how much it cost. I just had to do it.”
Her commitment to herself paid off – within two years she got her driver’s licence back, within four years she got a job as a motivational speaker and 17 years later, she went from a kindergarten reading level to Grade 12 – her proudest accomplishment.
Fifty-nine of the 98 passengers on board her flight died, mostly Greeks and Egyptians. Pflug said her experience taught her to be thankful for life, not to sweat the small stuff and live life to the fullest each day.
“Sometimes what appears to be a major setback is sometimes an opportunity to test our strength and make ourselves grow,” she concluded.