by Gary Sinise
Over the next few days, we started seeing little American flags on cars all over the city. I pulled into a gas station and bought one for our car. We soon installed a larger American flag on the outside of our house. Everywhere we went, a feeling of support for the United States abounded. Fear mixed with love. We worried about America, about what had just happened, about what might come next. Yet a larger movement had begun to brew. Patriotism was ramping up, making a huge comeback. We felt that we were all in this together. We strove to come together as individuals within the same country and support one another during this senseless tragedy. We would not let this tragedy ruin us.
But the days still felt dark. Images of 9/11 kept replaying through my mind. I saw the Towers exploding and falling. I saw men, women, and children covered in dust, running through the streets of New York City. I saw firefighters running up the steps of the Twin Towers—the same steps that people inside the building had just run down to escape death. I saw people jump from the towers, their bodies falling out of the sky. I pictured the pilots killed with box cutters. I saw smoke rising from the Pentagon, and saw the huge, gaping gash in the building after being hit by a plane. I saw one lone American flag stuck on a hay bale in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, marking the site where Flight 93 crashed. I saw people frantically poring over missing person posters in New York City. I saw first responders sifting through the massive mountain of twisted steel and concrete at Ground Zero, searching for bodies and any signs of life. The images replayed and replayed in my mind. They wouldn’t leave.
The attacks occurred on Tuesday. The following Friday morning, President Bush flew to New York and toured the still-smoking Ground Zero. As he stood on top of a pile of rubble with retired firefighter Bob Beckwith, the president put his arm around Beckwith in solidarity. Using a bullhorn, President Bush began his now-iconic speech by calling out to searchers: “America is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn.”
A searcher called from the back of the crowd, “I can’t hear you!”
Instantly the president called back, “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”
A raw nerve had been touched, and the rescue workers at Ground Zero began to chant, “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!”
President Bush called for a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for that same Friday. In the afternoon, I took my family to our church in Malibu. Mourners packed the church. We couldn’t find a place to sit, so we stood with others along a side wall. People looked stunned, and quietness settled on the church. Father Bill, our priest, began his message by saying simply, “This has been a tough week.” Then he paused. I don’t remember anything else specifically that Father Bill said that day—my mind churned so much—but I know he talked about service and volunteerism, about supporting each other through times of need, and about how service to others can be a great healer. At the end of his message, we all sang “God Bless America.” Tears rolled down my face as I tried to choke out the words, but I couldn’t get them out. My crying became too much. I gave up and just let the tears flow.
My heart broke for the families who’d lost loved ones on 9/11, and I ached for the enormous waste and destruction of lives and human potential. I was highly concerned for our nation, for the future, for my own children. That same Friday night, impromptu candlelight vigils cropped up across the country. In Malibu, a vigil formed on a street corner not far from our house. After we returned from church, Moira and I and the children headed out the door for the vigil, but before we’d reached the sidewalk, I said, “Wait,” ran back to the house, and lifted our American flag from its holder. I carried the flag with us to the vigil.
On the street corner, faces looked somber, but strangely triumphant in unity too. One voice began to sing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” and we all joined in. When that finished, someone began “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and we sang with all our might. When the national anthem finished, I raised the American flag over my head. As if on some unseen cue, everybody turned toward the flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
The memory of Father Bill’s message mingled with the sorrow, passion, and patriotism I felt at the vigil. As we walked home that evening, I wondered what I could possibly do to support my country during this terrible time.
In October 2001, our troops began to deploy to Afghanistan in response to the attacks of September 11. Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, had planned the attacks and trained the perpetrators. The son of a billionaire, bin Laden had been born in Saudi Arabia, but the plot to attack America had been hatched in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were harbored and supported there by the Taliban, who controlled the country.
Our troops soon started taking their first casualties. Each name on the nightly news I held close. Our servicemen and -women fought the terrorists on our behalf, and our servicemen and -women were now getting wounded and killed. I felt a terrible sadness for them and their families.
I wrestled with many issues. Anger, anguish, and despair flooded my mind. So many innocent people had been killed on 9/11. Nineteen radical Islamic terrorists had trained to kill Americans at flight schools within our own country. The terrorists had been taught how to fly our airplanes by my fellow citizens, unaware at the time that the men they trained were plotting to use the airplanes as weapons. I didn’t want our country to be at war. I didn’t want our servicemen and -women to have to be deployed. But I knew we had to respond.
An issue of justice remained unanswered. What happened on 9/11 revealed absolute evil, and evil must be confronted and defeated. That meant our nation’s defenders were going to be called upon to do the dangerous and difficult job of combatting our enemies. When I thought about it that way, I was fully in support of that response. If we didn’t respond, then who would be attacked next? If we didn’t do something, what other innocent people would die?
As a country, we started to wake up to the fact that when it came to national security, we had been far too complacent. We’d failed to see the signs, to connect the dots of the threats to us.
We still had a collective memory of the First Gulf War, its two parts code-named Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Back in the summer of 1990, right before I’d auditioned for A Midnight Clear, Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq, had pushed his armies into neighboring Kuwait and claimed it for himself. A coalition of thirty-five nations, led by the United States and Great Britain, came to Kuwait’s aid. I remembered turning on the TV and seeing the entire night sky lit up by antiaircraft fire. Saddam’s troops blasted away at our bombers as those planes rained fire on Saddam-controlled Baghdad. By the third week in February 1991, Saddam had been driven out of Kuwait; the First Gulf War was over, but not before we’d lost 383 Americans, with many more wounded. I never imagined then that one day I’d travel to Iraq myself.
In February 1993, just before I went to shoot The Stand in Utah, news came that a truck packed with thirteen hundred pounds of explosives had been parked in a garage at the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Terrorists lit the fuse and the truck exploded, killing six innocent people and injuring more than one thousand. Investigators later learned that the terrorists had planned to bring down one tower and topple it into the other, ultimately bringing down both Twin Towers and killing everybody inside. Most of the bad guys were caught this time, but not all. Investigators found the information on where the truck had been rented and discovered that the idiot who’d rented the truck had actually used his real name. He was eventually linked to a group of terrorists, including one of bin Laden’s partners in Al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was not apprehended in 1993 and was later named the main architect of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Today, it astounds me to think that radical Islamic terrorists had planned and tried to bring down the Twin Towers a full eig
ht years before they eventually succeeded. Why didn’t we see it coming?!
On April 19, 1995, I was working on Truman in Kansas City and turned on the TV news to see the chaos unfolding in downtown Oklahoma City. Two domestic terrorists had detonated a truck packed with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 innocent people and injuring another 680. Another terrible day for our country, coinciding with my wife’s birthday. That coincidence made the atrocities seem even more personal.
On June 25, 1996, Hezbollah terrorists bombed a housing complex called Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Coalition forces had used the complex as housing in their operation to enforce a no-fly zone in Iraq. Nineteen American Air Force members were killed, with many others wounded.
On August 23, 1996—a full five years before the attacks of 9/11—bin Laden officially declared war on the United States. He was angry that American forces were still in Saudi Arabia, where we’d been stationed since the First Gulf War. The Saudis expelled bin Laden, so he’d moved his terrorist training organization to Sudan, and then to Afghanistan. In February 1998, he declared war on the United States a second time, lumping the West and Israel together with this declaration.
He was serious about his declaration. On August 7, 1998, two US embassies were simultaneously truck-bombed by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda henchmen—one in Tanzania and the other in Kenya, killing 224 and injuring more than four thousand. After the truck bombings, the FBI placed bin Laden on their Ten Most Wanted list.
In October 2000, the USS Cole was bombed by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda while on a routine refueling stop in a harbor in Yemen. At lunchtime, with many sailors aboard ship lined up for chow, two suicide bombers piloted a small speedboat close to the vessel and blew themselves up, killing seventeen sailors and injuring another thirty-nine. A United States battleship had been blown up. If that isn’t an overt act of war, I don’t know what is.
After 9/11, I started remembering all these events and thinking, Why didn’t we connect the dots better? Why weren’t we better prepared? I was afraid for my country, for my family. A plan began to form in my mind to do something bigger than myself, something that would support our country in its response to the reality of terrorism. I concluded that the best way I could do this was to support our nation’s defenders. I didn’t know yet what this would mean. But I knew I wanted the men and women who were deploying to know they were appreciated, and that a grateful nation backed them up. The thought of our returning warriors facing any sort of treatment similar to what our Vietnam vets received when they came home was very troubling to me. I couldn’t stand the idea of our troops going off to fight Al Qaeda on our behalf and then being mistreated upon return. We couldn’t make the same mistake twice.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, I was asked to emcee the Chicago 9/11 memorial event held in Daley Plaza, in the middle of the city. More than one hundred thousand Chicago citizens packed the area, and tears flowed. It was a very somber day. I wasn’t primarily known for my work with veterans yet, but I’d been doing bits and pieces along the way. People knew I’d created the veterans’ nights at Steppenwolf. I’d supported the DAV since 1994 when Forrest Gump came out. I’d helped raise money to build a veterans’ memorial in Lansing, Illinois, and I’d supported the American Veterans Center awards ceremony in 2000. (And over the next decade, I was always somewhere on September 11, hosting some kind of memorial event.)
But I had yet to make a full commitment.
Over the next few years, the hunt for bin Laden continued. (His eventual killing on May 2, 2011, in Pakistan by SEAL Team Six and other participating units prompted Al Qaeda to vow vengeance). But in 2003, focus was shifting toward Saddam Hussein in Iraq. US intelligence believed Saddam had significant chemical and biological weapons, perhaps even nukes, that he planned to use against us. I felt deeply conflicted about this. It looked now like a second war would be started, and I hated the idea of more war. Yet I held a deep concern for the future of America. What would my own children experience in this new post–9/11 world?
Slowly, America adjusted to the new normal. We took off our belts and shoes in the airport. We consented to random pat-downs. We couldn’t go all the way to the arrivals gate anymore. We saw young people enlist and head off to war. We began to understand we were fighting a new kind of war against a cowardly enemy who blended in with the population, an enemy who often used children and civilians as shields, an army of suicide bombers, a war that wouldn’t be over anytime soon.
Yet life continued for America, and work continued for me. In February 2003, I shot the movie The Human Stain, starring Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman, and Ed Harris and directed by Robert Benton. I played Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who develops a theory about how the characters played by Anthony and Nicole are killed. In one scene, I go out to the middle of the lake to confront Ed Harris, the bad guy, who is ice fishing. We needed a frozen lake, but shooting wasn’t set to begin until mid-March. So Ed and I were asked to shoot the scene in February on a frozen lake just outside of Montreal. It was freezing cold. Ed’s character wore plenty of clothes, but my character had only a thin overcoat. My teeth chattered as the camera rolled. And in that period I often felt myself shaking for other reasons, ones that had nothing to do with the weather.
In early March 2003, the shoot finished, and I came home. My brother-in-law Jack Treese and I got to talking—debating, really. He was a hawk about our country and was convinced we needed to go into Iraq. Because he’d been a combat medic in Vietnam, I took his views seriously. Unmistakably, Saddam was an evil killer. His sons were evil killers. Saddam tortured and killed many, including his own countrymen, in unimaginable ways: by tearing people apart, feeding them to wild animals, lowering them into vats of acid, burning off their limbs, and raping women in front of their families. He squandered millions of dollars given to him by the United Nations’ humanitarian oil-for-food program and used it instead to pay the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $15,000 to $25,000 every time they blew up Jews in Israel. Some 117 of these bombings were carried out.
On February 5, 2003, Colin Powell made a convincing presentation to the United Nations that Saddam continued to build weapons of mass destruction in spite of UN Resolution 1441 demanding that Iraq comply with its disarmament obligations set forth in previous UN resolutions. Saddam had killed some 5,000 women and children by having Iraqi jets drop poison gas on them. All told, he killed as many as 250,000 Iraqis, 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds, and many other men, women, and children. This post-9/11 world was a frightening place, and Saddam Hussein was an evil, evil man—no question about it.
Yet I was not completely on board with sending our troops into a new war zone in Iraq. “I just don’t want to see any more of our men and women get killed,” I said to Jack, my adrenaline rising.
We debated each other hotly for some time, and eventually I blew up and walked out of the house. For an hour I circled the block, thinking, cooling off. All kinds of political problems were bound up with the plan to go to war with Iraq. To name just one, a few years earlier we’d actually supported Iraq when they were at war with Iran. As I walked, the hawk and dove parts of me tore at each other. I wanted evil to be confronted, but I didn’t want anybody to have to actually do it. We’d invaded Afghanistan nearly a year and a half before. Our men and women were getting killed and wounded, and we still hadn’t found bin Laden. Yes, we had removed the Taliban, and Al Qaeda was on the run, and I was glad about that, but I was reluctant to open up another battlefront and go into Iraq because more Americans were going to get hurt and die.
I debated and debated myself, circling the block. Finally, a switch flipped. I decided the necessity of the cause outweighed the problems associated with the invasion. Evil needed to be confronted, and Saddam was evil. Period. He needed to be stopped.
A few weeks later, on March 20, 2003, our troops began the invasion of Iraq in a mission titled “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” A month after the war began, I watched on TV with th
e rest of the world as our troops and the Iraqis wrapped one end of a chain around a tank and the other around the statue of Saddam Hussein in the town square in Baghdad—and yanked that bastard down. The local Iraqis, filled with rage, surrounded the statue and beat Saddam’s image with their shoes, a sign of great contempt and disrespect in that culture. The evil dictator finally had been toppled—figuratively and literally—and he was now on the run. (Eventually he was caught hiding in a hole in the ground near Tikrit. Saddam was tried by the Iraqi judicial system and executed on December 30, 2006.)
Shortly after the liberation of Iraq began, something big began to stir inside me. My thinking turned a corner, and I made a decision to go all in, making my commitment to support our troops stronger, more permanent. And as there was clearly a divide brewing in our country over whether we should or should not be fighting a war in Iraq, I had a fear that our troops, like those who fought in Vietnam, would be caught in the middle, not feeling supported and appreciated for their service. A fuller mission began to galvanize in my mind, heart, and soul. I began to feel a new and compelling calling to serve directly. I didn’t want to serve only a little bit, then go back to my golf game. I wanted to do something lasting.
Throughout my entire life, I’d always been the type of person who chose to act—not in the theater sense of the word, although I did a lot of that. I mean take action. Whether it was starting a band that lip-synced for a living room full of neighborhood kids, or working with my fellow high school students to fashion our own theater company, or taking a great production to New York, or moving out to Los Angeles so I could work in the movies—I’d never been the kind of guy who sat around and talked, or wondered, or thought about stuff without doing something about it, at least not for long. My response had always been to take action—and hopefully doing so would benefit other people along the way.