Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  In those early months of 2003, I realized like never before the cost of freedom, and I knew freedom needed to be defended. I knew places existed in our world without freedom, and I knew that without freedom, none of the good and fulfilling ways we in America aspired to live our lives would be possible. This realization helped fuel me more than ever before. It made me profoundly grateful for being an American, able to live in this land of freedom, able to make something of my life. When it came to my service, I wanted to be all in, all the time, living out my calling every single day for the rest of my life.

  I can most certainly say that what happened to our country on September 11 broke my heart and changed me forever. It forced me to rethink everything. What do I really believe? How do I want to raise my kids? What kind of example do I want to set for them? What can I do to give back to this great country I love? How can I use my good fortune to help? It was a turning point and marked the beginning of a new level of service. I found that the more I gave, the more I healed.

  Two months after watching the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down, I was on a plane to Kuwait.

  Nothing would ever be the same.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Bridge Between Worlds

  Hi, I’m Gary Sinise, and I’d like to go on a USO tour. Please call me back.” I left my number on the voice mail.

  A couple of weeks went by; all I heard were crickets. I concluded the USO must receive a large volume of calls with requests similar to mine, so I called again and left a second message. (This was April 2003, and fax machines were still big, so I sent a fax too.) “Hi, I’m Gary Sinise, and I’d like to go on a USO tour to support the troops. Please get back to me.”

  Chirp, chirp. Those crickets were deafening.

  The United Service Organizations (USO) has been around since 1941, and the driving purpose is to enable Hollywood celebrities and volunteer entertainers to go to wherever troops are—both domestically and overseas—and help boost morale. USO representatives say hello, shake hands, scribble autographs, and put on live shows. Most of all, USO reps bring messages of affirmation and encouragement from back home.

  Many famous entertainers have been part of USO tours over the years. In World War II and on into the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, USO reps included Abbott and Costello, Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Humphrey Bogart, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Marlene Dietrich, Duke Ellington, Judy Garland, Betty Grable, Connie Stevens, Raquel Welch, Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth, Laurel and Hardy, Ann-Margret, Glenn Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Martha Raye, Ginger Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, Fats Waller, John Wayne, many others, and, of course, Bob Hope.

  In more recent years, USO entertainers have included Trace Adkins, Drew Carey, Jay Leno, Steve Martin, Marie Osmond, Sinbad, Bruce Willis, Robin Williams, Jessica Simpson, Carrie Underwood, Toby Keith, Kellie Pickler, Wayne Newton, and many more.

  When I called in 2003, this was before CSI: NY. So I concluded the USO didn’t know who I was. Although I’d done a lot of movies by then, I was still mostly known for one role. I called again in May and left a third message—this time more strategic. “Hi, this is Gary Sinise calling again. I’d like to go on a USO tour. I want to do as much as I can to support the troops. Please call me back. Oh, by the way, I’m the guy who played Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump.” Simultaneously, I asked my publicist, Staci Wolfe, to help me double-team them, and she reached out to them as well.

  A representative from the USO returned my call the very next day. A big USO tour was coming up the following month, she explained. Would I like to be a part of it?

  I grinned. “Absolutely. Lieutenant Dan would be happy to go.”

  Called “Project Salute,” the upcoming tour marked the first largescale USO visit to the Persian Gulf region since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. More than 180 entertainers would come along. Signed up already were Wayne Newton, Kid Rock, Alyssa Milano, Leeann Tweeden, Brittany Murphy, Lee Ann Womack, Neal McCoy, Paul Rodriguez, John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, the hip-hop band Nappy Roots, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, football players, basketball players, and many more. Even Robert De Niro was set to show up midway through the tour.

  I was really looking forward to this trip, wanting to do my part to support and thank our troops for defending us, and to let them know we were thinking about them. I’d never been to a war zone before and didn’t know what to expect, or what exactly I would see or do once we got to Iraq. But I was ready to go. On June 16, 2003, I flew from L.A. to Washington, DC, where tour members gathered for the first time. A few performers looked as excited as I felt, but mostly we all just shook hands and climbed aboard the plane, a donated 747 from Northwest Airlines, and headed overseas. I was an actor who wanted to do something positive for the troops. I had no other plans.

  Our plane touched down in Kuwait City late afternoon on June 17, and after going through customs we checked into our hotel to get some rest. The next morning the USO officials split us up into three groups. My group made a stop to visit folks at Camp Doha Army Base just outside the city, before heading to Camp Arifjan, the main military installation for all US branches of our military. After visiting with a group of troops there, we boarded several large, tandem-rotor Chinook helicopters, and the pilots flew us to Camp Udairi. The ramp of the helicopter was open in the back, and from the air I saw a huge sprawling tent city in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert. Someone said we were about fifteen miles from the Iraq border, and the camp could accommodate some fourteen thousand troops. Already the temperature soared. It might have been 110 degrees Fahrenheit outside, maybe more, although it was hard to tell. The air felt sticky, sandy, and as we touched down I squinted at the clouds of dust that rose off two man-made ridges of sand surrounding the camp. A string of barbed wire topped the ridges, and guard posts dotted the perimeter.

  We all scrambled out of the helicopters. Generators hummed nearby, and a few helicopter rotors were still winding down, making it hard to hear. I smelled a whiff of plastic portable toilets, as a tan-colored US armored vehicle with a machine gun turret on top barreled down the road close to us. Saddam’s statue had been pulled down in Baghdad a few months before, and Saddam was on the run. I felt safe, but my eyes darted to and fro, keeping a sharp lookout for I don’t know what. We’re in a war zone, I reminded myself.

  A USO representative motioned for us to follow him, and he led us to a big tent near the center of the camp. The tent had an entrance on each side. Generators worked overtime to pump in air-conditioning. We headed for one door, and at a door on the other side, a line of at least a thousand troops waited in the heat to get in. As we headed in, they started to applaud. The atmosphere inside crackled. Maybe another thousand uniformed troops already inside the tent broke into applause when we came into the tent. I took a deep breath. What have we done? They deserve the applause, not us. But wow! It was amazing. Even with a little air-conditioning, it was hot as hell in there. But nobody seemed to care. We lined up, and the troops lined up and quickly started to file past us.

  We smiled and shook hands and posed for pictures, and everything happened quite quickly. The very first soldier I met said, “Hey, Lieutenant Dan, you got legs!” And then each one down the line just kept calling me Lieutenant Dan over and over. I realized they didn’t know my real name, so I went with it. I tried to look each person in the eye, tried to ask each soldier where he or she was from, tried to ask how things were going, but nothing I did felt very deep, because we had to keep the line moving; there were so many people to see.

  Two hours later we needed to leave. The same USO representative herded us back toward the helicopters. As the helicopters began to take off, I looked off into the distance in the direction of Iraq and envisioned hundreds of our tanks rolling across the border a few months before. I looked out again across this vast tent city in the middle of nowhere. Soon, it would be renamed Camp Buehring in honor of Lieutenant Colonel Charles H. Buehring, who would be killed in the coming months. As the s
un began to set and the base disappeared in the distance, I reflected on what had just happened. We’d seen nearly two thousand troops in two hours. I wondered, Did we actually do any good? The helicopters ferried us back to Camp Arifjan. It was night now, and after we landed and shook the cotton out of our ears, we headed back to the hotel for a night’s sleep. Tomorrow we would be getting up early to head up to Baghdad. As tired as I was, it was hard to sleep that night.

  The next morning I grabbed a quick bite to eat, gathered with the rest of my group, and shuffled off to Arifjan where a big C-130 military transport plane waited for us. The heat beat down from the sun. Inside the C-130, two long lines of foldable seats faced each other from either side of the airplane. I found my seat and strapped myself in. Toward the back of the plane, I noticed pallets of equipment and supplies. We were all part of the cargo.

  The man to my right wore a button on his shirt bearing a photo of two young men, one a New York City police officer, the other, a firefighter with the FDNY. We struck up a quiet conversation, and I learned he wasn’t an entertainer. The two young men were his sons, and both sons had died on 9/11. He was there because he wanted the troops overseas to know that America supported them. The man was maybe in his mid-sixties and spoke with a low rasp. Scars ran across his neck, and later I found out he’d survived throat cancer. The man carried a chunk of rock. Concrete maybe. He showed it to me, then passed it my direction so I could feel it too. I ran my hands over its rough surface. It felt like any old piece of rubble. Puzzled, I asked him what it was all about, why he was carrying all this extra weight.

  He swallowed once, twice, then his eyes grew wet. He whispered, more hoarsely than before, “It’s a piece of the World Trade Center.”

  A few hours later we landed at Saddam International Airport on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq. In early April 2003, this was the site of one of the fiercest battles of the war as the Iraqis fought hard to keep control of runways. It would soon be renamed Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). The temperature must have climbed to 120 by the time we arrived. The air felt thick—like the Mojave Desert on the hottest summer’s day. Security looked tight, and we were informed the airport was mostly safe (although a few months later a civilian airplane was struck by a Russian-made SA-14 missile shortly after takeoff). I longed for a bottle of water.

  When we clattered down the cargo plane’s ramp, I could only shake my head in disbelief. In front of us, waiting in two long rows of uniforms, stood American soldiers. Thousands strong. Lining our route all the way from the cargo plane to the hangar like a happy gauntlet. We simply walked forward and shook hands on the way to our destination. Soldier after soldier. Marine after marine. Sailor after sailor. Airman after airman. Smile after smile. I felt choked up inside. Happy to be there. Honored. Grateful. So incredibly grateful. We were here for them. But they had our backs. They weren’t going to let anything bad happen to us. They were there for us.

  Inside the hangar, another five thousand troops waited for us. Kid Rock led the charge along with a few members of his band. Country singer Chely Wright walked with Rebecca and John, followed by model and sportscaster Leeann Tweeden and Nappy Roots. I came last, and we all made our way onto the stage.

  My shirt was soaked. It must have been 130 degrees inside the metal hangar. Oven-hot. Noisy. Echoes bounced off the metal walls. The troops looked ready for a show, but I glanced at Kid Rock and he kinda shrugged. No one in our group had heard anything about a show, so we weren’t exactly prepared. Luckily, a soldier-led rock band had entertained the troops just before we arrived, and their equipment still sat on the stage. Kid Rock grabbed an electric guitar, John Stamos sat in on the drums, Kid’s bassist hopped in, and country singer Chely Wright jumped on a microphone to sing some backup. They all fired up the opening chords to “Sweet Home Alabama,” and the crowd went nuts. It was a crazy good time, sweat flying off the stage as the energy built. When the song finished, a few football players joined us onstage and were introduced, and the crowd cheered. Leeann Tweeden, dressed in a sexy red, white, and blue top, was a knockout doing interviews with the troops throughout the hangar with her camera crew from The Best Damn Sports Show Period. Nappy Roots launched into an impromptu hip-hop tune, and when they were done with rockin’ the hangar, someone introduced me as “Lieutenant Dan,” and the crowd went nuts again. I got up and said a few words. Everybody in the crowd was smiling. Clapping. The energy ramping up. From the front of the stage, I took a good look at the crowd. The expressions on the troops’ faces fascinated me. There they were, all piled into that hangar where it felt like a sauna. Sweat beaded on every forehead. But in spite of the heat, everyone was having a rocking good time. It was surreal to be there.

  When I stepped off the stage, I collected my thoughts. I’d heard some stories already. I knew some of the troops in that hangar had already experienced some bad stuff. They’d lost buddies, seen arms and legs lost to artillery and rockets. The man who’d sat next to me on the plane took the stage, along with two other 9/11 family members. He held up the piece of the World Trade Center, took the microphone, and spoke of what had happened that terrible day. The noise hushed. Soldiers nodded, and some bowed their heads. We’d heard that many of those same troops had volunteered right after 9/11. When the man was finished speaking, he passed the chunk of the Trade Center to a soldier at the front of the crowd. The soldier held it carefully, almost reverently, nodded, then passed it to the soldier next to him. One by one, each soldier touched the piece of concrete as it made its way around the hangar. That chunk of rubble seemed symbolic, even sacred. It represented a moment of great change in America. A change that each and every one of these service members were a part of. A cause so much greater than any one person.

  Kid Rock and the gang headed back onstage and blasted away for a few more tunes. I stood backstage while the show rumbled along, and an officer came up and asked me to come with him to meet some soldiers who were getting ready to leave the base. He wondered if I would simply say goodbye to them. I nodded and said sure, then went alone with the officer outside of the hangar and over to a squad of soldiers standing on the tarmac. Fully armed. Fully suited for battle.

  “Where you guys headed?” I asked.

  One just grinned.

  The officer spoke for him: “Into combat.”

  I simply shook hands and tried to say a few encouraging things. The squad members climbed aboard the truck and rode away, and it hit me anew what these soldiers’ jobs were all about. In my mind I said a silent prayer: Let them all be safe. Let them all return home again to the people who love them.

  I headed back into the hangar. Once the concert finished, I was able to sort through the crowd and locate Captain Justin Morseth, a young rifle platoon leader with the Third Infantry Division. His father-in-law sat on the board of directors for Steppenwolf, and Justin’s wife had given me a letter to give to him if I could find him. And I did. We were indeed able to arrange to meet backstage, and there among the loud noise of five thousand sweaty troops enjoying the entertainment, Justin smiled at the letter when I hugged him and handed it to him. He opened it right there and read it on the spot. Mail was finding its way to the troops, but there was something special about having a letter hand delivered from home, he said. The kind word from home absolutely made his day. And Leeann’s camera crew caught the whole thing on video.

  We boarded the C-130 again, strapped ourselves in, and flew back to Kuwait. It was a good day, but I was beat. In the evening, we landed, grabbed some quick chow, and returned to our rooms in the hotel around nine o’clock. For a few minutes I simply wandered around my room, culture-shocked to stand again in the civilian world. I felt jet-lagged, dusty, exhausted, and I knew I stank. For a while I sat on the bed, replaying the day in my mind, trying to take it all in. Then I peeled off my clothes, turned on cold water, and stood under the shower until I almost felt normal again. I dried off, threw on boxers and a T-shirt, lay down on the bed, and closed my eyes.

  I
must have dozed off, but when the phone rang I opened my eyes. My watch read just after 11:00 p.m. An official from the USO was on the line: “Hey, Gary. General Tommy Franks is heading back up to Baghdad first thing tomorrow morning. He wants to take a small group with him. This part of the trip is optional. You in?”

  “Count on me,” I said. “I’m ready to go right now.”

  I didn’t know exactly where we’d be going or what we’d be doing, or even if I could sleep the rest of that night. But I knew General Franks, a four-star general, was as tough as they come—and whatever he was doing, I wanted to go his direction. Not only had Franks led the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan that had ousted the Taliban regime, he’d also led the 2003 invasion of Iraq that had ousted Saddam Hussein. The general had just retired a few weeks earlier, on May 22, 2003, but he would still be active in his position until July.

  Early the next morning, we met on the tarmac at the airbase. It was a smaller group this time that included John Stamos and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Alyssa Milano, and Robert De Niro, who shot footage with a small video camera. General Franks greeted us with a smile and a handshake, and we snapped a few pictures for posterity. I’d met lots of celebrities before, but I couldn’t quite believe a man of this magnitude was standing right before my eyes. We flew up to Baghdad again, but this time no double-sided wall of troops greeted us. This time, instead of staying at the airport, we donned flak jackets and helmets and climbed into a convoy of trucks that sped us into the heart of the city. Images of Saddam lined the street. Paintings of his face still hung everywhere. We saw huge concrete pillars with big iron busts of Saddam’s head on top. One was toppled, lying facedown in the dirt. You couldn’t go anywhere in Baghdad without being reminded who the dictator had been. Three helicopter gunships hovered above us the whole way, providing security for the convoy. We were in the heart of the battlefield now. This was urban warfare, and anything could happen.