by Gary Sinise
I often wonder about these things. God’s plan for us. Destiny. Or if life is a series of random accidents as one small seed is planted, and years from now the “history we don’t know” is changed.
I think about how a ragtag kid, struggling in school, happened to be standing in a high school hallway at the exact right moment the drama teacher came walking by, changing the course of his life, and how that would lead to his getting together with some buddies and starting Steppenwolf Theatre. Or how one supporting film role for that kid became such an important story for wounded veterans everywhere. Certain events in our lives, certain turns we happen to make, or not make (if I’d gone right instead of left, if I’d gotten out of bed a little later that day), can lead to larger and more purposeful things that we never imagined—things that can inspire and reach many people for good.
In 1997, I played the role of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire at Steppenwolf. Terry Kinney directed the play, and he hired a Chicago composer named Kimo Williams to create some original music for the production. A professional musician and professor at Columbia College, Kimo had fought in Vietnam, and we became friends. Kimo had heard I played a little music myself, so more than once he invited me over to his house for a casual jam session. The intensity of Streetcar, however, was exhausting, so during the show’s run I never took him up on the offer. But after we closed the show and I was set to head back to L.A., an evening became free. Kimo called up a couple of other musicians he knew, we ordered some pizza and beers, and we banged around on guitars, drums, keys, and bass. It was just a simple, fun evening with some like-minded guys. I didn’t know it then, but I think a tiny seed of something may have been planted in the back of my mind that would grow into something great in the coming years.
My next movie was Snake Eyes with Nicolas Cage, filmed in Montreal. Some of the local guys on crew had a band, and one guy kept a small rehearsal studio, so we all got together one evening and jammed. A driver on set owned a club with a dance floor. He heard about our jam session and invited us to play at his venue. I had hardly picked up my bass since my early twenties because I’d been so focused on Steppenwolf and my career, but playing at a club sounded fun. We needed another guitarist for the club session, so I called Kimo and offered to spring for a hotel and fly him up to Montreal if he’d play with us at the club. He said sure. We went into the rehearsal studio, learned some tunes, invited all the cast and crew from Snake Eyes, and threw a party. All of us musicians twanged onstage while everybody else bopped around on the dance floor. It was a relaxed and fun and crazy good time. I even spotted Charlie Sheen—in town making a movie at the same time—on the dance floor in a black fedora, arms in the air, rocking out with our cast and crew. From then on, whenever I was in Chicago, I’d call up Kimo if I had a free evening, and he’d get the guys together. We’d play a little music and eat pizza and hang out. That’s how we started.
After 9/11, my life’s focus radically changed, as it did for so many people. The transformation didn’t happen all at once, but my mind-set definitely shifted. I still cared about my acting career, but in an earnest and new way I cared about so much more than acting. Wherever I went, I looked for new ways I could support the troops. I had no formal backing or team of people alongside me. As I went from acting job to acting job, I simply did whatever I could that related to this new thing I’d come to care about.
In 2003, about two weeks before my first trip to Iraq with the USO, I called up Kimo and said I’d like to put together a music event to honor the troops. I figured we could find a venue in Chicago and host a show, inviting any troops nearby to come and hang out. We’d play some fun cover tunes that would make them smile and try to honor them with a free night out. That was my big idea.
Kimo was associated with the National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, a really cool place with a big area devoted to artwork done by Vietnam veterans. Kimo liked my idea, so he arranged for us to hold the event in the museum’s large upstairs room. We contacted the USO, because we figured they’d know some military personnel we could invite. We ordered pizza and beer. A bunch of troops came over, we put on a show, and everything seemed to go well.
All the band members except me were professional musicians. Even so, our band sounded a little ragged at that hastily-put-together first show. We all sort of knew some songs, but we hadn’t gelled yet as any kind of band. What we lacked in cohesion, we made up for in enthusiasm and volume. For that first show, I played bass. Kimo played guitar. A singer with a tremendous voice named Gina Gonzalez played acoustic guitar and sang with us. My longtime keyboard player, Ben Lewis, played that first show, and his brother Matt played trumpet and belted out some tunes. A fantastic Chicago-area guitarist, Ernie Denov, was there as well, and along with Ben has been with the band ever since. That informal event on June 10, 2003, is now considered the first USO concert my band ever played. We were just Gary and his buddies, playing for the troops. That last phrase began to take a greater hold of my soul. Without knowing it, we joined what we loved doing with a new motivation—and when joy connects to mission, a life’s purpose begins to take shape.
Two weeks later, I went on the USO trip to Iraq. I watched how Kid Rock’s band really entertained the troops and brought smiles to their faces, and I saw by their expressions how the troops felt when someone with a big name showed up just for them. I saw how slumped shoulders turned into lifted spirits. How maybe a soldier would walk into the venue with a thousand-yard stare, but by the end of a show he had a new lightness in his step. The songs of America had reminded him of home, and in a small way, perhaps even reminded him of the freedom he was fighting for. Seeing this transformation was so moving to me. On the 747 on our way back to the States, even though I was tired from the trip, I was full of energy, pumped up and inspired by what I had just experienced. I was standing with some of the USO folks and said, “Gosh, I’d like to take a band on tour. I play music too. You think I could put on a show?” They nodded politely and changed the subject. I’m sure they were thinking, Oh great. Another actor with a band.
But I didn’t ignore the vision starting to take shape within me. After I returned from that first trip to Iraq, I immediately asked the USO where I could go next. They set up another handshake tour to visit troops in Italy two weeks later. They said I could take a few people with me, so in addition to asking my brother-in-law Jack Treese, I called up Kimo. Both guys said yes, and it was great to have these two Vietnam veterans coming on the trip with me.
On July 4, 2003, the USO held a big outdoor celebration at Carney Park, a recreation center for US troops near Naples, Italy. I shook hands there. We watched Mustang Sally, the all-girl band from Nashville, entertain the troops. They put on a great show, and once again I felt the desire to do something like that too. Two days later we visited the troops at the Air Force National Security Agency at La Maddalena, Sardinia, and toured the USS Emory S. Land, a US Navy submarine tender. From there we met with troops at Aviano Air Force Base, where I had the great privilege of experiencing a ride in an F-16, before heading down to Sicily to see troops at the Naval Air Station Sigonella.
I saw how important these handshake tours were for the troops, but I couldn’t get the idea of a band out of my mind. Still, I needed to think through a strategy. Plenty of professional bands were already entertaining the troops—and doing a great job. What could I do that they couldn’t do—particularly when I wasn’t even a professional musician? I began to wonder what sort of message the troops would receive if a new band was put together solely for their encouragement. Maybe this band could be started from the ground up with that mission in mind. Maybe this new band wouldn’t exist for any other reason than entertaining the troops.
Maybe this new band, in a way, would always belong to them.
I called up the USO and mumbled through my vision. I still had no fleshed-out plan. Again, they humored me for a second but quickly changed the subject, wanting me to continue with the handshake tours. They mai
nly wanted more well-known bands with bigger names to do the entertaining. The USO’s mission is to deliver celebrities to the troops, and while I was slowly rising in my profile as an actor, I understood their point of view regarding musical acts. Still, I felt my idea had merit. I kept talking it up, kept nudging them about it, kept going on USO tours, and eventually they softened. Maybe I just wore them down, but I think they saw how devoted I was to the overall USO mission, so finally they said okay.
Wow. It was actually happening—meaning we needed some songs to play. I called Kimo. “Guess what?” I said. “Next February, we’re going on a tour with the USO. And—oh—we gotta figure out something to play.”
Kimo chuckled. “Great, Gary. I’ll call the guys. We’ll figure it out. Let’s get some songs together and rehearse.”
Even I was shaking my head that the USO had agreed to take a chance on us. USO organizers had never heard us in concert, and it’s not like we had a CD we could hand over so they could hear our sound. In addition, I wasn’t a songwriter or a professional musician, and I didn’t have any established music tours that anybody could point to. I didn’t even really have a band at the time. So I have to salute the USO officials, because the decision showed tremendous flexibility and vision on their part.
But they trusted we would deliver a great show. And I think they agreed to send me on tour because I was Lieutenant Dan. I’m sure they crossed their fingers and hoped I could play.
A short while later, they told me where we were going. First up were two back-to-back shows at the Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a small base on a remote island in the Indian Ocean. I’d never heard of it before, but a smaller show was okay by me. Probably the USO representatives figured that if we stunk, nobody would hear about it from the tiny island of Diego Garcia. From there, our schedule called for a stop at a naval base in Singapore where we’d do another show, then on to South Korea for three shows: the US Army Garrison Humphreys, Kunsan Air Force Base, and Camp Casey.
I was excited and also a little nervous. I felt a personal responsibility to put on a professional-caliber show for the troops. Our troops were worth it. I didn’t worry about getting booed off the stage; I just didn’t want to let the troops down with a bad show. Fortunately, our tour was still a couple months away.
Around the same time that the officials from USO World Headquarters in DC agreed to set up a tour, and just before my second handshake tour to Iraq, we asked the Chicago chapter of the USO to set up a concert, preferably at a smaller venue. We needed experience playing for the military under our belts. The USO representatives agreed and set up a show for some two hundred recruits on November 6, 2003, at Naval Station Great Lakes. It’s the navy’s only “boot camp.” We played okay, but I knew we needed more practice. Still, our first show on a military base felt great, and I got to deliver a message that I would continue to deliver over and over in the coming years: Thank you, and I am grateful for you.
A few weeks later in November 2003, I headed back to Iraq for a second time with the USO. This tour had already been set up prior to my band’s creation, so I flew overseas alone. Chris Isaak was set to give a concert at Camp Anaconda near Balad. He found out I played bass and asked me to jump in with his band onstage. Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” proved a big hit with the crowd. The show had maybe five thousand troops in attendance, and between songs I took the mic and said a few words of encouragement. Somehow, the show felt different, although at first, I couldn’t put my finger on why. What was it exactly? Bigger crowds? A bigger name onstage? Then it hit me. I was playing for the first time in a war zone.
Camp Anaconda, also known as Balad Air Base, was a big base. Under Saddam Hussein, it was the most important airfield used by the Iraqi Air Force. The base was captured by the US as part of the invasion in April 2003 and was pretty beat up when I was there in November. Parts of some runways still could not be used because of bomb damage. We visited the base hospital and saw many of the wounded who were being stabilized to be sent home. I was staying in a building that had taken a beating during the battle for the base, and it was very rugged, with no lights or plumbing, a tiny army cot to sleep on, and porta potties down the road. I learned to always keep a large empty plastic water bottle by the bedside.
One night, I awoke to the sound of what I thought were noisy pipes. The sound kept going, and I realized it wasn’t pipes. I got up and walked out into the darkened hall where, for security detail, a few soldiers were standing by. I asked what I’d heard.
“Mortars,” one said. “They’re shelling us on the other side of the base.” My heart sank a bit. But since the soldiers didn’t seem too worried, I went back to the little cot in my room and tried to get some sleep, one eye open for the rest of the night.
Back home, in early February 2004, right before we were to head overseas with the band, Steppenwolf’s board held a fund-raiser golf tournament in Palm Springs. They needed entertainment, so I gathered Kimo and the band and we played, basically cramming our rehearsing in as tight as we could. We learned enough music to play for ninety minutes solid. If a show called for two hours, we were sunk. But hey—the golfers thought we were pretty good.
A week after the fund-raiser, which was our second official practice, Kimo and I and the crew headed overseas as a band for our very first time. Almost until the moment we left, the band still didn’t have a name. But during those first handshake tours in the summer of 2003, it had occurred to me that if I were ever able to bring a band on tour, it needed to be called the Lt. Dan Band. Nobody knew who Gary Sinise was, and the troops always identified strongly with the Forrest Gump character. The Lt. Dan Band seemed natural and proved a straightforward choice. So that’s the band that flew off on that first tour.
Diego Garcia is a million miles from nowhere and takes nearly twenty-four hours to get there. First London, then Hong Kong, then Singapore, then onto a US Navy jet for another five-hour flight to a little atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean where our US military base sits. It’s so far away that getting entertainment to the island is a rare thing. So even though the “Gary Sinise” of Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band was a mystery, Lieutenant Dan was not. The character was well-known already, and word seemed to have spread among the troops that the real Lieutenant Dan was here to play for them. So, while it wasn’t a huge crowd to start, this was our first overseas crowd, and it seemed pretty good to us. And we had another show there the next night, so we assumed word would spread that, although not quite Earth, Wind & Fire, we’d still be a fun show.
We were introduced, and a few people whistled and wahooed. Still backstage, my heart pounded, and I looked around at my band members. We were all jet-lagged, and the energy of playing was going to be all over the map. Yet we all made a silent pledge: we would go big with everything we had. One by one, we filed onto the stage, me wearing fatigue pants and a tank top because of the heat. I glanced at the people milling about in front of us, and we blasted away into our opening song. I closed my eyes, and the nighttime temperature seemed to soar. A minute later when I opened my eyes, I looked out again, and the crowd seemed to be getting a little bigger, and they really seemed to be having a good time. Midway through the show, we launched into “Purple Haze.” Kimo was channeling Jimi Hendrix while Ernie Denov played his electric guitar behind his head, giving it his all. For the next song, Gina Gonzalez channeled Janis Joplin, singing the hell out of “Piece of My Heart.” By the time our show finished, my tank top was drenched in sweat, the crowd had swelled a bit more—and everybody had been partying hard, dancing like nobody was watching. I started breathing easier, and for the first time it felt like we were taking off. When we got to Singapore, the secretary of the navy introduced us, and the crowds grew a bit bigger. Then we went to Korea and did three shows there. At every venue, importantly, the troops seemed to have a good time, especially at Kunsan Air Base where they packed into the officers’ club and I would meet Colonel Robin Rand, who would rise to the rank of four-star gener
al and become a dear friend in the coming years.
Our time in Korea proved particularly eye-opening, even startling. Americans are so blessed to live in a free society, yet many people are not so fortunate. The band toured the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea near Camp Bonifas, a United Nations Command military post. When I traveled there, between the two countries lay a foot-wide strip of concrete, about four inches off the ground. That was the borderline. The North Korean guards and the South Korean guards could come right up to their respective edges of the border and look across. I stood right next to that border, and there was probably no place on earth where you could feel more vividly the difference between freedom and slavery than there, staring into the eyes of a North Korean soldier just a few feet away. Several blue-colored buildings overlapped the line, with doors at either end of the buildings. The North Koreans could enter from their side, and the South Koreans could enter from their side. In the middle of each building is a common area with a table that straddles the border. Over the years, meetings and negotiations between the two countries have been held at that table.
Our band has traveled to South Korea three times—in 2004, 2009, and 2015—and each trip we visited the DMZ. More than once we saw North Korean guards studying us with binoculars and taking our pictures—official photos taken by guards wanting to know who was getting so close to the border. During several trips we toured the insides of the blue buildings. You could actually walk around freely inside these buildings—technically on either side of the border. On one trip, a North Korean guard came right up to the window where I stood inside the building. He snapped my picture, then stared at me for some time. I snapped a picture of him in return, then simply tried to hold his gaze and smile a bit, in the interest of maintaining goodwill. The man didn’t smile back. In his eyes I saw a deep and distant sadness, a haunting, almost blank despair.