Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  I got to help in a few unique situations. A convoy of US troops was headed down the road and Iraqi kids ran out to greet them when suddenly all hell broke loose. An insurgent’s rocket hit the convoy and blew up. One of the boys, about thirteen, was tragically caught in the cross fire and severely wounded in one arm. The US troops gave him emergency medical attention on the spot, then rushed him to a base hospital. He lived, but his arm couldn’t be saved. Later, a soldier who’d met the boy connected him with a doctor in San Francisco who’d offered to arrange for the boy to get a prosthetic arm. Out of the blue, I received an email from this soldier, asking me if there was some way we could help get the boy to San Francisco.

  This request really caused me to choke up. Immediately, I arranged to pay for plane tickets for the boy and his father to come to the States. I just didn’t want to wait for any red tape or anything. But getting the boy and his father out of Iraq proved trickier. I called a friend at the state department, Susan Phalen, who’d spent time in Iraq. She arranged for the boy and his father to drive from Iraq to Jordan first, where she personally met them and accompanied them from Jordan to San Francisco. The boy received his new prosthetic, and he and his father flew home. It was a tough story in many ways, but for me, it felt important to have this personal touch and engage with real people, not just numbers or theories.

  Somebody I met thanked me for my work in support of the troops. He told me he had a friend serving at a military hospital in eastern Afghanistan, Major Catherine Crespo, a nurse. I reached out to her, asking if she needed any school supplies for the local children. She worked at the 349th Combat Support Hospital at Forward Operating Base Salerno and said she didn’t need any school supplies, but described how the medical staff saw many injuries from IEDs. These weapons can cause real devastation to the human body and leave behind dirty wounds that must be left open to heal. One tool of modern medicine that helps phenomenally with open wounds is a device called a wound VAC. The hospital used them so much they burned through the machines quickly, and it was slow going to get replacements from the Department of Defense. She asked if we could help.

  I had no idea what a wound VAC looked like or how much it cost. I called a buddy, a surgeon, who put me in touch with the manufacturer, a company called KCI. The devices cost $25,000 each, certainly more than pencils and shoes. But the company CEO’s father was a marine, so when the CEO learned what we were doing, he promptly donated three wound VACs, sent them to our OIC warehouse, and we quickly shipped them to Afghanistan. Catherine wrote, “These wound VACs most assuredly saved hundreds of lives, maybe more. They continued to be used by the medical units that followed us after we left.”

  Our focus, however, stayed mainly on school supplies and shoes. Throughout the years, we heard many positive stories from troops who were able to help children and parents. Troops would go into a village in the cold winter and see kids running around barefoot. They’d describe seeing children put on a new pair of shoes for the first time. The kids’ faces lit up with joy. Or the troops would just carry items along out on patrol and see a group of kids or mothers and donate shoes right on the spot. Troops described conversations with parents of Iraqi children who said what a big difference a simple gift of new school supplies made.

  Seldom was I able to distribute supplies myself, but once in a while I was offered the rare and wonderful experience of being part of a distribution team. In 2009, on my second trip to Afghanistan, my band came along, as well as my industry pals Kristy Swanson, Kevin Farley (Chris Farley’s brother), Leeann Tweeden, and Mykelti Williamson. It had been three years since my first trip to Afghanistan with the USO. Then, I’d taken along my brother-in-law Jack, and after a stop in the United Arab Emirates we arrived in Afghanistan where we roughed it a bit, sleeping in makeshift barracks, plywood rooms with rickety cots and wooden bunks. A C-130 had taken us to Bagram Air Base, where I visited with hundreds of troops before setting off for several small forward operating bases (FOBs) via Blackhawk helicopters. There I shook more hands and took just as many pictures, it seemed. Now, after three years, I was back, only this time with both school supplies and my band. This was a morale-boosting concert trip for the troops, and we were set to play three shows: one at Bagram Air Base, one at Camp Leatherneck for the marines (our stage was two flatbed trucks backed up into each other), and one at Kandahar Air Base, where I’d serve turkey, gravy, and all the fixings to our troops on Thanksgiving Day.

  We flew on American Airlines to Frankfurt, where we spent the night, then boarded a C-17 for the flight to Afghanistan. The plane was filled with pallets of ammunition and supplies, and we found room wherever we could fit. Upon landing at Bagram Air Base, I was met by Major General Mike Scaparrotti, and while the rest of the people on the trip stowed their stuff and rested up, Mike flew with me by Blackhawk helicopter to a small Afghan school near Forward Operating Base Garcia, near the Pakistan border.

  OIC staffers had preshipped five hundred backpacks filled with school supplies to the small FOB. A soldier at the FOB had emailed me earlier, asking me if it might be possible to get them some school supplies. We already had the trip and the Thanksgiving dinner planned, so I thought it would be great to surprise the soldier by going out to the FOB in person to help hand out the supplies to the children. To say that this soldier was shocked to see me is an understatement.

  We landed in the Blackhawk right at the Afghan school. Soldiers were already there with several trucks filled with supplies. Security was tight. A couple of hundred children were already lined up, and the atmosphere was charged with excitement. An interpreter explained what OIC was all about and who I was, then we went to work. It took about two hours to hand out all the backpacks. The children were amazing. Although some did not have shoes on their feet, and clearly all were very poor, they were wide-eyed and grateful and some of the most beautiful kids I’d ever seen. I took photos with them, gave high fives, and tried to take it all in. We didn’t have long at the school, so when the backpacks were all gone, we jumped back on the Blackhawk and flew back to FOB Garcia where I visited with some one hundred fifty troops stationed there. The entire area near the Pakistan border was considered dangerous, laced with Taliban insurgents.

  Years went by, and our program ran strong. Eventually, as our troops started being pulled out of Iraq, our program began to wind down. We stopped shipping to Iraq in 2011, and continued to ship to Afghanistan until 2013, when we officially closed OIC. Altogether, the program lasted for nine years, and during that time, OIC delivered 340,967 school supply kits, thousands of shoes and backpacks, more than fifty pallets of sports equipment, more than half a million toys, and eight thousand Arabic-language copies of Seabiscuit. OIC remains one of my favorite programs of all those I’ve been involved in.

  The children of Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t the only kids affected by the global wars against terrorism. In the early days of the war, I sat in my office thinking about all the casualty reports we kept hearing in the news. A heavy sadness washed over me. By then, I’d already done six or seven USO tours and met a lot of troops, and some of those men and women I’d shaken hands with had now died. My heart ached for their families, specifically for the children of US service personnel who’d lost their moms or dads in the conflicts. (As I write this in 2018, nearly seven thousand Americans have been killed in the wars against terrorism, with many thousands more wounded.)

  I went online and searched for organizations specifically geared toward helping children, and found Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. I’d met some folks on my first USO tour who worked with Intrepid, so I reached out to them and ended up on their board for a few years to help raise awareness for their initiatives. They’re connected with the Fisher House Foundation, which provides a network of conveniently located homes where the spouses and children of wounded service members can stay for free while their loved one is recuperating in the hospital. I also got involved with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which focuses on grief manag
ement for loved ones of fallen heroes.

  Still, I wanted to do more. I received a call from Roy White, who’d been involved with an event held a few weeks earlier, right before Christmas 2006, called the Snowball Express. Roy wanted to know if I’d help the next year. Their idea was simple. They brought the children of our fallen heroes to Disneyland just before Christmas to allow them to meet each other, to see that they were not alone in their grief, and to bring some joy and new happy memories to this special group of children who were experiencing so much sadness, especially at Christmas.

  Roy came to my office, along with early event coordinators Greg Young and Bill “Monsoon” Mimiaga, and they showed me a video of the Snowball Express event. I loved it! The kids looked like they were simply having fun, exactly what I wanted to be a part of. This was something that focused specifically on the kids. I made a financial commitment on the spot and donated my band to play for the kids at the 2007 Snowball Express. While we can never do enough for these children and their families, I wanted to do at least something.

  There’s no playbook on performing shows for grieving children, and my band and I learned things along the way. The following year, 2007, we held the first Lt. Dan Band concert for the kids at a theater called the Grove in Anaheim. We played the song “Hero” by Mariah Carey, a slower, moving ballad. In advance, we’d thought about this choice in the set list, and I wanted the kids to be strong, to know they are heroes to us. But because it’s an emotional song and I wasn’t sure how they were going to take it, I put Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga” in the set list as our next tune, a fun, fast-moving song, so we could shift the mood, just in case. We often perform “Hero” during our concerts for the troops, and I dedicate it to the families of our fallen and families of our wounded. It is always moving and well received as I remind them that when they are going through these difficult times, they should know there is strength and hope and a hero inside them that will help them find the way. And they are heroes to me. But sure enough, when we played it for the children, we quickly saw that the song meant something different, something heartbreaking—a reminder of the hero they had lost—and the mood quickly became somber. Kids started to cry—not what we wanted at all. We wanted the music to bring them joy and fun and help lift their spirits. We wanted them leaving feeling better than when they walked in. So when the song ended, I stopped the show, bent down, and simply hugged the children in the front row, one after another, as tears ran down their faces. Then we started up again with “Conga,” and that changed the mood and helped spark joy in the kids again. From then on, whenever we played for Snowball, I decided to only do songs that were going to make the kids happy.

  One family I saw backstage at Snowball that first year was the wife and children of Air Force Major Troy Gilbert, an F-16 pilot. I’d met the Gilberts in early 2006 at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona when I attended a ceremony for my friend Robin Rand, who was being pinned as a brigadier general. Later that year both Robin and Troy deployed to Iraq with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing under Robin’s command. On November 27, Troy was killed while flying a combat mission in Anbar Province, Iraq, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He went down with his jet while protecting twenty soldiers on the ground below who were battling insurgents. I saw Troy’s wife, Ginger, and their children that day at Snowball before we played the concert. Surprisingly, nearly ten years later, I would receive a phone call from Robin, now a four-star general, inviting me to attend a funeral for Troy at Arlington National Cemetery. Troy’s body had been missing for a decade. Al Qaeda insurgents had removed him from the crash site. By the time our forces got there, only a piece of his skull was found in his helmet. The skull was buried at Arlington. In 2013, an additional limited amount of remains were recovered, prompting another burial at Arlington. Finally, in 2016, the rest of his remains were recovered by US Special Forces and returned home. On December 19, 2016, Troy was laid to rest. He is the only US service member to have been buried at Arlington three times. At the end of the final ceremony, we all looked to the heavens as the missing man formation of F-16s flew through the sky. One aircraft abruptly broke away from the pack, in memory of the fallen pilot. It was a powerful and emotional moment. Troy’s wife is a wonderfully strong woman, and I know the Snowball event in 2007 helped her and her children through a very difficult time.

  Backstage at my first Snowball event, I also met Jim Palmersheim, an American Airlines pilot and Operation Desert Shield/Storm veteran who at that time was volunteering in support of the new Military and Veterans Initiatives (MVI) program at American. The airline has done a lot of caring for veterans. AA lost two planes on 9/11, and their representatives were now doing all they could to support our nation’s defenders. American Airlines had supported the first Snowball Express event in 2006 and were supporting it again the following year. An instant friendship sprang up with Jim.

  A year later, in 2008, I volunteered my band to do another concert to support an organization called Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes at their event in Orlando, Florida. They serve and support our wounded service members, and I’d begun helping them back in 2004. At this 2008 event, American Airlines was lending travel support. Jim Palmersheim was there and had now become managing director for Military and Veterans Initiatives at American. After the event, he and I sat down for a drink and I told him all about Operation Iraqi Children. Our minds started cooking up an idea, and he arranged for an American Airlines plane to ferry school supplies to Iraq—twenty-two tons of school supplies on that one flight alone. It was a big donation and a big trip. Over the years, AA has done great things for our veterans and for the families of our troops.

  From that first event in 2007, I’ve supported Snowball Express every year since. In 2008, I couldn’t bring in my band due to scheduling difficulties, but I still wanted to support the kids. So, on the Snowball Express weekend, after my shoot at CSI: NY finished at 6:00 p.m., I jumped into my car and headed down to Anaheim, where I took pictures with kids and signed autographs, then presented the organization with a donation of $10,000 from Moira and me.

  In 2009, the event moved to Dallas, the main hub for American Airlines. A huge group of volunteers and local sponsors got on board, and the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth made available many great things for the kids to do. From 2015 to 2017, my concert for the kids was held in Fort Worth at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base. The entire Snowball Express four-day event includes magic shows, parades, skits, bowling, and face painting. Scholarships are given out to older teens. The most moving part of the event comes when the children march down the street surrounded by cheering residents of Dallas–Fort Worth, each child, upward of fifteen hundred of them, holding a balloon. The children have written messages on the balloons to their fallen parent. The balloons are released into the sky. The messages of love soar into the heavens. Dallas rolled out the red carpet for these children for nine good years, and each year the Dallas volunteers did absolutely everything possible to make sure the children had a great time.

  I love this event for the kids so much that in 2018, we brought Snowball Express under the Gary Sinise Foundation umbrella of programs, and moved the event to Walt Disney World Resort in Florida. Dallas is terrific, but to change things up and give the event new life, it was time to move to “the happiest place on earth.” Some one thousand kids and 668 parents and guardians came in 2018, and everybody had a great time.

  New children come to Snowball Express each year, and it’s sobering to realize they are not new because they haven’t heard of the program before, but because each year our troops continue to give their lives. When children turn eighteen, they graduate from Snowball to make room for additional children. Each year we see returning children too. It’s moving for me to stand onstage and see these children grow up, year after year, always with the loss of their parent in mind. It never really goes away. Some of the older teens adopt a mentoring attitude, and they take the younger children under their wings and help
them through their difficult experiences.

  I could not be prouder to be a part of creating opportunities for joy, friendship, and communal healing by connecting families struggling with loss to one another. Together, they share a common bond and can feel part of a bigger family. The children meet and interact with others who understand what they have been through, and help each other through this unique and terrible experience. It cannot be overstated what an event like this can mean to a child who has lost a parent in military service. Struggling with their grief can be overwhelming, and uniting together with hundreds of other children experiencing a similar tragic loss can be the magic that carries them throughout the year.

  One of the children’s favorite songs that we do year after year is “Life Is a Highway” by Tom Cochrane, covered by Rascal Flatts and featured in the movie Cars. The song’s got a great up-tempo feeling, and it always sets the crowd dancing. During that song, I always welcome the kids to come up onto the stage with us so they can bop around with the band. Word gets out beforehand, and kids pile up in front of the stage waiting for the moment they know I’ll invite them up. There’s so much joy on their faces during these moments. It’s such a blessing to interact with the kids this way.

  At the same time, I’m always reminded of the solemnity embedded in these moments, of the incredible cost represented in the faces of the children who come to this event. I feel for these families so deeply. I hurt. How profoundly grateful we all must become—as individuals, as a nation—when we realize anew the magnitude of the sacrifice given for us. Freedom is never free. Someone has to pay.

  Last year, one girl wore a T-shirt to the event with these words printed on the back: “In honor/memory of . . .” and underneath the words was a blank box where kids could write in the name of their fallen hero.