Grateful American

by Gary Sinise

  With Dad’s various medical issues, I spent a lot of time taking him to different doctors. One day, while at an appointment, I received a call from our housekeeper. A pipe had burst at home, and water was pouring from our ceiling. My mom and daughter stayed with Dad at the doctor’s office while I raced home to check things out. Repairmen had been working on our heating ducts, and by mistake one of the guys had hit a sprinkler pipe in the crawl space.

  At the time, several other family members in addition to my parents lived with us. My nephew, Gavin Treese, had done two deployments to Afghanistan in the US Army and was now serving as a recruiter in Simi Valley. When his father, Jack, was diagnosed with cancer, Gavin was able to get reassigned to be near Jack in his final days. At the time the pipe broke, he, his wife, Kari, and their two kids, Aidan and Delilah, were staying with us. My daughter and her husband were also with us, and my sister-in-law Amy was still in the guesthouse where she had lived with Jack. Water can quickly wreak surprising amounts of damage. We needed to rip out all the damaged sections of our home, and the renovation became so extensive, we had to move everybody into a hotel, and then a rental house, until the work on the house could be finished.

  Not long after the pipe burst, while we were still in the hotel, my phone rang. The clock read 3:30 a.m. My mom’s voice came on the line. Dad felt miserable, she said. He was really in a lot of pain. I raced up to their hotel room where Dad lay moaning, foam edging the corners of his mouth. Within five minutes, the paramedics arrived and rushed him to the hospital. A scan showed massive bleeding on Dad’s brain. He was eighty-five years old. The surgeon told me they needed to operate immediately. If they didn’t, Dad would surely die that same night. I scribbled my signature on all the permission forms, and within two hours of my first running up to his room, Dad was undergoing emergency brain surgery.

  For the next three and a half weeks, Dad remained in intensive care, hovering between life and death. I canceled everything else on my schedule, including a troop-support trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and stayed with him every day. He’d been intubated, and when they finally took the tube out, his throat ached. He tried to talk, but he was very emotional, as tearful as my grandpa Dan had been in the hospital.

  After Dad had been in intensive care for some time, Moira asked our priest to come to the hospital. He prayed for my dad, then Moira and I walked out to a courtyard by the cafeteria to talk in private with him. He asked how we were holding up. My emotions, like Dad’s and Grandpa’s, overcame me and I started to cry. I’d been holding everything in so tightly—the pressure of trying to be a caregiver, the uncertainty of wondering if my father would pull through.

  “I don’t want my dad to go,” I said through my tears. “I’m not ready yet.”

  We talked for some time, and it felt good to let everything out. I’m grateful our priest came that day.

  In time, Dad recovered somewhat. Although he lost much of his balance and now is unable to do a few things, his memory remains sound. He can talk, and we’re blessed and grateful to still have him with us.

  One of the amazing things about the experience was the perfect timing of the burst pipe. If our pipe hadn’t broken, we would have still been living at home when Dad needed emergency brain surgery. Our house is farther from the hospital than the hotel, and every minute counted in the rush to get him to the hospital. If not for the burst pipe, Dad might not have lived.

  When I thought about that, I remembered something I have heard in church. We each have a purpose in life, and if we’re serving God, following him, living out God’s calling and purposes for our life, then we can have faith that God is leading us, and even difficult times can turn out all right. God can cause all things to work together for good.

  Only a year after Dad’s emergency brain surgery, Moira needed another back surgery, her sixth. Her back problems had begun more than a decade earlier. She had surgery on her spine, but the first surgeon had made a mistake, seriously damaging nerves in her right leg that would never properly heal. Three months later, she saw a different surgeon who was able to fix some of her issues with a spinal fusion, but in the following years she needed three more surgeries. Her fifth, in 2016, was another fusion of a few more discs that had fallen apart.

  But this latest surgery was the most serious of all. At the end of this seven-hour surgery, Moira had fourteen inches of metal rods and screws in her spine, everything fused together, totally locked in place. In May 2017, she spent four and a half weeks in the hospital recovering, and I canceled everything to stay with her, sleeping on the room’s tiny sofa at night. For the first two and a half weeks, Moira lay in terrible pain, and it took a while for the team to nail down the right mix of pain relievers. I’ve met a lot of families whose loved ones needed an extended hospital stay, and I couldn’t help but think of all the families of our nation’s defenders who have faced the same thing—multiple surgeries, lots of pain, trying to get their loved ones through it safely, staying by their side day after day, night after night.

  Moira has recovered well, although she will never again be able to fully twist her torso from side to side. One thing lightened our load during those weeks in the hospital: our first grandchild. Sophie was due with the baby just before Moira’s surgery, and since first babies often arrive late, Moira was afraid she would miss the birth. Amazingly, our granddaughter was born exactly on her due date at the end of May. Four days later, Moira went in for her surgery.

  Before the baby was born, Moira and I went to a movie. As we climbed into our car after the show, the phone rang. “We were going to tell you this in person,” Sophie said. “But we can’t wait. We’ve decided on a name for our little girl. We’re going to name her after you, Mom. Moira.”

  Moira burst into tears. My eyes filled too. We were so touched, so moved—so grateful.

  I’ve had my own brush with life’s frailty in recent years.

  In March 2012, I landed at Reagan National Airport and jumped in a town car, headed to Walter Reed to visit wounded troops. A busy day was planned. After my visit to the hospital, I was scheduled to do an event with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and folks from the USO. The following day I was to head out to Martinsville, Virginia, for a concert to raise funds to build a smart home for Marine Corps veteran and triple amputee, J. B. Kerns.

  The driver of the town car cruised at the speed limit on the George Washington Memorial Parkway, a twenty-five-mile highway that runs along the Potomac River. I don’t remember our car slowing. I was engrossed in plans for the next day’s concert.

  I didn’t see anything. Feel anything. Hear anything.

  The next thing I knew, I woke up in the emergency room. Ella, who attended nearby Catholic University of America, hovered above me with a concerned face. I felt her hand on my shoulder. I heard her voice. My neck ached terribly. I burst into tears and said, “I have to get to the hospital . . .” meaning, I need to get to Walter Reed to visit the wounded veterans.

  “Dad! You gotta stay here,” Ella said. “You were in an accident.” Her voice echoed, like I was in a long tunnel.

  Heavily sedated, I blurred in and out. I remember lying in the CT scanner. I remember a loud noise. I remember lots of faces I didn’t know. Pieces of the past few hours shuffled through my mind. I vaguely remembered paramedics placing me on a spinal board and carrying me to an ambulance. I found out later that the driver had slowed to let a pedestrian cross the road where there was no crosswalk. A van had rammed us from behind at full speed. An off-duty firefighter happened to be driving by just as our car was hit. He’d stopped and called 911 for us and put a blanket over me so I wouldn’t go into shock. My seat belt had snapped. Paramedics found me in the back seat, toppled to my left side, with the driver’s seat lying on top of me. The driver of the van was fine. The driver of my ride, the town car, was injured and at the same hospital as I was. I was in and out, but they said I mumbled to the first responders to call my brother-inlaw Jack. As it happened, Moira had just had
her fourth back surgery. So we were both down for the count.

  At the hospital, doctors apprised me of my injuries. My neck was fractured, so I was fitted with a thick neck brace. I also had a bad concussion, and my head ached. I remembered I was in a band when Kimo called to check on me. I told him to play the next day’s concert without me, but he chuckled softly and said in a low voice, “No, Gary. Nobody wants to do this concert without you. You just heal up, buddy. Get better real soon.”

  For three days I stayed in the hospital. Ella slept on the couch in my room. The wounded veterans at Walter Reed who I’d been scheduled to visit found out about my accident and sent me a get-well card instead. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, sent me a note saying he was sorry I missed the event with him and to get well soon.

  My good friend Ben Robin, who’d been doing my makeup and hair for a long time, flew out from L.A. to DC to help. We’d just finished shooting CSI: NY for the season, but I had a full schedule of volunteer events. Everything needed to be canceled or rescheduled. My friend Dave McIntyre offered to pick me up in his plane and fly me home to L.A. This proved extremely helpful, because going through a commercial airport in my condition would have been difficult, plus we wanted to be careful how word got out to the press. Ben flew home with me.

  We had just ordered a hospital bed for Moira so she wouldn’t need to climb upstairs with her back surgery. We ordered another one for me and moved it in downstairs next to Moira’s. Side by side, for the next month, we stayed in hospital beds in our living room—her with her back brace, me with my neck brace, fighting good-naturedly over the TV remote. I started rehabilitation within two weeks, and Moira soon went to her back appointments, and within a couple of weeks we were both back on schedule.

  I’m grateful I woke up. I’m grateful I healed. Not everyone wakes up or heals.

  For a month, I was off my feet and off the grid. When I finally came back toward the end of April, I played three concerts, one a military-appreciation event at Fort Drum, New York, plus two fund-raisers to build houses for wounded vets. Two months after the accident, I was back onstage at the National Memorial Day Concert. I invited the off-duty firefighter who’d stopped for me, plus the driver of my car, to be my guests. The driver had recovered well and was doing all right.

  The entire experience made me see powerfully how quickly life can change. My schedule had been crazy. I had been going everywhere, doing everything. Moira chuckled at one point and said, “Well, you’ve been benched. Maybe this was the only way to get you to slow down.” During those long days in our living room, I considered how one minute you’re here and everything’s going well. The next minute, even without expectation or awareness, life can completely change. You could be injured. You could be gone.

  It made me think of our soldiers who have been wounded or have died in explosions. Some never knew what hit them. Just kaboom, and they were gone. Others went from one reality to another reality without remembering the middle. One minute they drove along in a Humvee. The next minute they lay in a hospital bed, with life forever changed.

  I couldn’t wait to get back to our mission.

  In 2009, the evening after I’d helped pass out the Operation International Children (OIC) backpacks and school supplies at the Afghan school, I was staying at Bagram Air Base. I’d just finished the USO concert, and backstage General Mike Scaparrotti invited me to attend a send-off ceremony the following morning for what’s called an “Angel Flight,” the airplane trip that carries a fallen warrior home. Staff Sergeant Matthew Pucino, thirty-four, one of our special forces soldiers, had been killed shortly before our arrival at the base. He’d been on a patrol near Pashay Kala when his vehicle struck an IED, ending this warrior’s mission. At 5:00 a.m. the next day, Matthew’s body would be flown home to the United States.

  I wanted to learn more about this hero. I found out that Matthew was as all-American as they came. He’d played baseball and football as a boy growing up in Plymouth and Bourne, Massachusetts. In high school, he quarterbacked his school’s football team. After graduation, he went to university and earned a degree in criminal justice, intent on pursuing a career in law enforcement, but like so many others, his life’s direction was changed forever by 9/11. He enlisted in 2002 and worked to become one of the best of the best, eventually becoming a Green Beret. He deployed twice to Iraq where he helped capture more than two hundred insurgents. Once, during a mission on Christmas Eve, his team came under heavy attack. Badly wounded, a sergeant needed blood to survive. Matthew quickly donated not just one, but two pints of blood to help his fellow soldier, then straightaway returned to the battle. After he came home to America, he reenlisted and deployed to Afghanistan to continue the fight against global terror. Those who knew him best simply called him “Uncle Matt.”

  I woke early, showered, and dressed. The general came to get me, and we arrived at the flight line shortly before 5:00 a.m. In the dark of the early morning we pulled up behind a giant C-17 with the back ramp down. Outside the airplane several military personnel stood quietly at attention in respect. It was a very still and somber scene. I could see into the belly of the plane. Bright lights lit the inside where a few soldiers stood watch over the flag-draped coffin of their fallen brother. The general and I got out of the car, and my throat had a lump that wouldn’t go down. I stood motionless for a moment, staring at the casket, then followed the general onto the plane. Just the two of us. I looked at the sad faces of the soldiers quietly standing guard over their friend. Then I looked at the coffin.

  General Scaparrotti knelt. He rested his hand on top of the coffin, and I knelt beside him and did the same. I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and said a silent prayer for this soldier and for his family who would be at Dover Air Force Base to receive their fallen loved one when he returned home.

  After a moment, the general and I stood up and took a few steps back so there’d be space in front of the casket. One by one, the soldiers came on board the plane, each paying respects to this fallen brother. I choked back tears and thought of the hundreds if not thousands of families I have met over the years who have lost loved ones in military service, Gold Star families as they are known, and how hard it must have been for them when the Angel Flight arrived home. I pictured the casket being brought down the ramp as the dignified transfer took place. I felt so sad and sorry for these families. Far too many of them.

  That moment is why I do what I do.

  My mission is one of respect, of honor, of gratitude.

  It’s a mission of serving other people.

  Of helping us never forget.

  It’s a mission I want to invite all American people to join. In fact, I invite all people from all countries who live their lives in freedom. We must ensure the sacrifices of freedom’s defenders and their families are never forgotten. We must value freedom over tyranny, embrace the opportunities that freedom affords us, and support and remember those who provide it.

  Today there’s an organization called TAPS—Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors—led by veteran Bonnie Carroll, the surviving spouse of Brigadier General Tom Carroll, who was killed in 1992 in a plane crash in Alaska along with seven other service members. Since 1994, TAPS has offered compassionate care to all those grieving the loss of a military loved one, and has helped more than eighty thousand military family members suffering and struggling with this terrible loss. TAPS supports mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, spouses and children. Military personnel can be lost through combat, in training accidents, from illness or suicide. The TAPS staff and volunteers don’t differentiate how a military member dies. In March of 2018 I was privileged to receive their Guardian Angel Award for my support of their critically important work. I accepted the award by saying, in part, “I just hope that I can be a good steward of the freedom that has been provided to me, and all my fellow Americans, because of the sacrifices of so many guardian angels. It is my wish to do that for the rest
of my life.”

  As I said those words, I remembered being on the tarmac in Afghanistan in 2009. I saw again Matthew Pucino’s flag-draped coffin. I thought of the many warriors who have given their last full measure just like Matthew, and I thought, God bless them and their families always.

  When I look at photographs of my trips, I often wonder about the men and women in those photographs. Did they make it back alive? Were they wounded? Over the years, more often than I can count, I have had a family member come up to me with a photo I took with their loved one in the war zone. Sometimes a final photo, as that person was killed shortly afterward. I made it a practice, when taking these photos, one after another and spending maybe only twenty or thirty seconds with each person, to try to make those seconds count. We are in a war zone, and anything can happen to these folks at any moment. After my 2017 trip to Baghdad, I received a very sad email from a friend informing me that a young woman, a soldier in a photo with me, had taken her own life shortly after that photo was taken. She was smiling and happy in the photo. You just don’t know what is really going on sometimes.

  After spending so much time with the grieving families of our fallen heroes, over and over I’ve been reminded that life can end at any time; that’s why we all need to make the most of each day. We need to make each day purposeful, and for the past several years I’ve discovered that much of that purpose for me is in serving and honoring the needs of our defenders. That’s why I’m still on a mission, a mission that’s the driving reason I’ve told my story. All my experiences—the places I came from, my years of formation, the people I met along the way, the mistakes I made and learned from, the challenges of my career and the ways I overcame—all my life has culminated in my ongoing service work.