Beyond Lt. Dan: Gary Sinise Reflects on Grief, Gratitude, and a Life Devoted to Honoring America’s Heroes

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Service … it’s a great healer for a broken heart. It helped me a lot through our fight for our son, and the difficulties and the challenges of fighting for him and then losing him,” says Gary Sinise.

An Emmy Award-winning actor, producer, director, and musician, Sinise has dedicated his life to supporting America’s active-duty military, veterans, first responders, and their families.

The Gary Sinise Foundation has raised over $500 million in support of these communities, and Sinise has won many awards for his humanitarian contributions, including the Presidential Citizen Medal, the second-highest civilian honor in the United States.

In this episode, Sinise reflects on his three decades of service, from building dozens of specially modified homes for wounded veterans and first responders to playing nearly 600 concerts with the Lt. Dan band (named after his Forrest Gump character) at military bases across the United States and overseas.

Sinise’s son McCanna Anthony “Mac” Sinise died last year at age 33 after a five-year battle with a rare bone cancer called chordoma. Before he passed, he was able to record an entire album of music that he’d begun in college. It’s titled “Resurrection & Revival.”

Mac’s story and his father’s full tribute to his son can be found here on the Gary Sinise Foundation website: https://www.garysinisefoundation.org/mac-tribute

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Gary Sinise, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Gary Sinise:

I’m happy to be here. Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek:

I was getting a little bit of a tour of the foundation, and I came across a quote. There are a number of quotes from you around the walls here. I’m just going to read it to you and get you to tell me your thoughts. “Government can only do so much. I believe citizens have a role to play as we are the beneficiaries of those who sacrifice in freedom’s defense.” It’s a big quote, on a big wall in a central place. Tell me about that.

Mr. Sinise:

This is a nonprofit organization supporting the military. Quite often I’ve been asked, “Don’t you think that the government should take all the responsibility and everything?” I think the government has a great responsibility to take care of the men and women who serve our country. I also believe that we as citizens have a role to play. I don’t think there’s any way for the government to serve all the needs of the men and women who serve our country and sacrifice. And so I just felt that I had a part to play. 

It was beyond a part in a movie. It was to do something with the gifts that I’d been given and, you know, with Vietnam veterans in my family and remembering what it was like for them to come home from war and not have the support that they deserved for serving our country, not have the services provided that they needed. I was motivated to make sure that, especially post 9/11 when we started deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, those service members would be taken care of, that they would be honored for their service, and they would be shown appreciation and gratitude. Somebody like me who’s in the public eye can go out there and do that and then shine that spotlight on them, draw attention to them, and create awareness, and that’s what I try to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

Before Lieutenant Dan, certainly, you were in Tracers. You actually got a whole bunch of veterans together on stage as a stage actor and acted in this play. Tell me a little bit about this because this is before 9/11, before any of this, you were already thinking about somehow explaining to the world what veterans were going through.

Mr. Sinise:

I felt bad back in the 70s and 80s about what happened to our Vietnam veterans. I learned a lot after I met my wife-to-be. Her two brothers served in Vietnam in the Army. Her sister’s husband served as a combat medic in the Army. They were just a little bit older than I was. I mean, they were off in the jungles of Southeast Asia when I was in high school chasing girls around and playing guitar. They started to talk to me about serving in Vietnam and coming home from Vietnam and what it was like and how difficult it was. 

I started to really think about what I was doing during that period of time and how little I was paying attention even though it was front and center all the time. Every night on the news there were casualty reports and things were not going well in Vietnam and the Tet Offensive and all this stuff. I was just a kid doing kid stuff. I started to feel very guilty and badly for what happened to them, so I wanted to try to do something back in the early 80s.

In Chicago, I was part of a theater company. My wife was in the theater company. We didn’t have any veterans in the theater company at all. We were just a group of ragtag actors doing our thing. As artistic director, I was directing some of the plays. I thought, you know what, I’m going to look for a play that speaks to this experience, this Vietnam experience. That’s when I found this play called Tracers that was at the time being performed on stage by the guys who wrote it.

It was a production put together by a Vietnam veteran named John DiFusco. He was in the theater now, he’d come home from Vietnam and all that, and he decided to put an ad in the paper asking veterans to come and meet with him to kind of workshop a play, kind of sit there and talk about their experiences, and then he would write it down and they would all create this play together. And that’s what they did. Then they started performing it. 

I flew out from Chicago to Los Angeles, and I sat there in 1980, and I saw this play. Up there were the real guys. Only a couple of them had actually done any acting. The rest of them were just Vietnam vets who read the ad in the paper and said, “I’ll go check that out and see what that’s about.” So they’re all Vietnam veterans performing their life stories right there live on stage. It was very powerful, very moving. I went back to see it again the next night, and I asked them if they would let me do it in Chicago, and they eventually let me do it in Chicago with a cast of pretty much everybody who was not a Vietnam veteran. 

They were all actors, except there were two who were from outside our theater company who were Vietnam veterans who were also actors whom I asked to be a part of it. One of them was an actor named Dennis Farina, whom you may remember from a show called “Crime Story” or “Get Shorty.” You can look up Dennis. He did a million movies. You would recognize him. Dennis was just starting out as an actor, and he was a Vietnam veteran. He was a Chicago police officer, and he did some of his first work on stage with Steppenwolf Theatre. He played the drill instructor in the play. As a Vietnam veteran, it was incredible to have him and another Vietnam veteran actor named Greg Williams in the play with us.

We spent time at the VA in North Chicago, sitting there talking to real Vietnam veterans who were struggling and suffering from post-traumatic stress. They were in the VA dealing with their mental health issues from their service in Vietnam, and we sat there and talked to them, and that woke everybody up. My cast really realized at that point that we have an obligation, we have an opportunity here to do something to help these folks. That was the play Tracers that I ended up doing on stage, and that led to a whole bunch of support in the Chicago area with veterans, and I eventually played a Vietnam veteran about ten years later.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think a lot of people will assume that your whole experience with the Vietnam War is through this Lieutenant Dan character, of course, you played. I’m curious, at what point did you realize what your version of service to the world was going to be?

Mr. Sinise:

I think maybe there are phases, there are steps, there are seeds planted along the way. My dad was in the Navy during Korea. His two brothers were in World War II, one in the Navy and one in the Army Air Corps, over Europe in a B-17, and then their father served in the Army in World War I, along with a great-uncle who was also in the Army during World War I. My grandfather met my grandmother, who was an Army nurse at a base in Rockford, Illinois. 

So there are a lot of veterans in my family, but it goes back a ways. I remember growing up as a kid, my grandfather never talked about that. My uncles never really talked about it. My dad never really talked about it. It was really the Vietnam veterans on my wife’s side of the family that kind of woke me up a little bit. So in the 80s, I started supporting them. Then I played a Vietnam veteran in the 90s. He was a wounded veteran, so that introduced me to an organization called the Disabled American Veterans [DAV]. 

At that time there were 1.5 million wounded veterans as a part of the organization. This was back in the mid-90s. I met just hundreds and hundreds of wounded veterans going all the way back to World War II. I started supporting them. I think the 80s and 90s were teeing up something that would happen, this call to action that happened after September 11, 2001, when we deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. People started getting killed, started losing people, people started getting hurt, wounded, and the hospitals were filling up. 

I started visiting the hospitals, I started doing USO tours, just volunteering to go out. I was meeting hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of military people on bases all over the world and across the United States. I just started supporting a lot of nonprofits. I think there are 25 or 30. There’s a book I wrote called “Grateful American,” and at the end of the book, I put this list, this call to action list of all these different nonprofits that I was getting involved with before I had my own. 

Having been in that space and learning a lot from where all the different needs were from all these different organizations and trying to support them and raise money, raise awareness, taking a band out there to entertain the troops, all these different things, at a certain point I was in it for good, and that’s why I started the Gary Sinise Foundation.

Mr. Jekielek:

I have a strange characteristic. I remember movie plots intricately well. I don’t know why. I wish this applied to other aspects of my life. So I can think back, for example, to Forrest Gump and remember a lot of what happened. One of the things that strikes me about Forrest Gump and the Lieutenant Dan character that you played was that he starts, you know, as the photo behind you actually shows, kind of a bright, bushy-eyed, ready to go to war. 

The war really hurts him in all sorts of ways, physically and psychologically. He’s, you know, suicidal. But then in the end, with the help of his friend, he kind of comes out okay. Right. But it’s a whole arc of a whole difficult road to get there. I’m wondering how much that portrayal played a role in, I guess, the world, people understanding the service that you wanted to give.

Mr. Sinise:

There’s no question it played a greater role in my life than just a part in a movie. I very much wanted to honor our Vietnam veterans by doing a good job, you know, just playing a Vietnam veteran in a way that they would feel was honorable and true and truthful. And what’s cool about the movie, and I’ve said this before, is like you say it’s a happy ending, and up until that point, the movie came out in 1994, we had seen movies about the Vietnam experience prior to that, but you always kind of wondered if the Vietnam veteran was going to be okay, you know, at the end of a lot of those movies. At the end of, “Platoon,” Charlie Sheen is on the helicopter, and the helicopter takes off, and he’s looking down at the battlefield with all these dead Americans, and he’s crying. And you just know he’s going to have trouble when he gets home. You know, you look at other films.

Mr. Jekielek:

Like, “Full Metal Jacket.”

Mr. Sinise:

Like, “Full Metal Jacket,” “Deer Hunter,” and “Coming Home.” Bruce Dern, at the end of “Coming Home,” takes off his uniform and swims out into the ocean, and he’s not coming back, you know. I mean, you just always wondered, at the end of a lot of the films, “Apocalypse Now,” you just wondered if the Vietnam veteran was going to be okay. And then along comes, “Forrest Gump.” We see a story about a Vietnam veteran that we really hadn’t seen before, which is a guy who, at the end of the film, at the end of the story, he’s gone through battle, he’s been wounded, he’s isolated, he drowns himself in alcohol abuse, he’s got post-traumatic stress, he’s riddled with guilt because he was obviously in charge of the platoon the day that they were attacked and he walked them into an ambush, a bunch of people got killed and wounded, including him. So he’s dealing with a lot of that, and a lot of guilt. 

But at the end of the story, he makes peace with himself and he moves on, and the last thing we see is he’s a wealthy businessman, he’s married, and he’s standing up on new prosthetic legs, and he’s moving on with his life. It’s a happy ending for a Vietnam veteran. While that’s a story that had never really been told in the movies before, it’s a story that existed out there. There were Vietnam veterans who came home, and you know, while there were a number of them that really dealt with a lot of serious issues and struggled, there were also others that were able to kind of put their war years in perspective and move beyond them. And so now we’re seeing a story about somebody who was able to do that, even the disabled American veterans. That’s how I got involved with them. 

They asked me to come to their national convention in 1994, about six weeks after the movie opened, and they wanted to give me an award for playing Lieutenant Dan. And a lot of the people in the audience that day, over 2,000 wounded veterans, many of them were Vietnam veterans who went through difficult times, who were wounded. They’re all wounded in some way at the DAV. And that was very moving to me. It was impactful and powerful, and it certainly set the stage for my getting involved in supporting our wounded. And that’s why we have such a strong focus on taking care of our wounded service members here at the Gary Sinise Foundation.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is it like to act as someone who has lost their legs?

Mr. Sinise:

As an actor, there were a couple of challenges with that, just physically and everything. There were times when I had to get in a wheelchair and tuck my legs underneath me. And I remember Bob Zemeckis, the incredible director that we had on Gump. Bob did not want to, he didn’t want to put a box under my seat where my legs were in there, and everybody would know, okay, his legs are down in the box. 

So he hired an illusionist named Ricky Jay who was a magician. Ricky Jay, with his team, kind of designed a seat that, if you look at the wheelchair just like this, it looked like it was flat. But actually, it went down like this, and there was a little platform for my butt to sit on right here, and room on the side of this little platform for each of my legs to tuck in. And so they designed that, and then they created, with the wardrobe department, some pants that looked like, you know, they were tied off at the knees. And I tucked myself in there. 

So I had to do those shots, you know, wheeling myself around and being in the chair. But then the other shots that kind of sold the whole thing were the CGI shots. And they came up with a way to kind of remove my legs out of the picture with computer graphics technology, and it was just kind of starting out at that time. Now anything you can think of, they can create it, but at that time they were doing a lot and just starting to create these illusions in the computer. 

So I wore these blue stockings from the knee down on my legs, and it’s like the blue screen material that you know you use for special effects. Well, they wrapped my legs in that material, and then in post-production, I had to kind of move my legs around and everything like I didn’t have legs, and in post-production they went in and just removed frame by frame the blue color out of the frame. So if you do that right, if you have your leg here and you remove this blue color, there’s nothing there, right? 

There’s just a blank white place. Here’s your leg, but now everything’s gone. It’s blue. So they had to go in and paint in everything that was in the background, right? They had to create shadows, and they did all this stuff through computer graphics. It was a painstaking process, but ultimately, it still looks good, even over 30 years later.

Mr. Jekielek:

It looks incredibly convincing. That’s why I was curious.

Mr. Sinise:

People thought I didn’t have legs, and then I guess they forgot that in the beginning of the movie, I’m walking all around.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s right. There’s some real character acting you did there, no?

Mr. Sinise:

Yes. Do you know what we did in the very beginning? We said, “Let’s show the audience my legs. We want them to see my legs.” So the first shot you see of Lieutenant Dan, I’m in boxer shorts. I come walking out, all I have on is boxer shorts. So you see my legs, you see my whole body, my legs are there, and I come walking out. We wanted people to get used to me with legs so that it would be even more impressive when the legs were gone. 

Mr. Jekielek:

Between us, there’s a corner of a table where there are many thousands, I’m sure, of challenge coins. And maybe very briefly, what are these challenge coins? 

Mr. Sinise:

With the challenge coins, there’s various stories about where challenge coins came from. There’s one story that during World War I, when our folks were serving overseas, you know, they were serving with people who didn’t speak English. They would exchange coins, you know, that would have their branch of service on it so that somebody on the other side, or maybe they were fighting along with somebody who was from France. They didn’t speak any English. They would exchange these coins. They became a sign of unity and brotherhood. 

There are multiple stories about where they came from. Nobody can seem to agree on it. But today, many, many units and many individuals throughout the military, our first responders and everything, make a specific coin to identify them or identify their unit, where they’re from. There are nonprofits that have their own challenge coins. And over the years, many, many years of going on tours and visiting hospitals and engaging with our military and our first responder communities, I’ve been given a lot of coins, a lot of coins over the years that are a prized possession for me. 

With this table, you can’t see it right now, but we actually extended this table just recently. One, because our staff has grown and we need a larger conference table, but two, so we could also add some of the coins that were around the office in different places. I’ve collected well over 3,000 coins in a number of years, and I can’t tell you where every single one of the 3,000 came from, but I always bring them back, I always give them to the staff, I always look at them, and they’re special because I know something. 

People don’t give them out lightly just to anybody because you can only make so many. Usually, somebody will make 50 of them and give them out in special circumstances. I’ve received just a lot of these special coins over the years. So we want to display them for people that come here to the office. It’s a sign of gratitude and appreciation, and for me to display them like that, it’s a way to pay tribute to the people that served and decided to give them to me and a sign of respect.

Mr. Jekielek:

I noticed a photo of you touring West Point with the soldiers standing in full regalia and weapons. Was that an award as well?

Mr. Sinise:

Yes, that’s probably the Thayer Award. Was I in a Humvee? 

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes. 

Mr. Sinise:

Okay, yes. That particular photograph was taken in October of 2015. I was privileged, blessed, and humbled to receive the Sylvanus Thayer Award from the West Point Association of Graduates. They give this award once a year to a single individual, and they were honoring me that year for my support of the men and women who served. My brother-in-law has a storied history with West Point; he was a West Point graduate. My brother-in-law, Boyd McCanna (Mac) Harris, was in the class of ’66 at West Point. 

The class of ’66 is a well-known class because over 250 officers from that class were killed in Vietnam, and that was a heavy, heavy price that they paid. He served in Vietnam twice, so he has a great history with West Point. West Point is a wonderful place. I’ve been there many times. I’ve played concerts there for folks. Anyway, the Thayer Award was a special day. The entire day is dedicated to the recipient of the award. There’s a parade, and you’re reviewed by troops, and they march by you.  

I spoke to them and made a major speech in the mess hall, which is a place where MacArthur made his “Duty, Honor, Country” speech. Omar Bradley made speeches there. Well-known people address the Corps of Cadets at the mess hall. I got to make a speech to the Corps of Cadets. So I sequestered myself for about five days writing that speech out to make sure I hit some good points. It was an opportunity also to talk about my brother-in-law and his history there at West Point.

Mr. Jekielek:

I was interviewing Nick Searcy, who tells me he’s a friend. I asked him, “So what should I—he gets asked a million things, Gary. Oh, dear. What should I ask him?” But what he remembered was your early work, I think still with Steppenwolf, with John Malkovich. He watched, I think it was in New York, and he actually watched you perform on stage with John Malkovich. He said, “Get him to talk about that. A lot of people don’t know about that. It was awesome.”

Mr. Sinise:

That was back in the early ’80s when we started the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Steppenwolf is over 50 years old now. It’s hard to believe, but I was 18 years old when it got started. In 1974, we eventually started in a suburb of Chicago where I grew up, Highland Park, Illinois. A buddy of mine from high school, Jeff Perry, went off to Illinois State University, met a buddy down there doing theater named Terry Kinney, and the three of us kind of got Steppenwolf going. 

Then eventually, in 1980 or so, we moved from the suburb of Highland Park into the city of Chicago, and by 1982, we were doing this play called “True West” by Sam Shepard. It was a four-handed play. There were about two brothers and a couple of other characters: a mother and a producer. It’s about a screenwriter who is writing a script and trying to sell it to a producer. He has a brother who’s just a desert rat whom he never sees. The screenwriter has sequestered himself in his mother’s house because she’s gone off to Alaska on a trip. He needs to finish the screenplay because he’s going to meet with this producer to sell the project. 

Out of the blue, his brother shows up, his desert rat brother. They’re complete opposites, right? Complete opposites. The desert rat shows up and he’s a thief. At one point, the producer shows up for his meeting with the screenwriter, and the screenwriter’s hoping his brother doesn’t show up while he’s in the meeting. Of course, the brother walks in with a stolen television set and comes down and starts talking to the producer. 

All of a sudden, he’s the one who sells the script. He’s got a story in his head about two guys that go out in the desert and blah, blah, blah. He sells his story to the producer. Of course, the screenwriter just goes nuts because he had been working on his own project to sell. So it’s a great, funny play. 

John Malkovich and I ended up moving that show. It was the first show that we did at Steppenwolf that moved to New York. We were at Steppenwolf, kind of only known in Chicago. Nobody really knew us outside of Chicago. Then we went and did this play in 1982, and it was a huge hit. We got great reviews; it was a big, big show. It was Malkovich’s entrance into being Malkovich, right? Being John Malkovich.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s right. People always ask me, “What film?” Well, that’s the one that I remember.

Mr. Sinise:

This was the entrance into, “Being John Malkovich.” In fact, in that movie, they reference “True West” and they show a clip from it. But nobody knew who we were. We went there. The company was celebrated, we did really well, and a lot of actors from all over the place just started coming down. They were hearing about it and coming down to see it. I guess Nick was one of them. We did it for six months. When we finished it, we went into a television studio and put it on tape for PBS. So on YouTube, it lives on. 

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to go back to work at the foundation, too. Your son, Mac, worked with you at the foundation. You were very close, and he unfortunately passed recently. You posted in your social feed, your ex-feed, a song that he had done, “Quasi Love,” and I just wanted to get you to tell me a bit about the relationship, what it meant to you, and the work you did together.

Mr. Sinise:

Mac was an incredible guy. He celebrated his 33rd birthday in the recording studio, recording an album in 2023 that he envisioned doing. He was very disabled by this awful rare cancer that took his life called chordoma. He fought it for about five-and-a-half to six years. He probably had it for many more years than that, but it’s a very slow-growing tumor that starts in the spine. We discovered it because he was having trouble sitting down. It was at the base of his spine, and he was having all kinds of pain and trouble. 

We discovered there was an orange-sized tumor, and that tumor could have very well been growing there since birth. It’s a slow, slow-growing tumor. You can take it out and it can be cured if you get it all, if there are no cells that escape. There are only maybe 300 people per year in the U.S. that are diagnosed with this particular cancer. So 70% of the time they go in, they take it off the spine and they get it all. But 30% of the time it comes back, and that’s what happened to Mac. 

When it comes back, it starts to spread, and there are no drugs being developed for a cancer that maybe 90 people a year have. So you’re just up to trying whatever drug you can. As time went on, Mac became more and more disabled. He was an excellent drummer. He was my number two drummer. If my drummer couldn’t make a show or something, I would ask Mac to do it. 

He loved my band. He went to USC music school. He was a songwriter, a composer, a drummer, and an excellent musician. He wrote a lot of music. During this period of time when he was fighting cancer, the cancer was so difficult to deal with that he just didn’t think about music that much until 2023. He said to me that there was a piece of music he had been thinking about that he wrote in college but never finished, and he wanted to try to finish it. He teamed up with two of my band members to help him sort of work on it. 

Then out of the blue, a buddy of his from college, a composer pal, contacted him and came to see him. They started talking about music, and Mac played him some of the recordings that he’d been working on with some of my band members, this piece. His buddy, Oliver Schnee, said, “I’ll work on it with you. Let’s finish it.” That’s exactly what Mac wanted to do—get it finished. 

They went to work on it together in June of 2023, and by July 17th, they were in the studio recording this beautiful, amazing piece called “Arctic Circles” that led to an entire album’s worth of music that he finished by the end of the year. He designed the album cover. The album is called “Resurrection and Revival.” He wanted to make some vinyls to give to people, vinyl records. He said, “Dad, if we ever sell any, the money could go to the foundation.” 

Well, he never saw the record. He never got to hold it because it went to press the week that he died. But he finished it, and he wanted to make 100. I decided to make 500. We also decided to put a story on the Gary Sinise Foundation website, letting people know what had happened. Mac worked for the foundation. He loved the foundation. He had started a podcast for the foundation. He was devoted to the foundation. 

But as the cancer took over, he couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted people to know that we lost him. I had never talked about it publicly, like in interviews or something. I never talked about it. So people were kind of stunned by it. We also said, “Mac did a record, and here it is, and if you want to pre-order it, you can order it here and we’ll get you a copy.” I had ordered 500, and within a day, we had 1,000 orders for the record. 

It was incredible—the outpouring of love and support and people acknowledging that they were saddened by what they had read on the Gary Sinise Foundation website. Some of the videos from the recording sessions were on Mac’s YouTube channel, and we put that in the article. and so people were going to the YouTube channel, hearing the music, and they were buying the album. It was beautiful. 

After he died, I found all this other music that he wrote in his Dropbox file that I had never heard. So I went to work, called Oliver up, and said, “We’re going to do another record.” I produced and funded part two. Oliver produced and arranged and helped me get it all organized, and now part two is out there as well. Now the vinyls have sold almost 7,000 copies between the two of them, and it continues to sell. The music is beautiful, and the proceeds, as Mac wanted, are helping our mission here at the Gary Sinise Foundation.

Mr. Jekielek:

I’m very sorry for your loss. 

Mr. Sinise:

Thank you. 

Mr. Jekielek:

This is the perfect moment. You have these two arms, as I understand it, in the Foundation. One of them is this RISE program where you build homes for severely wounded veterans. The other one is supporting first responders, stations, and so forth. Maybe just briefly tell me about each of those projects. Maybe there are other things I don’t know about.

Mr. Sinise:

On the first responders side, I was on a C-130 going up from Kuwait to Baghdad in June of 2003. I sat down next to a man who had served with the FDNY. He was also a Marine. He had served in the Marine Corps. He was a retired firefighter, and his name is John Vigiano. God placed me right next to him, so we struck up a conversation, and he started to tell me about his two sons who were killed on September 11th. One was a firefighter, and the other was a police officer. 

When we were on our way up to Baghdad, the first thing we were going to do was land at the airport and walk into a hangar with 5,000 troops waiting for a show. Kid Rock was on the trip, and John invited me. He said, “Have you ever been to a firehouse in New York?” I said, “No.” He wanted me to come to his son’s firehouse. They had lost six firefighters from that particular firehouse. It was in Brooklyn. He said, “Would you like to come?” I said, “Yes.” 

About three months after we got back from the trip, I was in New York at the firehouse, and he was introducing me to people that knew his son and served there at Ladder 132, Engine 280 in Brooklyn. I got to be very, very good friends with many of them, some of my best pals in the world. I started supporting the FDNY [Fire Dept. of the City of New York] at that point and trying to help. 

There’s an organization called the FDNY Fire Family Transport Foundation. They provide vehicles for many, many veteran fire department folks, people that maybe have served in the fire department that might be going through cancer and need a ride to the hospital, whatever, and they provide these vehicles. I started to raise money to donate vehicles to the fire family transport. I helped them raise money to build a memorial to honor all the first responders that were killed on 9/11. That’s called the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance on Coney Island. Part of the wall was dedicated to the Brooklyn firefighters. 

The original intent was to honor the Brooklyn firefighters, and then they thought, no, we should put everybody who was lost, so they needed to raise money to build the rest of it. I did a concert, and we raised all the money and dedicated it about ten months later. Building homes for our wounded also kind of started in New York City. The first quadruple amputee, the first soldier to survive losing both his arms and both his legs, is from Staten Island. 

A couple of organizations there knew I had supported the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance a couple of years prior. Then the soldier was injured. His name is Brendan Marrocco. He was blown up. I had met him in the hospital because I visited Walter Reed regularly at that time. They came to me and said, we want to build him a special house to make life easier for him. He’s going to need an elevator in there because he’s got a wheelchair, all this stuff. 

I did a concert to raise the money. I think we raised a good portion of the money. There were other donors and everything that came in, but the concert, I think, raised a significant amount of money to help build that special home. There were four other quadruple amputees after that for whom we built houses, and that’s how I got into home building. Now we just gave away our 95th house since I’ve been involved in this. We have a very vigorous program that supports the families of our fallen heroes. 

One of the things I did was get involved with supporting the children of our fallen heroes through an organization that started called Snowball Express. I started doing concerts for the kids and donating money. American Airlines is a big, big supporter of that. It started at Disneyland in California; then we moved it to Dallas, which is the hub of American Airlines. Then we decided to move the whole thing to Disney World from Dallas, and we were going to need some extra money. So we decided to bring it under the umbrella of the Gary Sinise Foundation. 

It became one of our initiatives under the Gary Sinise Foundation because we had the ability to raise the additional money it was going to cost to take over a hotel at Disney World. Every year we take over 1,000 kids and surviving spouses of military heroes to Disney World. A couple of years ago, we started adding families of fallen first responders. We do two back-to-back events: one for military kids, then take a few days off, and then we bring in children and families of fallen first responders. I play a concert for them at Disney World.

Mr. Jekielek:

You have this band that’s been around for quite a while where you play the bass, the Lieutenant Dan Band. But wait, before I go there, you moved your foundation here to Franklin, Tennessee, right by Nashville. What was the thought behind that from LA?

Mr. Sinise:

Things started to get tough for our son physically toward the end of 2019. It was getting harder for him. In early 2020, he was going to need another surgery on his spine to remove more tumors that were growing and spreading, and it was just getting harder. So at the end of 2019, I finished up. I had two or three acting jobs that year. 

I acted in a movie called “Joe Bell” with Mark Wahlberg. Then I did a movie called, “I Still Believe,” for Lionsgate with the Erwin brothers. I also did a television series called, “13 Reasons Why.” It was a Netflix series and I did about 10 episodes. That was the fall into December of 2019, and it was a perfect job at the time because leaving home was getting harder and harder as Mac was getting more and more challenged with things. The series, “13 Reasons Why,” was shot in San Francisco. 

I would fly up there on Sunday night, shoot Monday morning, and get on a plane and come back. I didn’t have to be away from home a lot during that job. I finished that in December of 2019, and then 2020 became very, very difficult. Mac was in the hospital six out of the first eight months of the year with two major spine surgeries to remove tumors off his spine, and after each surgery, he would become more disabled by it. 

I thought, I’m going to take advantage of the blessings of success that I’ve had in the movie and television business. I was on “CSI: NY” for nine years. I was on another series for a couple of years, “Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders.” I did well with those and I could afford to step away. I started to focus on Mac and the family and being there for them, almost exclusively on the Gary Sinise Foundation and what we’re doing here. 

One of the things that I would still keep in the pipeline, once we got through Covid in 2020 and 2021, is concerts for the troops and playing because that had become a big part of the mission at the Gary Sinise Foundation. The Lieutenant Dan Band was born in 2003, 2004 when I just started doing USO tours, and I wanted to go out there and entertain the troops like Kid Rock was doing. On the first trip I was on, he was rocking out, and I was Lieutenant Dan, shaking hands and taking pictures. 

But I wanted to entertain, so that’s where the band came from. I had musicians I played with. I liked to play bass. I put a variety show together of all kinds of music that they would appreciate and enjoy. And I pay the band. I do it for free. It’s part of just my mission, you know. 

Now the band has done almost 600 concerts over the last 20 years or so on military bases all over the country and overseas. It’s all free concerts for people. Occasionally we’ve played in some clubs and that kind of thing, but mostly it’s military. I think it’s over 180 now. That’s a lot of military bases around the country and overseas to visit. Many of those bases I’ve been to multiple times. So it’s hundreds of trips, and I did a hundred USO tours over the years. 

Then the Gary Sinise Foundation became solid enough that I could make the band and my work with the band a part of the mission of the Gary Sinise Foundation. The American people who donate to the Gary Sinise Foundation help me take the band to military bases and hospitals to entertain the troops and to lift spirits. Thank you to the American people for allowing us to do that. I think every time I go out there, it just lifts me up because I see nothing but happy faces out there having a great time, and it lifts everybody up. It gives me the opportunity to talk to them about my appreciation for them and my gratitude for what they do.

Mr. Jekielek:

And the move to Tennessee?

Mr. Sinise:

Okay, about the move to Tennessee. In 2019, because I stepped away from acting, I started thinking, “How long will I be away from acting? I want to make sure that the money that I’ve been blessed to receive through the movie and television business lasts for as long as possible, and that I can continue to support the mission.” I put a lot of my own personal money into the foundation. I still go out there and do some speeches here and there and some narrations here and there, things that don’t take me out of town too much. 

So I decided that California was getting a little expensive, so I started looking at no state tax states and where things are a little bit more affordable and all of that and looked at Texas, looked at Florida, looked at Tennessee, and having many friends in the music business here, having been here many times, kind of supporting the military at Fort Campbell and different places. And another buddy of mine said that he was moving his business from California to Nashville. I just started thinking maybe that’s the place to go. 

So I asked my daughter, who lived in California about 10 minutes away from us, who has three little ones, I said, if I was going to move to some place like Nashville, would you think about coming too? Well, her husband works for the foundation. So if I was going to do that and move the foundation, he was going to have to move anyway. But I wanted to make sure they were cool with it before I bought a house and moved the foundation. And she was very excited about the idea. So once she said yes and her husband said he was eager to do it, then I made the decision to move, and we started looking for a place. And we got this great, great spot here in Franklin.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s astonishing how many people that I know who have moved to this area over the last half-decade or something like that. So with some of the similar ideas, I think.

Mr. Sinise:

Yes, they have to make the roads wider.

Mr. Jekielek:

I couldn’t help but notice you have Abraham Lincoln here in this room. I asked about that, and I was told you’re a huge fan. So what is it about Abraham Lincoln in particular that makes you particularly interested?

Mr. Sinise:

He is one of our greatest presidents, obviously. These paintings that you see, like this one over here, were done by Steve Penley, who’s also a big Lincoln fan, and he’s painted Lincoln many times. So I’m privileged to have a few of these wonderful Penleys in the office here. I’m a big Lincoln fan. He held the country together at a very, very difficult time. I mean, our country could be two different places right now if it wasn’t for what happened back then and how they managed that. 

It was difficult, difficult times when you look at what he had to go through. And he gave his life for his country. If you look at the Gettysburg Address by itself, right, just a few words, he could put words together like very few people in the history of our country. I’ve studied some of that. My son was a Lincoln fan as well. And so it’s great to be able to honor President Lincoln Library in Springfield at one point. That’s a prized possession for sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

I want to go back to this idea of service. I had a moment in my life where I was facing my own mortality, and I made a promise to give my life to service, and I’ve tried to live that. There was a very specific thing that happened to me that made me make that vow and then feel like I’m obliged to live that way. It’s worked out unbelievably well, well beyond my expectations, in fact, kind of magically. Well, no, absolutely, in so many ways. 

But that wasn’t me before. I was doing interesting work, I was an academic, I was going to be some sort of professor, researcher, I don’t know, right? But it wasn’t, that’s not what I was thinking. I’m just, I’m curious if there was some sort of transformational moment, I touched on this earlier, but I want to kind of dig a little more into that, that really oriented you that way. Because you had a great life being an actor. You have to focus on being a good actor. There’s a lot of work that goes into that, right?

Mr. Sinise:

There’s probably a few things. And I’ll talk a little bit about my wife, who’s just an incredible person who’s faced tremendous challenges herself. She has degenerative arthritis, disc disease in her spine, so she’s had multiple spine surgeries. She’s had arthritis that has kind of destroyed her hips, so  she’s had two hip surgeries. I mean, she’s been through a lot. Plus, a month before Mac was diagnosed with cancer, she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. 

That was a hard summer, the summer of 2018. I had two cancer patients to care for, and that was tough. And she’s been through a lot; thankfully for her, she had a lumpectomy, and then she had radiation and chemo, and she’s been cancer-free for five years now, six years or so. But years ago, she battled alcoholism as well. And I write about this in my book, so it’s not something I can’t talk about. Because she wanted me to go ahead and share this story because it’s a happy ending story. She’s been sober for 27 years or more now. 

But it was a difficult, difficult time. She got sober in September of ’97 and she quit drinking. In ’98, she went to do a play at Steppenwolf. She was playing this Catholic woman in a play called Playboy of the Western World. We were doing it at Steppenwolf. And one of the things she would do during that is she was going to Alcoholics Anonymous. And the local meeting was at a local church called St. Michael’s. 

At one point, she went there, and she was asking somebody where the meeting was. This woman just looked at her and said, “You should become a Catholic,” and then she walked away. Moira went to the meeting, then went back to the play. And she started thinking a lot. 

I was shooting a movie in Wilmington, North Carolina, with Shirley MacLaine. It’s a movie that was released called “Bruno.” Moira finished up the play, and then she put the three kids on an airplane, and she flew down to North Carolina to be with me during the filming of the movie. And the day she gets there, we wrap because hurricane Bonnie is heading right toward the coast, it’s going to slam into North Carolina. 

I said, “Honey, they just wrapped us. They’re telling everybody to get on planes or get out of here.” So I rented a car, and I said, “We’re going to drive to Charlotte, and we’re going get on a plane,” because there are no planes and everybody’s trying to get out of here. So we get in the car, and she gets there, we put the kids in the car, and we leave immediately. We’re heading to Charlotte, and the hurricane is coming, and it’s raining behind us and lightning and everything is behind us, and we’re heading as fast as we can to get to Charlotte to get away from the storm. 

At one point, she turns to me and she goes, “When we get home to California, I’m going to become a Catholic.” I’m driving like a maniac, and I’m like, “Okay, what?” And she said, “Yes, I’m going to the Catholic church, and I’m going to become a Catholic.” Her mom was Catholic, her dad was  Methodist, but she was never really raised with anything, but she was feeling something really powerful. So she went home, and she went through the Christian initiation program to become a Catholic, and two years later, she was confirmed into the church. So I started going to church with her. We started taking our kids to church. We put them in the Catholic school. 

Then September 11th happened, and we went to the Catholic church because if you remember, the Friday after the Tuesday of September 11th, President Bush had kind of made that a national day of prayer and remembrance for the victims of the terrorist attacks, and so every house of worship in the country was filled to the gills, and so was ours. And we were standing there, and the priest came out and the first thing he said was, “This has been a tough week,” and you just felt every single head just nodding like this. 

It was a tough week for everybody. Everyone had the images of the towers crumbling, the people jumping out of the towers, and planes, and everybody had those images in their head, and everybody was trying to process it in some way. We all sang God Bless America, and tears were rolling down my cheeks, and I’m holding my little girl’s hand. And somewhere in that homily, I don’t know if he said it or if I just heard it or if I walked away just thinking it or whatever, but I heard him talk about service work, and that the way to heal our nation was to come together and serve each other, try to help each other through it. And people were doing that. 

My friend John Vigiano would tell me about being down at ground zero searching for his sons in the rubble and people from all over the country and all over the world had come to New York City to try to come down there and help. And the first responders and the workers who were going to dig through the rubble would get there every day, and there’d be lines of people standing and applauding them as they were going through, handing them water and handing them food, and, you know, just had come to Ground Zero to do something. Everybody was looking for a way to help, and my heart was broken, and I wanted to help. 

I heard that and I started raising my hand and volunteering for things. I called up the USO and said, “Please send me on a tour.” When we deployed, we had deployed to Afghanistan, but then we deployed to Iraq, and I wanted to go there. I just wanted to go and say thank you. With the veterans of my own family, the Vietnam veterans who didn’t get a lot of support when they went off to war and came home, I wanted to go and thank our troops and be there with them and support them. The more I did that, the more I wanted to do it again and again and again. 

Then I wanted to reach out to other organizations that were doing it and see if I, as a celebrity, could go in there and do a PSA, raise some money for them. That just snowballed into a massive effort that manifested into the creation of a full-time foundation that has over 75 employees. We’ve raised over $520 million in the 15 years that we’ve been around, deployed those resources all over the place, helping a lot of people, and it’s a good feeling. 

I always say that service is a great healer for a broken heart, and it helped me a lot through our fight for our son and the difficulties and challenges of fighting for him and then losing him. I didn’t stop doing the service work during that time. It was the thing that was helping me with our own battle at home.

Mr. Jekielek:

It really is transformational, isn’t it?

Mr. Sinise:

No question.

Mr. Jekielek:

This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. A final thought, perhaps, as we finish up?

Mr. Sinise:

As I said, for anybody who’s going through a difficult time, the loss of a loved one, parents who lose a child, my heart goes out to them. I know what has been helpful for me is just reaching out and touching somebody else and trying to help them through difficult times. Not everybody can start a foundation. Not everybody has a public platform that you can go out there and raise a whole bunch of money and do that. 

When people ask me about how they can support our veterans or our military, I always say that there are such simple ways to do it by just looking in your own neighborhood, looking in your own community, your own town or city. There are veterans everywhere. And there may be military families that are struggling. 

Maybe there’s a military family that lost a loved one in military service that can’t afford to pay their rent that month or pay the car payment or fix the car or pick up the groceries or whatever it is. And there are little ways that we can all reach out and touch somebody and help them that lift us up in return. I just made a graduation speech at Vanderbilt the other day, and that’s what I wanted to leave them with—by lifting somebody else up, we lift ourselves up. There’s no question about it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Gary Sinise, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Sinise:

Thank you, thanks for having me.