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Feb. 10, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Gary Sinise | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 37
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One of the things I was going to do in Germany was go to Landstuhl Medical Center, which is the main hospital in Germany where people come right off the battlefield and they go to the hospital.
I walked in and I had a USO hat on and I didn't know what to say or how to start it.
And somebody looked at me and he said, Lieutenant Dan.
Hello and welcome to the Sunday Specialist.
Our special guest today is Gary Sinise.
He has a brand new book out.
We're going to be talking with him about his journey in acting, his journey in service, his work with the military.
We'll get to all of that.
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Gary, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Good to see you.
So, he has a brand new book.
The book is Grateful American, A Journey from Self to Service, and it really is an inspiring book.
We're living in a really divided time, obviously, Gary, and it's really, I think, a difficult time for most Americans, but it's a really uniting story.
So, let's start from the beginning.
How did you get into acting?
You were telling me earlier that you grew up on the south side of Chicago.
How do you go from there to world-famous movie star?
Well, it's a bit of a long journey, but there's a story in the book where I talk about that.
Just a circumstance.
I stumbled into it, really, or somebody stumbled into me when I was in high school.
I was kind of a rock and roller.
I had bands.
I played in bands from the time I was like fifth, sixth grade or something like that.
I had guitars and played in rock bands.
Then I did that in junior high school.
Then I got into high school and I had a lot of trouble in high school.
Academically, I was really struggling.
This was in the late 60s and early 70s.
It was a time that crazy things were going on.
The Vietnam War was happening during this time.
I got caught up in some mischief there during my high school years, and I was struggling.
I was having a lot of trouble.
You know, one of the things I did to escape was play music and play in bands, and I was standing in this hallway one time when I was a sophomore in high school.
This is Highland Park High School in Illinois, on the north side of Chicago, north suburbs.
I'm standing in a hallway, and this little lady, this little blonde lady comes blowing down.
I mean, she was like a Hurricane or typhoon or something, just whipping by.
And I'm standing here with my rock and roll pals, you know, looking pretty scrubby and, you know, grungy and everything.
She turns around, she goes, she goes, have you ever been in a play?
And I said, no, no, no, we're rockers, you know.
And she said, well, I'm directing West Side Story and you look perfect for one of the gang members.
So come and audition for the play.
And she blew off down the hall.
And we kind of looked at each other and laughed and everything like that.
But the year before, when I was a freshman, I went to another high school in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.
And it was Glenbard West.
And they had done West Side Story at the school when I was a freshman.
And I went to see it.
And I thought it would be fun to get on stage and play gang member and dance and rumble and all this stuff.
So I thought about it a little bit.
And after school, there was the audition.
And I decided, well, let me just go down there and just see what's going on.
So I was standing outside the audition.
All the pretty girls were going in.
We didn't have to audition.
I'm just thinking about it.
So I turned to my bass player who was in my band.
I said, let's go in.
And we went in, and they handed me a script.
I didn't know what I was doing or anything like that.
And I got up there.
I started stumbling around, making jokes.
People were laughing.
And she put me in the play.
And that was the beginning of my acting.
After that, it changed my whole life.
I mean, I was really a struggling kid.
I was having a lot of trouble.
And I write about that in the book, and I think young people might be able to connect to that.
I was just not, academically, I had a lot of trouble.
I never learned how to read and write properly.
And, you know, those fundamentals you learn in first, second, third grade, I just wasn't paying attention at all.
I could barely read.
So when I got up there and auditioned for the play, and then I got in the play, and then I found this community of people that kind of really, I just felt comfortable in it.
And then I just wanted to do it over and over and over.
And all through high school, I kept acting in plays, and I ended up being one of the You know, one of the top guys in the theater department.
And because I was such a screw-up, you know, early in high school, I didn't have enough credits to graduate on time with my class, so I had to go back to high school for a final semester.
So I was supposed to graduate in 1973, and we say in the book that I graduated in 1973 and a half.
That's when I graduated.
But I kept doing it, and I met one of my best friends in high school, who's remained one of my best friends for years, Jeff Perry, who's a well-known actor here in town, and then he was in the play, West Side Story, and Jeff and I became fast friends, best friends, did a lot of work together in high school.
He went off to college, and then I started Steppenwolf Theatre, and he came and worked with us in one play, and then we founded What has become a theatre that's lasted for 45 years now.
Can you talk a little bit about Steppenwolf Theatre?
So for folks who don't know Steppenwolf Theatre is now one of the most storied theatres in the country.
And you were obviously a founder of it.
What was the original idea of it and what do you think the legacy of it has been?
Well, the original idea was just kids wanting to do plays.
That was it.
We just wanted to, you know, kind of in that Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, let's put on a play kind of thing.
And we did that.
And we found a church kind of that would let us use the church during the week.
And we would rehearse our plays and perform them on the, you know, on Friday and Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights.
That became the foundation of Steppenwolf Theatre.
You know, it was really started by 18-year-old kids.
17, 18-year-old kids.
And now this theatre, as I said, it's... I mean, this was 1974 we got this going, so it's 45 years old now.
We own four buildings.
We're building another one.
I mean, it's kind of crazy when you look back at it.
And you see what teenagers with a passion and a dream and a desire and enough energy and kind of this you don't know what you don't know kind of attitude gets you.
And it laid the groundwork for something that we built as we moved from Highland Park, Illinois into the city of Chicago.
Renovated another space that David Mamet had originally started.
We took that over.
We were in there for eight years, and then we built a building from the ground up, and now we own three or four buildings in the same area.
I mean, it is a pretty amazing American story, and something that probably could only happen in America, that a high school screw-up could be doing this sort of stuff.
You know, through sheer willpower and creativity, because we now live in a time when people tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how victimized they are, how difficult they've had it.
You sound like you didn't come from a background where you were significantly privileged beyond sort of the normal privilege of living in the United States.
My dad, and I write about the family in the book, my dad was a film editor in Chicago.
He started learning the film business when he was in the Navy.
He processed film He was in the Navy during the Korean War.
At one point they said, do you want to go on a ship or do you want a camera?
And he took the camera and he started taking pictures.
Then they put him in the lab at the Pentagon, you know, in Anacostia.
It's a naval base right there.
In D.C.
and they put him in there and he was receiving the top-secret film that was coming back from the front in Korea and he had top-secret clearance and he would process this film and take it over to the Pentagon and they would analyze the war footage to help them with their battle plans and things like that.
So he learned the film business.
He was editing things and all that and then when he got out of the Navy he went back to Chicago and started his own film company.
It was, he made a modest living, it wasn't the, you know, the tremendous living, but he moved, he moved us from the south side, where I grew up in, I was born in Blue Island, Illinois, lived in Harvey, Illinois, and then we moved up to the northern suburbs of Highland Park, and that's where I went to school, that's where I got into acting, that's where I met Jeff Perry, that's where Steppenwolf started, and it was really, it was, it just, I was kind of a kid who was always kind of aimless.
My dad was working all the time.
I describe it in the book.
And I was sort of on my own.
My mom had her hands full dealing with my sister and my brother and her mother and her sister.
And I was just kind of crazy out there learning things on my own, trying to figure it all out.
So at an early age, I think I learned this sort of do it yourself, go at it.
If you can think it, you can do it sort of attitude.
You know, don't wait around for somebody to hand you something.
And so that's where all that came from.
And, you know, I continued to do that as time went on.
So how did you get from Chicago out to Hollywood?
So my own parents, my dad and Bob are both from Chicago.
They ended up in Hollywood because my dad wanted to do scoring for films.
That was a dream that never worked out for him.
How did you end up out here?
Well, it's a combination of things.
You know, I started Steppenwolf with my buddies, Jeff Perry and Terry Kinney.
And then my parents in 1977, they moved to LA from Chicago because my dad was a film editor.
He had a business in Chicago.
They wanted to open a West Coast office.
So he opened that office out here in 1977.
in 1977.
In 1979, I took a little break and came out here, took a little break from Steppenwolf, came out here, lived with my parents to try to get in the movie business.
I, I, There's some funny stories about some of the things I did back then.
But it didn't work out.
I just really struggled.
I couldn't get in the door.
I was trying to sneak onto lots.
I was trying to audition for things.
I couldn't get a job.
I couldn't get an agent, you know.
It was just a terrible time.
They kept telling me to go to get acting lessons.
I had this theater company in Chicago that I worked with, and I would tell them about that, and they said, well, I never heard of it.
Go get some lessons.
And so it was really frustrating, frustrating time.
So I went back to Chicago, went back to my theater company, ended up being the artistic director, started directing a lot, and directing plays.
And some of the plays that I was doing just hit.
One of them was called True West by Sam Shepard.
John Malkovich and I were in that together and we moved it to New York.
It was the first play that we moved to New York from Steppenwolf.
Malkovich was an early member of the company.
We worked together a lot and did that play And it was just a big hit.
It was huge.
It was a big hit for us.
We moved it to New York.
First thing there, Malkovich became a movie star after doing that play.
And I kept directing.
Went back to Chicago, kept directing.
Ended up doing some plays that were really doing well.
One of those plays was called Orphans, that John Mahoney, rest his soul, was in along with Kevin Anderson and Terry Kinney.
We did it off-Broadway, it was a big hit.
And I was offered a movie deal by David Putnam.
He produced Chariots of Fire, he produced Mission he produced killing the killing fields.
He was a big producer and they gave him a job running Columbia Pictures and he came to see that play and Eventually, they offered me a directing deal at Columbia Pictures And I was running Steppenwolf and doing things at Steppenwolf and I felt well it was time to kind of break away do some other things so I came out here and took that deal and Was with Columbia Pictures for a couple years trying to find something to direct for them.
That was our deal It was a first look deal.
So they got the first look at anything that I wanted to do.
I never found anything that they wanted to do, but I found another project that I ended up doing for another studio.
And that was the first movie I directed, called Miles From Home, with Richard Gere and Kevin Anderson, Brian Dennehy, Helen Hunt, Penelope Ann Miller, a bunch of people were in that.
And it was a good first try.
Eventually, I think my second movie was much better.
It was Of Mice and Men.
I knew that story very, very well.
Malkovich and I had done it on stage, you know, like 10 or 12 years before I directed the movie.
So I was able to get the rights from Elaine Steinbeck to make that into a movie.
And I was a little more sure-handed, I think, at that one.
But it was 87, 1987, when I moved to Hollywood.
And then after Of Mice and Men, Forrest Gump came along and, you know, There you go.
Well, in a second I'm going to ask you about the differences between directing and acting and how it is to be behind the camera as opposed to in front of the camera.
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All right, so back to your directing career.
So you came out here as a director, and yet I think most people know you more as an actor than they do as a director.
What is the difference for you between being behind the camera and in front of the camera?
Which do you prefer?
And did it help you as an actor to be a director in theater?
Uh, it helped me as a director to be an actor.
I would say.
Because most of what I know as a director is from working with other actors and being an actor myself.
So I always, when I would direct, I would direct from an actor's point of view.
How can we make this, you know, dramatically viable in the story.
How can we punch up this energy here?
How can we do that?
How would I play it?
I think maybe I can have some ideas about that and impart those to other people.
But, and how do you shape the story to have it be compelling?
So I'm always looking at that.
And what I know about directing movies, which I've only done a couple of, is what I know about acting and directing plays.
I didn't study all that.
I just kind of, you know, I didn't study all that.
I went to high school.
I didn't go to college.
I just went right into founding Steppenwolf Theater and working in this basement of a Catholic school, actually, is where the original Steppenwolf was in Highland Park.
And there was this big, empty basement at this closed-down Catholic school, and we asked the priest if he'd let us use it, and he did.
And we paid him like $1 a year for a tax write-off.
And so in there, we developed our skills.
We were isolated.
We weren't in the city of Chicago, where there's a lot of other theater there.
We were in Highland Park, Illinois.
There's only one little theater there, and it was us.
So we weren't distracted by a lot of other things and we stayed in the basement and just worked on our skills, worked on our work, kind of tuned up the way we approached things.
Our whole ensemble approach was developed in those early days when we were kids.
And I've carried that through all these years of directing and acting, carried it.
All those fundamentals that we learned as kids, you know, stay there.
And we learned it together, really.
So you've done theater and you've done film and you've also done a lot of TV.
I mean, I want to ask you about the transition from film to TV.
So now, TV is not considered a step down.
For a long time there, it was like if you were in the films and then you went to TV, That was considered a step down.
Now you're seeing all sorts of mainstream actors, big actors, for whom it's a step up to move to TV.
You were really one of the pioneers in that, actually.
What was it like to move from the big screen to the small screen?
Was that a bit of a culture shock, or how did that work?
It was a little bit.
I remember being a little hesitant about it.
I mean, I was offered a television series in 2004.
And I had done a few little television things prior to that.
I did a television movie with James Woods in 1989 called My Name is Bill W. Played a good supporting role in that.
Had a couple episodic roles, but nothing.
I was always looking for the big movie part or the big part on stage or something like that.
Never considered settling down into a television series.
Until it was presenting itself to me, and then, you know, it was CSI New York, and it was already a successful franchise.
They had done CSI Vegas, and then there was CSI Miami, and now they were going to spin off the third show within four years or something like that.
I mean, CSI Vegas came out two years later.
They had another show in Miami, and two years after that, they had another show they were putting up in In New York, CSI New York.
So, I mean, they spun this franchise off very quickly.
And I knew they had a lot invested in this franchise.
CBS was going to put a lot into it.
I met with Anthony Zeicher, who created the CSI franchise.
I had a good meeting with him.
We had a good talk.
And I was, you know, at that time, I was very focused on supporting our military.
It was post-September 11th.
I was working with veterans.
I was supporting FDNY in New York and Fire Family Transport Foundation and 9-11 family members who had been affected by that terrible tragedy.
Anthony wanted my character to To be somebody who was affected personally by September 11th.
Lost his wife on September 11th.
He's also a police officer.
I knew a lot of veterans and police officers who were personally affected by that.
So I connected to the idea of playing a 9-11 family member and a first responder Pretty quickly, because I had been supporting them.
And once I got through the idea, the question of what will it be like to play the same guy week after week after week after week.
Once I got through that, you know, all the other things were staring me in the face.
Steady work, staying home, a good franchise, paycheck, all these things.
And if it's successful, it would be, you know, very rewarding personally and financially, which it was.
So, it was the right thing at the right time to go from You know, what I was doing to television.
And after the first year of struggling through figuring out what the show was and everything like that, I really embraced the idea that I was playing the same guy every week and had this steady job.
And during that period, and I write about it in the book, all the things I was doing to help the military and to support various military charities and all this stuff, The fact that I had that steady work and had that job gave me a means to support many things that I believed in that I never dreamed about.
And it really was... The chapter in the book where I talk about this is called Perfect Timing.
And the timing could not have been better with what I was doing on my charitable side So you've worked on the stage, you've worked on the big screen, you've worked on the small screen.
Which did you prefer and why?
Because you see people who are sometimes successful on stage who can't make the transition to film, people who are successful on film who can't make the transition to stage.
You've done all three.
Which did you prefer and what were sort of the upsides and downsides?
You know, I prefer employment.
That's what I would say there.
And I like being involved in things that kind of make sense to me.
That's it.
I've directed, I've acted in all the mediums.
You know, the parts that I've done on stage have been very rewarding generally, you know.
What I've done in film and television has generally been rewarding and valuable and I don't feel like I spend time...
unwell spent.
So it's hard to say, Ben, you know, that I prefer one over the other.
Each one has given me something special.
And, you know, I've done what I think is good work in all those mediums.
Well, the book also obviously goes into deep detail and I think necessary detail about your relationship with the U.S. military.
military.
So, when did you first start getting involved with all of your outreach efforts on behalf of the military, with first responders, with police across the country?
Did it start with Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump or were you doing work with the military before that?
Well, that was certainly part of it.
You know, the Forrest Gump character was a wounded veteran, lost both his legs, and suffering terribly from post-traumatic stress.
And playing that part led me to start working with our wounded 25 years ago.
I mean, Forrest Gump came out 25 years ago this year.
So June 6th, this summer, it'll be 25 years.
That was certainly a part of getting involved with our wounded.
But prior to that, actually, I began supporting Vietnam veterans groups in the Chicago area, getting involved with supporting them back in the early 80s.
My wife's two brothers served in Vietnam, and her sister's husband also was a combat medic in Vietnam.
So when I met her in 1970, really we started dating and we got married in 81.
We started dating in 76.
She was a part of the early history of Steppenwolf, the early ensemble.
She introduced me to her brothers and her sister's husband and I asked them about Vietnam.
I started talking to them.
I was 18 years old in 1973.
It was the last year of combat operations in Vietnam.
The draft was over in 1983.
I recall registering for Selective Service, but the draft was over.
And I remember during high school, I'm doing all those plays, I'm playing in my rock band, I'm chasing those girls into the auditions and everything like that, and every night On television, during that time, there are casualty reports, there are terrible stories about Vietnam, and my mom is watching the television like this, and I'm calling my girlfriend and figuring out what the set list is going to be, and I wasn't really paying attention all that much.
But when I met those family members of my wife, and they started Talking to me about what it was like for them to be in Vietnam and then what it was like for them to come home from Vietnam to a nation that had turned its back on our military and had rejected the Vietnam veteran.
Something happened to me.
I just started thinking about that a lot.
And I remember taking over as artistic director for Steppenwolf.
And one of the things I wanted to do was find some material That I could do that was focused on the stories of Vietnam veterans.
And I read this.
So as artistic director, you're always looking for plays and you get all these publications from different cities that have the list of plays that are going on in those cities and what's going on.
So I, I would do that.
And I got one thing that was from LA called the drama log.
It was kind of what's going on in sort of The small theaters in L.A.
And I read this story about a play that was written by a group of Vietnam veterans and where they were actually performing the play that they wrote.
So every night, these guys would recreate their own stories of what happened to them in Vietnam on stage.
And it got very good reviews.
It was a big hit.
It sounded very powerful.
I immediately got on an airplane and flew out to see it.
It's 1980 and I was just knocked out.
I went back the next night and saw it again.
And I went home to Chicago and I wrote to the guys that did it and I said, would you consider letting me do this play to tell your stories That you're telling yourselves on stage every night, would you let me do that?
And they said, no.
It should only be performed by veterans.
We don't want anybody to do it but veterans.
Eventually the play closed in Los Angeles and I just kept asking them, you know, what are you going to do with it?
Well, no, no, no.
And eventually we were doing a play in Chicago that Malkovich had directed.
And it was called Baum and Gilead by Lanford Wilson, and it was high performance.
It took place in a diner, like a seedy diner in New York.
So it's got all the night people out there, the hookers and the pimps and the drug addicts and the junkies and the crazy people running around.
It was like 38 people on stage, all just being crazy, you know?
And it was very high energy, and we put Springsteen music in it, we put Tom Waits music in it, we put Riggie Lee Jones.
It was just very, you know, very Steppenwolf.
That was kind of our thing.
And so I said to this guy, John DeFusco, who had created this play, Tracers, about these Vietnam veterans.
I said, come see it.
So he flew out, he saw it, and he loved it.
And then he gave me the rights to do the play.
I did it there.
Veterans from all over the area came to see the play.
A lot of Vietnam veterans.
And this is 1984.
So this was, you know, the Vietnam veteran wall had just opened in 1982.
So this was still a time where Vietnam veterans were just not used to coming out of the shadows and telling their stories.
But our play became this rallying point and veterans would come from all over and we ended up creating a night at Steppenwolf every week that was just simply for the veterans.
And that began a series of events and things that laid the bedrock for my veterans work going into the 90s and then post-September 11th.
So in just a second, I'm going to ask you about Lieutenant Dan, how it was to play that part, and your work with the USO, and generally what people don't get about the military.
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All righty, so let's talk a little bit about Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan and how that changed your perspective on the military situation.
So obviously you were already incredibly pro-military, you already wanted to tell the stories of people who had served and done that amazing work.
What changed your perspective about playing Lieutenant Dan?
I remember when I... I did have mice and men.
And that, I think, got the attention a little bit of the producers of Forrest Gump.
At least it got me an audition.
Here's a guy who directed and produced and is one of the two main guys in the movie.
That got the attention of the producers and the director, Robert Zemeckis, so I got an audition.
And I read it, and I was going to audition to play a Vietnam veteran.
And here I was.
I had been supporting Vietnam veterans for 10, 12 years at that point, in various ways.
Very much wanted to play that part.
I directed that play, Tracers.
I had a cast of guys that were just amazing in it, all playing the Vietnam veterans.
I wanted to be them.
I wanted to be up there doing that myself, but I was the director and it was my passion project.
Now here's an opportunity for me to play a Vietnam veteran.
In a way to honor my wife's two brothers and her sister's husband and all the many Vietnam veterans that I had met.
It was a great story.
A story of a Vietnam veteran that actually ends well.
Up until that point, you know, they started making movies about Vietnam about 1978.
about 1978, three years after the fall of Saigon.
And there was the deer hunter and coming home and casualties of war.
And these various movies started...
But you always wondered, at the end of those films, if the Vietnam veterans was going to be okay.
At the end of every one of those movies, you're just not sure if he's gonna be okay.
At the end of Coming Home, one of them kills himself, you know?
And at the end of The Deer Hunter.
And at the end of The Deer Hunter, you're just like... It was always tragic, and you just didn't see any way for the Vietnam veteran to be okay.
Along comes Forrest Gump, and he goes through all that same despair and anguish and heartbreak and...
Loneliness and anger and all these things.
But what happens at the end of that story?
He's successful.
He's wealthy.
He's married.
He's moving on with life.
He's standing up on new legs.
He's moving on.
And it's a happy ending for a Vietnam veteran.
We hadn't seen that movie, that story.
But yet, that story was the story of many Vietnam veterans.
It just hadn't been told.
There were many Vietnam veterans who came back.
And while there are many that Struggled for many, many years.
There were also many that were able to put their service years behind them and move on in business and be okay.
And here along comes Lieutenant Dan and that's his story.
So I very much wanted to play that part.
I was lucky to get it.
It introduced me to an organization called the DAV, Disabled American Veterans, which I've supported now for 25 years because You know, almost 25 years ago, about a month after the movie opened, they invited me to come to their national convention.
I tell this story in the book.
And they gave me an award for playing Lieutenant Dan.
And they wanted to honor me for playing Lieutenant Dan in what they thought was an honest portrayal of a catastrophically injured soldier.
And they just felt it was so many of the members of the DAV, or Vietnam Veterans themselves, they just wanted to recognize that work.
And that began Our relationship, as I said, has lasted 25 years.
Every year I go to their national convention, I play concerts for them, I've done PSAs, I've done fundraising, different things for them, many friends within the DAV.
We have a program at my foundation that's in partnership with the DAV.
That really started me focusing on our wounded.
Then along comes September 11th.
And we deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our folks started getting hurt, started getting killed.
And I just could not sit by and do nothing.
That was such a devastating attack on our country.
And now we were deploying in reaction to that.
And it also became kind of a divisive time because, as you recall, during the Iraq war, after we went into Iraq in 2003, then 2004, 5, 6, 7, things started getting worse there.
An insurgency, there was Abu Ghraib, there was all these things.
During those years, you could just see it.
I mean, what was happening in the coverage of it was Very similar to what had happened in the Vietnam War.
Things were just not going well.
And, you know, I just pictured our guys sitting over there watching television thinking, gosh, things are not going well and I'm sitting right here.
They're saying it on the news every night.
And I didn't want our folks deploying in reaction to that terrible event, people that were signing up because of those airplanes going into those buildings, I didn't want them To feel that they were being neglected or that the country was going to turn its back on them or something.
And it was a divided time, if you recall.
Some people supported George Bush and the efforts to go into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some people didn't.
And it was being... It was a very divided time.
And I wanted to help.
You know, I wanted to help our service members get through it.
So... And, you know, just personally, and I say this in the book, my heart was just broken after that terrible day.
It was broken, and I needed to do something to help heal that.
And I felt, having been involved with Vietnam veterans, Wounded veterans through the DAV in the 80s and 90s.
My role now would be to support the active duty folks that were responding to that attack.
Yeah, you know, you toured plenty with members of the military, meeting members of the military.
And do you have any sort of memories that stick out of that time?
Because you've obviously done a ton of it and met an enormous number of members of the armed services.
Yeah, just all throughout all the travels and everything.
You know, a number of stories in the book about that have affected me and that have galvanized my passion for making sure that we don't forget what our defenders do for us on a daily basis.
And some of those stories are in the book.
And I remember, you know, I tell a story about As a kid, I remember when my grandmother passed away.
And she was in her 60s, and she was a heavy smoker.
And she just wasted away in the hospital.
And I went to see her, and I loved my grandmother.
And I was just heartbroken, seeing her just Laying in the bed.
And it was terrible.
And I just ran out of the hospital.
And I never wanted to go back to a hospital.
Unless I was on a gurney.
And when I started doing USO, my first trip was to Iraq in June of 2003.
Then I came back.
Then I went in July.
Three weeks later, I went to Italy, visited troops there.
And then about a month later, in August, I was in Germany, visiting troops there.
I just went, boom, boom, boom.
I was going.
Didn't have a job at the time.
And one of the things I was going to do in Germany was go to Landstuhl Medical Center, which is the main hospital in Germany where people come right off the battlefield and they go to the hospital.
And they're stabilized in Germany and then they're sent home to the States, to one of the hospitals here.
And I was very apprehensive about going.
I didn't... I... You know, I was just like, what's it going to be like?
You know, hospitals, I can't stand the thought of it.
And I remember my grandmother withering away and it's just...
Just, it was bad.
And I thought, now I'm going to see guys that have been blown up, shot at, and burned up.
I was very nervous about it, I remember.
I can remember sitting on the bus as the bus approached the hospital and we pull in this little van and we pull up and just as we pull up, a big bus pulls up and a whole bunch of people run out of the hospital and they start unloading gurneys that have just come off the airplane from the battlefield, sent back to the hospital.
Wires and tubes and, you know, IVs and, you know, everything.
And they're, you know, these guys are all stabilized, but they got to get in there because they got surgery right away, as soon as they get to the hospital.
And that team ran out so professionally, getting them out of that, out of those buses quickly.
And I just stood there and watched.
This was the first thing I saw at the hospital.
Seven or eight wounded guys being carried into the hospital on gurneys, all with wires and missing legs and all this.
I was just like, okay, take a deep breath here, you know.
And they first took me into a room that had about 30 guys in it.
And these were all guys that were banged up.
Cuts, bruises, gunshot wounds, whatever it was.
But they were going to get patched up and sent back to the battlefield.
And they were all in there and they were waiting, you know, gel on their face from burns or whatever, you know, they were going to get fixed up and sent back to the war zone.
I walked in and I had a USO hat on and I'm like, this is, you know, remember this is before CSI New York, so I was Lieutenant Dan but, you know, I hadn't done much else.
So, I didn't know what to say or how to start it and somebody looked at me and he said, And he burst into a smile.
And they all had these thousand-yard stares.
They were quiet in there.
It was quiet.
Nobody was saying anything.
And then one guy just lit up and started smiling and calling me Lieutenant Dan.
Then everybody started coming around and laughing and taking pictures.
And all of a sudden, the whole mood in the room just completely changed.
Nobody knew what my real name was.
They just saw me from the movie.
And they wanted to talk about the movie and I thought, gosh.
And then I left that room after being in there for 90 minutes or so, shaking hands and taking pictures, signing autographs, to go upstairs to the hospital rooms.
But I knew when I left that room, gosh, I just brought something into that room that was really, really positive.
It changed the whole mood in the room.
Just showing up.
So I went upstairs and that's when I saw a lot of Really badly wounded people.
Some didn't even know I was there.
But their family members had flown from the States to Germany and they were standing over hospital beds of amputees and waiting for them to wake up.
And I changed their mood just by showing up.
I'll never forget that because it started a whole journey of trying to support our wounded that I've been on ever since.
Well, it's an amazing thing.
And it's also, I would imagine, something that keeps you grounded.
I mean, I've lived in Hollywood my entire life.
You've been out here longer than I've been alive.
But the fact is that... Don't remind me.
But the fact is that you see so many people who, you know, are very wealthy and very famous who seem to have lost their grounding in reality.
And you haven't.
Do you think that you're, you know, both between your family life and your work with the troops, that's what's helped keep you grounded and on solid ground?
Partially.
And partially my, just the background from working in a basement.
You know, for all those years, you know, with actors.
You know, a lot of the actors that were with us in those early days, Joan Allen, Laurie Metcalf, as I said, Malkovich, Jeff Perry, you know, a lot of folks, Gary Cole, a lot of folks are all just sort of grounded in this Illinois thing that we had at that time.
And they remember the days where we all worked for free, we didn't get any money, and everybody was just doing it for the love of it.
That gave us a lot of, I think, good fundamentals, you know, when we moved away from that into something that we had all had to struggle for.
You know, nobody came out here, you know, and just got handed stuff right away.
I mean, everybody kind of You know, work their way up.
You know, Malkovich was a little bit different because we went, he started, we went to New York, he started doing movies after that.
But, you know, everybody had a pretty good grounding, I think, once we started moving into the movie business already.
And just simply because we remember, you know, it wasn't always You know, glamorous and all that.
There was a struggle for a lot of folks to get there.
And I remember that.
And certainly, you know, when you go to the war zones, and you see how people are living in the war zones, and you live with them that way for a little bit, and you eat what they eat, and you sleep on what they sleep on, and all of that, and you continue to do that, it gives you a... It's a reality check, for sure.
So I know that right now you're spending an awful lot of time on touring, and I want to hear about what happens after the tour is over.
What are your plans for the future?
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All right.
Gary's book is Grateful American, A Journey from Self to Service.
Everybody should go check it out.
And Gary, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate your time.
It's my pleasure, bud.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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