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May 28, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:08
Beyond Lt. Dan: Gary Sinise Reflects on Grief, Gratitude, and a Life of Giving
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The band has done almost 600 concerts over the last 20 years or so on military bases all over the country and overseas.
And it's a good feeling.
It's a good feeling.
Service, I always say this, is a great healer for a broken heart.
And 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.
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.
In this episode, I'm sitting down with award-winning actor, producer, director, and musician Gary Sinise, perhaps best known for playing Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump.
He's dedicated his life to supporting America's active duty military, veterans, first responders, and their families.
He received the Presidential Citizen Medal for his humanitarian contributions.
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.
And by lifting somebody else up, we lift ourselves up.
And there's no question about it.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Gary Sinise, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
I'm happy to be here.
Thank you.
I'm curious, at what point did you realize what your version of service to the world was going to be?
I think maybe there's phases, there's steps, there's 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's a lot of veterans in my family, but it went back a ways.
And 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 got me kind of woken up a little bit.
And so in the 80s, I started supporting them.
Then I played the Vietnam veteran in the 90s.
He was a wounded veteran, so that introduced me to an organization called the Disabled American Veterans, the DAV.
You know, at that time, there were 1.5 million wounded veterans as a part of the organization.
This was back in the mid-'90s.
And I met just hundreds and hundreds of wounded veterans going all the way back to World War II.
And I started supporting them.
So 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.
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'm trying to support them and raise money, raise awareness, taking a band out there to entertain the troops, all these different things.
It just, at a certain point, I was in it, you know, for good.
and that's why I started the Gary Sinise Foundation.
And one of the things that strikes me about Forrest Gump and the Lieutenant Dan character that you played was that he starts, you know, The war really hurts him in all sorts of ways, physically, psychologically.
He's suicidal.
But then in the end, with the help of his friend, he kind of comes out okay.
but it's a whole arc, a whole difficult road to get there.
I'm wondering how much that portrayal played a role into Well, 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, he's going to have trouble when he gets home.
You know, you look at other films.
Full Metal Jacket.
Full Metal Jacket, Deer Hunter, Coming Home.
Bruce Dern, at the end of Coming Home, he takes off his uniform and swims out in 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 know, you just wondered if the Vietnam veteran was going to be okay.
And then along comes Forrest Gump and we see a story about a Vietnam veteran that we really hadn't seen before, which is...
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, 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, There were Vietnam veterans who came home, and 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.
And it was a hopeful story.
It was a positive story, and Vietnam veterans recognized that, and they wanted to celebrate that.
Even the disabled American veterans, that's how I got involved with them.
And 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.
You know, they're all wounded in some way at the DAV.
And that was very moving to me.
It was impactful and powerful, certainly set the stage for my getting involved in supporting our wounded.
That's why we have such a strong...
Between us, there's a corner of a table where there's many thousands, I'm sure, challenge coins.
And maybe very briefly, what are these challenge coins?
coins.
There's various stories about where challenge coins came from.
There's one story that when
or maybe they were fighting along somebody who was from France, they didn't speak any English, they would exchange these coins, and 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, they 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 I've collected well over 3,000 coins in a number of years, and people don't give them out lightly just to anybody.
Because you can only make so many, right?
Usually somebody will make 50 of them and give them out.
In special circumstances and I've received just a lot of these special coins over the years and so we want to display them, you know, for people that come here to the office and let, you know, 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.
Your son Mac worked with you.
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.
I want to get you to tell me a bit about the relationship, what it meant to you and the work you did together.
Yeah, Mac was an incredible guy.
He celebrated his 33rd birthday.
In the recording studio, recording an album in 2023 that he envisioned doing.
And he was very disabled by this awful, rare cancer that took his life called chordoma.
And he fought it for about five and a half, six years.
He probably had it for many, 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 in the base of his spine, and he was having all kinds of pain and all kinds of trouble.
We discovered there was an orange-sized tumor, and that tumor very well could have 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.
And there's 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.
30% of the time it comes back, and that's what happened to Mac.
And 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.
And as time went on, it disabled him more and more.
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, excellent musician.
He wrote a lot of music.
And 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, and he said to me that there was a problem.
And so he teamed up with two of my band members to help him sort of work on it.
And then a buddy, out of the blue, a buddy of his from college, a composer pal, contacted him and came to see him.
And 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 of this piece.
And so his buddy, Oliver Schnee, said, I'll work on it.
Let's finish it.
And that's exactly what Mack wanted to do, get it finished.
And so they went to work on it together in June of 2003.
And by July 17th, they were in the studio recording this beautiful, amazing piece called Arctic Circles To an entire album's worth of music that he finished by the end of the year.
music And he designed the album cover.
The album is called Resurrection and Revival.
He wanted to make some vinyls to give to people.
Vinyl records.
And he said, Dad, if we ever sell any, you know, 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 got to hear it all.
And I decided to...
I decided to make 500.
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.
So I wanted people to know that we lost him.
And I had never talked about it publicly.
Interviews or something like that.
I never talked about it.
So people were kind of stunned by it.
And we also put...
And if you want to pre-order it, you can order it here, and we'll get you a copy.
And 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 And some of the videos from the recording sessions were on Mac's YouTube channel, and we put that in the article.
So people were going to the YouTube channel, hearing the music, and they were buying the album.
It was beautiful.
And after he died, I found all this other music that he wrote in his Dropbox file that I'd never heard.
And so I went to work.
I called Oliver up and said, "We're going to do another record," and I produced, you know, funded part two, and Oliver produced and arranged and helped me, you know, get it all organized, and 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 Mack wanted, they're helping our mission here at the Garrison East Foundation.
I'm very sorry for your loss.
Thank you.
You have this band that's been around for quite a while where you play the bass, the Lieutenant Dan Band.
Before I go there, you moved your foundation here to Franklin, Tennessee, right by Nashville.
What was the thought behind that from L.A.?
Things started to get tough for our son physically toward the end of 2019.
It was getting harder for him.
Early 2020, he was going to need another surgery on his spine to remove more tumors that were growing and spreading.
It was just getting harder.
So, at the end of 2019, I finished up.
I had two or three acting jobs that year.
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 tumor off his spine.
And after each surgery, he would become more disabled.
Buy it.
So 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 New York for nine years.
I was on another series for a couple of years, Criminal Minds Beyond Borders.
And I did well.
And I could afford to step away.
And I started to focus on Mac.
And the family and being there for them and just 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 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, right?
First trip I was on, he was rocking out.
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 it's also, you know, I pay the band.
I do it for free.
It's part of just my mission, you know.
And now the band has done almost 600 concerts over the last 20 years or so on military bases.
All over the country and overseas.
And it's all free concerts for people.
Occasionally we've played in some clubs and that kind of thing, but mostly it's military.
It's over 170, I think.
That's the number I have in terms of military races.
I think it's over 180 now.
It's quite the number.
Yeah, that's a lot of military bases, you know, around the country and overseas to visit.
And so, you know, and many of those bases I've been to multiple times.
So it's hundreds of trips, and I did 100 USO tours over the years.
And 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.
So the American people who donate to the Gary Sinise Foundation, they 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 and it gives me the opportunity to talk to them about my appreciation for them and my gratitude for what they do.
And it's a good feeling.
It's a good feeling.
Service, I always say this, it's a great healer for a broken heart and 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.
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.
By lifting somebody else up, we lift ourselves up.
And there's no question about it.
Well, Gary Sinise, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you all for joining Gary Sinise and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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