Gary Sinise - CPAC at Liberty

all right tonight we have the honor of very nice and before we do I need to interest you can all go ahead sit down now I'm gonna introduce my friend John highbush who is the executive director of the Ronald Reagan Foundation and library he is the reason why mr. Gary Sinise is here tonight they're basically neighbors out there in California and friends and they share alike mindedness in the vision and values of our country and so I asked John if he could somehow pull it and mr. Sinise for this night so it's his it's his fault that he's here it's his responsibility is here so we let's give him a big thank you and I'm gonna turn it over to him now thanks so much Scott Jerry thank you so much for allowing me to bring out one of the most decent and generous and patriotic Americans that that walked this earth today Gary Sinise [Applause] this is a big deal for Gary and I we we've brought a number of slides some photographs that it's a big kind of a neat show-and-tell that connect very very much to gary's brand-new New York Times bestseller and it's a bit of a walk down memory lane and we left the Reagan Library just last night to flew in right after the event a packed crowd a lot of incredibly patriotic Americans just like those that I am looking at it the this evening so with that if I could ask my friends here to put up the very first slide here's Gary's book this one is really really worth your reading it is an American tale it's a classic and I really encourage you to take a look at it it might it might change your life if we could we'll go to the next slide here we go Gary let me ask you a question which of these young gentlemen might be Gary Sinise all right that's me in the red shirt hi everybody it's nice to see you thanks for having me so just still there yeah so the reason Jon wanted to put this this picture up is because so much of what my performing life it began with with music and I had my first guitar when I was in fourth grade and started playing and this is a little this is am very well attended large crowd in the backyard of my house in Highland Park Illinois and folks from Illinois here and that's good that's why I grew up the north side I was born on the south side of Chicago moved to the north side went to school in Highland Park Illinois this is where it got my first guitar started playing that's me in the in the penny loafers and white socks there with the red shirt we had and my dad took this picture and I put it in my book because so much of what I'm doing right now includes music and music kind of led me to music actually led me to acting because years later about this I guess I'm about sixth grade here years later I'm a sophomore in high school I was a struggling student like all from the time I was in kindergarten through all the way through high school and I was really in I was kind of in trouble music was the only thing that kept me kind of busy and kept me interested and I was standing in a hallway in in my high school as a sophomore and I was standing probably cutting class I was just not a good guy a good student at that time I was a good guy but just not a good student and I was standing in this hallway and this little lady just blew down the hallway she was like a fireball and do you know they you know the musical West Side Story the West kites there it is that West Side Story is about you know these two gangs the American gang the Puerto Rican gang and they kind of fight each other and then they come together at the end she blew down the hallway and then turned to me and looked at me standing with my band members and said I'm directing West Side Story you look perfect for the gang members please come an audition for the show and then she blew off down the hall and this is just a chance encounter I I just happen to be cutting class and standing in that hallway at this moment but it was a life-changing thing because I ended up kind of taking her up on it I went to the audition and they handed me a script first first I wasn't sure if I was going to go in there but I saw all the pretty girls going in so I followed him in there and they handed me a script I didn't know what I was doing and I started to read the script and I was stumbling through it and making jokes and cracking everybody up and she put me in the play and gave me a two-line part I think it was a very small part but and this is the original program from the play in 1971 and it completely changed my whole life I fell in love with acting now I wanted to take all the theater classes I wanted to come to school and be in all the plays and I found this purpose that I would carry into my career years later and obviously have been doing it since since I was 16 years old can we go to the next slide now Gary I thought Steppenwolf was a band I know what is this about so this is this is 1976 and I graduated from high school and I didn't go to college and I wanted to continue that feeling that we had of doing plays in high school so we got some kids together and we started a theater company and we called it Steppenwolf because somebody happened to be reading the book called Steppenwolf and we needed to put something on the program so we call it Steppenwolf and this is 1976 this is our first sign we we were able to get there was a Catholic school that had closed down and there was a basement in this Catholic school and it was a big room and I went to the priest and I asked him if we could use that room to build a theater and he said yes and he gave us he gave us the room for like what dollar a year and we went in there we built an 88 seat theater my high school buddy Jeff Perry has anyone seen the show scandal scandal fans there Jeff plays the evil chief of staff on scandal and he's my best buddy from high school he was in the production of West Side Story we started the theater company together he went to Illinois State University and that's where he met John Malkovich and actress named Laurie Metcalf who's done superbly well really well let's go to the next slide a great group of people there there's a bunch of people from Steppenwolf right there that's Laurie Metcalf on bottom right Jeff Perry behind her that's me in the white shirt with the glasses there and behind me is my wife Moira up top is Malkovich and next to him is actress named Glenn Headley who unfortunately passed away on the Left member of Frasier remember John Mahoney played Frazier's dad that's John Mahoney behind the woman in the white shirt there and the woman in the right shirt there is Joan Allen she's a very well-known actress nominated for three Academy Awards great group of people here and this is the original company of Steppenwolf well speaking of Malkovich can we go in the next slide okay you know you know John Malkovich is do you know okay so that's him with me and this is the play cut that we did called true West it's one of the first shows that we moved to New York from Chicago and Malkovich and I were in it nobody knew who we were we took it to New York in 1982 it was a big hit it ended up playing a significant role in Steppenwolf's evolution as a company and by the way if Steppenwolf went from this basement of a Catholic school where no one made any money I was 18 years old when it started it's now been around 45 years we own three buildings there we built two of them from the ground up bought the other two renovated them really does a wonderful American Dream story in the beginning we all worked jobs during the day I was I've worked on a loading dock at Neiman Marcus unpacking boxes and on you know pulling them off trucks Malkovich drove a school bus do you know John Malkovich's don't you fear for those children that he was driving I often wonder if they turned out all right those children it was that was John's day job and we all had day jobs and we worked work to support ourselves why we did the theater at night now the theater company is has over 50 actors writers directors artists that are involved in it and again it's it's a internationally recognized theatre company and it there's a lot in my book about this the importance of this stuff to how I would eventually move into the television and movie business well speaking of important stuff this next slide I believe give you this production really changed your life so I have I have a lot of veterans in my family and where are all our veterans out here can we can we have all our veterans stand up and be recognized by the audience here and anyone who served our country [Music] [Applause] how many Vietnam veterans do we have in the audience to them welcome home to all our Vietnam veterans god bless you so I have Vietnam veterans in my family on my wife side the family I have World War 1 my grandfather served during the Battle of the Argonne in France 1917 1918 my he had three sons two of them served in World War two one on a ship in the Pacific the other a navigator and a b-17 bomber over Europe my dad served in the Navy in the early 50s on my wife's side of the family her two brothers served in Vietnam one as a combat assault helicopter pilot eight hundred combat hours the other a West Point graduate went as a platoon leader a lieutenant then went back again as a company commander of a captain then he went to West Point taught as a major there he was teaching at Fort Leavenworth as a lieutenant colonel in the early 80s he was diagnosed with cancer and unfortunately passed away in 1983 I got to know these Vietnam veterans very very closely in my family and they really I think even more so than the veterans of my own family the the Vietnam veterans on my wife side of the family were the ones that then really awakened something in me as a young person I was I was an 18 year old high school kid in 1973 when combat operations ended in Vietnam and during the Vietnam War I remember very specifically the nightly news broadcasts of casualty reports and what was going on in Vietnam but I was caught up with playing music I was caught up with doing theater I was caught up with just being a high school kid and you know it wasn't until I really met the Vietnam veterans and my wife's family that I thought back to those days and how oblivious I was to what was going on with guys that just were folks that were just a little older than was serving in the jungles of South Vietnam while I was being a kid in high school and so I started thinking and I felt very guilty about having been so oblivious during that time and I I wanted to do something and as the artistic director of Steppenwolf back in the late in late 70s early 80s one of the things that you do as artistic directors you look for plays for the people in your company to be and and you're putting blaze on stage so as a director I very much wanted to find a piece of material that told the stories of our Vietnam veterans and so I I looked in newspapers from all around the country to see what they were doing in those cities and I found this play that was being performed in 1980 and it was called tracers and it had been conceived by a Vietnam veteran who had done some work in the theater and he wanted to bring Vietnam veterans together to kind of workshop a play based on their experiences in Vietnam so he brought them together and they wrote this play and only two of them had been onstage before the rest were just veterans and they were performing their stories on stage eight times a week every night in Los Angeles so I flew out there to see the play and it was very powerful and I went back the next night and sought it again and then I started begging them to let me produce it in Chicago they felt that it should never be done by anyone other than veterans so they said no and then it closed in Los Angeles and I kept bugging them why don't you let me do it why don't you let me do it finally they said okay and so we produce this play in in preparation for producing this play we did a lot of research we went to Chicago and we sat with groups of Vietnam veterans that were struggling with post-traumatic stress at the VA and we listened to them talk and they told us they shared their stories of serving in Vietnam it was a galvanizing moment for my cast and so we went and produced this play the word got out in Chicago and this is the early 80s so the wall had just opened up in 1982 but Vietnam veterans were still they were still reluctant to you know come come together and I mean it was a terrible time for our veterans coming home from Vietnam as you well know our Vietnam veterans because the country had been so divided over the war and the Vietnam veteran kind of felt the sting of that and it was a shameful period in our history where our veterans were not treated well when they came home from war but I wanted to honor them in some way by telling their stories on stage and the word got out around Chicago that this was happening at Steppenwolf and so veterans from all over the city were coming to see the play so we we made one performance a week just veterans night and we would have 200 veterans in the audience every night and we let them in for free and it became this healing powerful cathartic thing in Chicago news is very moving to me to be a part of this and so from that experience I started working locally to support local Vietnam veterans in Chicago supporting them throughout the 80s and then along came the 90s and I got to play one next slide please boy this is famous this this changed your life as well yes so 10 years later after I did did that play we had moved out to Los Angeles and I was trying to get acting work I produced a film of mice and men the John Steinbeck novel and some mice and men fans out there agree thank you and I think that got the attention of the producers and the director of Forrest Gump because they called and asked me to come in and audition for this part and I've read it and it was a Vietnam veteran and having been involved with supporting Vietnam veterans in Chicago and working with them in different ways I was just so eager to play this part and I went in an audition for it and then I didn't hear anything for about three weeks or so and you know as an actor any actors here any people in the theatre departments out here so as an actor you kind of learn after a while that you shouldn't hang everything on one audition you got to just keep going and you hope that they work but keep going and I learned to do that and so and when I didn't hear anything back on Forrest Gump I just went on an audition for other things I auditioned for a movie called Little Buddha that Keanu Reeves was in and anybody see Little Buddha in here you're the only one man you saw it great so how many people saw for his gum so good thing I didn't get Little Buddha clearly and then I got this one I screened tested for Little Buddha but it was between me and Chris Isaak you know Chris Isaak he's the rockabilly guitar player country guy and Chris auditioned for it he got the part luckily I didn't get the part because I may have taken it because I needed work and I got this part instead and it it turned the whole career into a different direction from that point on I started supporting our wounded through the DAV disabled american veterans organization they invited me you know Forrest Gump is 25 years old this year and 25 years ago they invited me to their the DAV invited me to their National Convention I document all this in the book it was a very powerful moment they invited me to come on stage there was 2500 wounded veterans in the audience they were all cheering they wanted to get me an award for playing the wounded veteran and it it changed my life in more ways than one next slide now this is a quite a different role and I think I'd remember Gary I think you told me once that this is one of the your most favorite roles that you played yes oh that's Harry Truman I got to play Harry Truman for HBO in an HBO film it did very very well in fact I went to the Oscars for four it's Forrest Gump and the day after the Oscars I got on a plane and went to Kansas City and started shooting this President Harry Truman it was based on a book by David McCullough that is a full plastic silicone gel face that it went from here to here completely fake face that to make me look old like Harry Truman and I would sit in the makeup chair for four and a half hours in the morning and then we'd shoot for 12 or 13 hours I mean it was a really long day but it was worth it because the movie did really well on HBO had won a bunch of awards I won some awards for that and it it led to other things you know you're always hoping that you get the next big part and that would just keep the momentum going and this one certainly did that now you went to Broadway as well I think next slide here's an interesting shot anybody have any idea what this might be what your write is it's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest I was always a big fan of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from the time I was a kid I saw it as a kid as a young actor I was at the world premiere of the movie that Jack Nicholson was in I was just a big fan of it and in the back of my mind over the years I'd always hope to play that part so this is how many people saw the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with Jack Nicholson so do you remember the chief well the chief was a guy named Will Samson that's his son Tim Samson in our production have One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and we did it in Chicago then we moved it to London and then we did it on Broadway and we opened it in April of 2001 we were supposed to close September 16 2001 but for a few reasons we decided to close early July 29th 2001 next slide that's you holding the American flag right this is September 14th 2001 this is three days after the attacks of September 11th I would have been in New York had the play run it's full run to September 16th but now I'm back in California and on we all experienced that terrible day and President Bush declared that the Friday after the Tuesday of the attacks would be a National Day of Prayer and I'm sure you remember churches places of worship across the country who were just filled to the gills people looking for comfort looking for hope we were all filled with a terrible fear that these attacks were going to happen again remember anthrax going through the mail all of a sudden within a couple of weeks of the attacks there was a there was a fear there was a our hearts were broken it was just a very difficult time and so that day earlier that day I was in our little church and it was packed and I was standing up against the wall and tears running down my face and I remember I remember just feeling called in some way to I didn't know what but but that I had to participate in some kind of healing for the country in some way and this is the candlelight vigil in our neighborhood and they were happening all over the all over the country nice people in the neighborhood we're walking down to the corner for the candlelight vigil and I started to walk there and then I ran back and I grabbed this flag and I brought it there and at one point everybody turns to me and they started to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and everyone was singing patriotic songs god Bless America and tears running down our faces and I just lifted up the flag at that point somebody snapped that picture and this was a there's a chapter in my book called turning point and the book is called grateful American I am a grateful American a journey from self to service prior to this moment I was focused on the singular thing in my life this acting directing you know the the career but things changed after that event and I bright very specifically what that did and how I turned towards service to heal this broken heart from that terrible day and and I just it just started to snowball from there well the speaking of turning from self to service here's where it led you next can we see the next slide so this is this is November 2003 in Balad Iraq at Balad airbase it was called camp anaconda there was about 6,000 troops there I was there with with Wayne Newton and Chris Isaak was there as well he was performing Chris Isaak I don't know if you know him but he's the one who got the part in Little Buddha and I just volunteered to start going out for the USO I'd already been to Iraq by then this is my second trip there in six months and I just started volunteering you know what can an actor do you volunteer for the USO and I wasn't I wasn't playing music at that that time for you know on any regular basis so I but I just wanted to go so I just volunteered to go visit with our troops shake hands take pictures sign autographs have lunch with them talk to them make sure that they knew that they were appreciated and I was I was fearful at this time that we would deploy our troops to Iraq and Afghanistan and and they would not feel appreciated and having Vietnam veterans in my family having worked with Vietnam veterans having met hundreds and hundreds of Vietnam veterans having talked to them in the hospitals the thought of our troops coming back after responding to the attacks of September 11th and not feeling appreciated not feeling welcomed home that was very troubling to me and so I just started going out there and this is my sixth trip in six months I went to Iraq in June of oh three we remember the statue being pulled down so the statue was pulled down of Saddam Hussein in the square our troops tied up chain around it and yanked it down and they were I don't know if you remember the Iraqis they were hitting the statue and it was was a celebratory time that happened two months before my first trip I went to Iraq in June about three I came back in July I went to Italy visited military bases all around Italy in August I went to Germany visited military bases all around Germany September I was in I was at Walter Reed in Bethesda for my first time in fact I was at Walter Reed and Bethesda Bethesda on September 11th 2003 I remember very specifically in October I was in San Diego visiting troops and in November I'm back in Iraq and this is talking to a bunch of troops in a soccer stadium that Saddam Hussein used to torture people in and it's it's a very you know this is a very meaningful shot to me because it it represents some of the early the early support that began a whole series of events and journeys along the way now Gary then your career as a sixth-grade musician comes full circle next slide and this is what the Lieutenant Dan band so I have a band if you don't know that one person does that's good yeah Thank you very as I said yeah I played music all the way through high school and up in in my early 20s and I got very very busy with with the theater company and didn't play and then picked it up again in the late 90s and then September 11th happened and on my first true tour that jun 3 2 1 a tour with a hundred and eighty different people on that tour it was a giant tour northwest airlines gave us a 747 and me and a bunch of entertainers got on the on that airplane and went over to Iraq Kid Rock was on that tour Lee Ann Womack was on that tour Robert De Niro even showed up on it I mean there were basketball players football players actors comedians cheerleaders I mean you name it rock stars it was a big tour and I was watching the musicians kind of entertained and I had a group of people that I played with for fun so I just started talking to the USO about letting me take them with me finally in February vote for they said ok I'd been on a bunch of Tours myself and then been going over they they saw I was dedicated so they said ok you can take the band so we set up a tour to Korea Singapore and Diego Garcia that began what has turned into about 450 concerts for the troops around the world this is just recently this is at Fort Huachuca in in Arizona the ban is you know after playing so many concerts for the military the band's very very well known within military circles the band is a program of my foundation so I have to pay all the musicians pay the production cost but we can we can like much like the USO people donate to the USO and what's the USO do it provides entertainment and all kinds of thing so you donate to the Gary Sinise foundation and we among other things provide morale boosting entertainment and support for the men and women who serve our country I play for free and this is this is a big concert that we did up there it's been a lot a lot of concerts over the year one day maybe you'll you'll hear the band it's a really fun show well at Gary's speaking of morale-boosting this next slide is kind of tough to look at but it's what it's all about so this is a this is Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio and it's one of my trips there so as I said I began making regular trips to the hospital starting in 2003 in fact my first trip to a military hospital to visit our wounded was not in Washington it was in Germany on that August trip to Germany I went to Landstuhl Medical Center which is for our military folks they they might know this Landstuhl is where our our servicemembers who are injured they will go to Landstuhl first from the battlefield in Afghanistan Iraq wherever and they will be stabilized at Landstuhl and then they will fly home they'll quite often go to Walter Reed or Bethesda and now that their combined now at the time that I first started visiting there were two different hospitals in DC Walter Reed in Bethesda and Bethesda there's also Fort Belvoir this is in San Antonio and this is this is where our primary burn unit is so if you are badly burned you will you will go to San Antonio - BAM see this marine had been on a mission in Thailand actually he was based in Okinawa and he was flying a mission in Thailand his helicopter went down in Thailand this is in the intensive care unit and his family asked me to go in and talk to him he was not aware that I was there he lost hand and a leg and he was badly burned and the thing that I've experienced over the years with multiple visits to the hospitals many many times over and over and over is that I can see our wounded in various stages of their recovery so on my next trip I went and he was in a wheelchair and he met me for really the first time because here he didn't know I was talking to him there and the bandages were off he was in a wheelchair he was up he was moving around the next time I was at BAM see he was on a prosthetic and moving around and and now he's retired from the Marine Corps and he's teaching in Michigan and he's doing very very well so a happy ending this next slide Gary I had the opportunity to wants to work for the Red Cross and was assigned to Iraq and the reason I picked this is because I can tell you're in a medical tent in one of our war zones yes this this is again in Balad in 2007 and he had been badly injured lost a leg they were stabilizing him before he was going to be transferred out to Landstuhl and I was actually visiting a friend of mine who I met on my first band tour to Korea who was a colonel at the time f-16 pilot he was now a brigadier general and he's running the air wing at Camp anaconda and so I went and was was making a visit there and we paid a visit at the hospital there were many wounded in the hospital being stabilized and somebody snapped this picture unfortunately I've been you know I've tried over the years to find out who that was and what happened to him and in so many I've got you know there's been so many trips over the years multiple trips and I've got so many pictures with with our servicemembers in war zones and I whenever I look at them I just say a little silent prayer to myself that I hope everyone was okay because there have been there have been times when mothers have come up to me with pictures of me with their servicemembers son or daughter and I can I can think of five or six times specifically where they told me it was the last picture taken of their son or daughter as they were killed you know very soon after I was there [Music] so when I see pictures of so many of these folks that I've seen over the years I I always pray that they're there okay and I know some of them have returned either wounded or he'd come home to their final rest and yet you know when when you go on these trips and I'm seeing 2,000 people at once in a two hour period shaking hands taking pictures very quickly just given them that moment you know that 20 second moment you try and give them that 20 seconds and make it seem like 20 minutes because I get to leave the war zone and they have to stay in the war zone and you you hope they're all right and god bless our servicemembers we could never do enough for the men and women who serve our country [Applause] Gary let's go too sometimes there's joyous moments too next slide so quickly out so early in the war in 2004 ITI after my my second trip to Iraq on my second trip to Iraq that that trip where we were in the soccer stadium during that trip we went the troops wanted to show us one of the schools that they had refurbished and you weren't hearing about all these good news things you know and this is prior to the insurgency really ramping up and heating up but they took us out to an Iraqi school that they had rebuilt completely rebuilt nobody was hearing about these civil affairs projects but they wanted to show me and Wayne Newton and some of our group so we went in convoy was dangerous but we went out to the school and the first impression that I have that I remember was the troops getting out of the Humvees and out of the trucks and the kids just running up to them and grabbing them and hugging them and these were the soldiers that had helped to rebuild their school and they it was such a joyous wonderful time and we went around to all the classrooms and I remember me and Wayne and Neal McCoy great country artists and chris isaak going into one classroom and the four of us saying you are my sunshine to the iraqi kids they didn't know what we were saying but they liked it and they you know and but I saw all the kids sitting it they had it was very basic I mean in our classrooms you have things on the walls and there's drawings and ABCs and there's toys and all kinds of things like that nothing on the walls here all they had was these these desks that were kind of long and you would have three or four kids sitting at each desk and they'd be sharing like one little pencil stub and so I got the idea hey and when I got home I went to my children's school and I showed them pictures of my trip and I said let's collect a bunch of school supplies and we'll ship them over there so I shipped a button we got 25 boxes shipped them over there and that began a program that eventually we created called Operation Iraqi children that we launched in 2004 we started taking in donations we ended up between 2004 and 2013 shipping hundreds of thousands of school supply kits pens paper pencils erasers all these things that the kids don't have over there we ended up shipping them to Iraq and then we changed it to Operation international children because we were shipping to Afghanistan Djibouti Haiti the Philippines all these different places hundreds of thousands of school supplies because we were now taking in donations people would send us supplies and this trip this 2009 around Thanksgiving 2009 I got to take 500 backpacks over to the border right near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan that's the schoolhouse it's a little mud hut and those are the children as you can see some have shoes some don't but I got to give them each a backpack filled with school supplies as part of our program Operation international children and I write about Operation international children in Great America grateful American it was a very very positive program very positive hearts and minds program as the convoys would roll into the villages everybody would be tents troops would start handing out stuff everything was better [Music] we're getting near the end here next slide that you know meanwhile you had a day job CSI New York fans out there so CSI New York came at the perfect time it came in 2004 right when I was ramping up all all kinds of military support and I didn't have my own foundation at the time the way I was doing a lot of it was through other organizations supporting the USO traveling to play for the troops visiting hospitals supporting multiple military charities many of them are listed as a in this call to action section at the back of my book because they were very very important in teaching me I learned so much from working with all these military charities who were operating in all these different spaces including supporting first responders and so when I started my own foundation and to launched it in 2011 I had a hit TV show Gorn I had financially I was doing very well I could put a lot of my personal money into the into the creation of the Gary Sinise foundation and the chapter in my book about this in relation to my service mission is called perfect timing because the timing couldn't have been better to get this job I mean it just came at the right time CSI New York was on for nine seasons and that's a hundred and ninety seven episodes and I owned a little piece of the show so that's that helped me create the Gary Sinise foundation it allowed me to donate to multiple different military charities and and I've met just extraordinary people serving our country out there trying to help our veterans more times than I can count [Laughter] this week in North Korea and all that's happening there is on a lot of people's mind this next slide we just pulled up because I know that's where you are in this picture so I often talk about you know while I while I talk about how important it is to take care of our defenders and to keep them in their prayers and help them when we can it I want people to know why we should do it you know these are our freedom providers they sacrifice for freedom for the freedom of the United States and for the freedom of the world and when you go to places that don't really understand what that is places like Iraq and Afghanistan places that have been under the thumb of a dictator this is the border between North and South Korea the DMZ and I often talk about this and I write about it in my book I don't think there's a place on earth where you can stand and feel the difference between freedom and slavery any any stronger and more powerfully than standing on the DMZ because the border line it's this big it's a small concrete block that just runs down like this it's about this high and I can stand on the south side right here and I could step over to the north side if I wanted to and on some of these trips that I've made to the DMZ the North Korean guards will come right down to their side of the border and they'll be standing two feet away from me just staring at me taking pictures and you can look into the eyes of a North Korean this close I was there in 1983 and at that time they were digging tunnels under oh yeah yeah we went down into some of those tunnels there's there's probably still tunnels that they haven't found they found four of them and just imagine how many North Koreans were died you know in you know in digging those tunnel trying to dig them yeah but you can stand there and stare into the face of a North Korean guard and that / that person just has no concept of what freedom is he he was born into slavery he's still there to serve the supreme leader he cannot say when he wants he cannot worship how he wants he cannot assemble how he wants he doesn't have a free press none of the things that they have none of the things that we so cherish here but those things have to be fought for and protected and who has to do that our military service members people that are willing to go and fight for freedom defend it so god bless all our defenders for serving our country we can never do enough for you as far as I'm concerned that that slide of the hospital tent last year Franklin Graham was a good friend was here he does those tents right very close to the battle lines in Iraq or he did a while back he set the tents up here on campus and it's amazing how sophisticated they are because because the nearest hospitals two three hours away so they bring the soldiers in a lot of the equipment they have is donated by the military but they actually man the tents put the doctors there the nurses and you guys probably strike a great partnership because that's what he's doing well yeah and and they're so sophisticated now that that forty years ago some someone in a similar situation to someone who was you know we built homes for many of our wounded we had five quadruple amputees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we built homes for all of them years ago that person would have not have made it they would have bled to death but the Battlefield medicine and medical things are so different and much more sophisticated survived these tents are all state-of-the-art and they do surgery in the tents ever a covering room and but back to Lieutenant Dan I wanted to mention Tim Lee he's told his whole story here after his legs were blown off when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam you spent how many months in the hospital eight months and I remember you telling that story but it seemed like your attitude at that time was very similar to what lieutenant Dan's attitude the character his attitude was in the movie is that is that accurate I mean but you were you were I don't know I wanted to live you know I spent eight months on a ward we didn't have private room to semi-private rooms it was a ward with thirty thirty five Marines if you are on Ward one at Philadelphia Naval Hospital you were an amputee you were a marine and I saw a lot of bitterness and anger but I thought it I don't want to get bitter I don't want to get mad thought there was a point a little bit later it was a point when I went down to the bottom I had two young doctors that were happy and they were really doing things they shouldn't have been doing they were gonna do a hip disarticulation die cut off my right hip which I've been I wouldn't be able to set up I'd have Leo my stomach backwards that's like 47 years ago a lot of things have changes gary said but my dad stopped him from doing that surgery it was a godsend then on Monday morning I go to what we Marines call stump rounds and again it's all different today but there's a new doctor there set between the two young doctors ends up being the same doctor dr. Robert Bailey who did the first surgery on me Oh on the USS sanctuary when they bought me off the battlefield and so it was a god thing he took me to surgery one time didn't remove anything put me on brand-new antibiotics and two weeks later I was being discharged from the hospital and I haven't been back to a hospital for anything directly relating to what happened to me on March the 8th 1971 so I'm just glad to be alive I like to say one more thing I know that's a Vietnam veteran sitting out here and I won't say thank you and I appreciate Gary Sinise I'm not here to patronize him at all but what he's doing and in others doings well for these young men and women that have been to Iraq and Afghanistan it was nothing like that when we came back to Vietnam we were spat upon called baby killers and and horrendous the bags of urine thrown at us and nothing and truth about who most of us didn't expect anything we went did a job but a lot of hatred a lot of animosity so I think somebody said anything did come from Vietnam yes learn how to treat our men women who go and pay such a great sacrifice for now my point was that you did such a good job and that with that character showing what so many men like when Tim was at his low point what so many other Vietnam vets went through I think that was a big part plus what you're doing now of making sure that never happens to any any veterans coming home again we appreciate you so our final slide here and you know what you're doing now it's the Gary Sinise foundation it's what has become the focus of your life so yes having worked with multiple military charities learn from them raise money for for many of them over the years it just became clear that this was this was a part of my life that was going to be with me for a long time so I started the Gary Sinise foundation we have multiple programs at the Gary Sinise foundation doing a lot of great things I write about it in the book you can go to Gary Sinise foundation.org there are many many videos on the YouTube channel that show our programs in action and you can meet the people that we're supporting and that kind of thing it's been a beautiful mission it's given my life great purpose and meaning to be able to use the success that I've had in the movie in television business and do some good with it to help somebody else so I hope that you'll give grateful American a look take take a look at it learn a little bit more about how I got to the service mission and the Gary Sinise foundation thank you everybody for having me here [Applause]

Channel: Liberty University

Views: 63,206

Rating: 4.9167194 out of 5

Keywords: Liberty University, LibertyU, Liberty, Jerry Falwell

Id: b3qbqGUwBQM

Length: 59min 43sec (3583 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 11 2019