Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(57)
An issue of justice remained unanswered. What happened on 9/11 revealed absolute evil, and evil must be confronted and defeated. That meant our nation’s defenders were going to be called upon to do the dangerous and difficult job of combatting our enemies. When I thought about it that way, I was fully in support of that response. If we didn’t respond, then who would be attacked next? If we didn’t do something, what other innocent people would die?
As a country, we started to wake up to the fact that when it came to national security, we had been far too complacent. We’d failed to see the signs, to connect the dots of the threats to us.
We still had a collective memory of the First Gulf War, its two parts code-named Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. Back in the summer of 1990, right before I’d auditioned for A Midnight Clear, Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq, had pushed his armies into neighboring Kuwait and claimed it for himself. A coalition of thirty-five nations, led by the United States and Great Britain, came to Kuwait’s aid. I remembered turning on the TV and seeing the entire night sky lit up by antiaircraft fire. Saddam’s troops blasted away at our bombers as those planes rained fire on Saddam-controlled Baghdad. By the third week in February 1991, Saddam had been driven out of Kuwait; the First Gulf War was over, but not before we’d lost 383 Americans, with many more wounded. I never imagined then that one day I’d travel to Iraq myself.
In February 1993, just before I went to shoot The Stand in Utah, news came that a truck packed with thirteen hundred pounds of explosives had been parked in a garage at the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. Terrorists lit the fuse and the truck exploded, killing six innocent people and injuring more than one thousand. Investigators later learned that the terrorists had planned to bring down one tower and topple it into the other, ultimately bringing down both Twin Towers and killing everybody inside. Most of the bad guys were caught this time, but not all. Investigators found the information on where the truck had been rented and discovered that the idiot who’d rented the truck had actually used his real name. He was eventually linked to a group of terrorists, including one of bin Laden’s partners in Al Qaeda, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was not apprehended in 1993 and was later named the main architect of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Today, it astounds me to think that radical Islamic terrorists had planned and tried to bring down the Twin Towers a full eight years before they eventually succeeded. Why didn’t we see it coming?!
On April 19, 1995, I was working on Truman in Kansas City and turned on the TV news to see the chaos unfolding in downtown Oklahoma City. Two domestic terrorists had detonated a truck packed with explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 innocent people and injuring another 680. Another terrible day for our country, coinciding with my wife’s birthday. That coincidence made the atrocities seem even more personal.
On June 25, 1996, Hezbollah terrorists bombed a housing complex called Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Coalition forces had used the complex as housing in their operation to enforce a no-fly zone in Iraq. Nineteen American Air Force members were killed, with many others wounded.
On August 23, 1996—a full five years before the attacks of 9/11—bin Laden officially declared war on the United States. He was angry that American forces were still in Saudi Arabia, where we’d been stationed since the First Gulf War. The Saudis expelled bin Laden, so he’d moved his terrorist training organization to Sudan, and then to Afghanistan. In February 1998, he declared war on the United States a second time, lumping the West and Israel together with this declaration.
He was serious about his declaration. On August 7, 1998, two US embassies were simultaneously truck-bombed by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda henchmen—one in Tanzania and the other in Kenya, killing 224 and injuring more than four thousand. After the truck bombings, the FBI placed bin Laden on their Ten Most Wanted list.
In October 2000, the USS Cole was bombed by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda while on a routine refueling stop in a harbor in Yemen. At lunchtime, with many sailors aboard ship lined up for chow, two suicide bombers piloted a small speedboat close to the vessel and blew themselves up, killing seventeen sailors and injuring another thirty-nine. A United States battleship had been blown up. If that isn’t an overt act of war, I don’t know what is.
After 9/11, I started remembering all these events and thinking, Why didn’t we connect the dots better? Why weren’t we better prepared? I was afraid for my country, for my family. A plan began to form in my mind to do something bigger than myself, something that would support our country in its response to the reality of terrorism. I concluded that the best way I could do this was to support our nation’s defenders. I didn’t know yet what this would mean. But I knew I wanted the men and women who were deploying to know they were appreciated, and that a grateful nation backed them up. The thought of our returning warriors facing any sort of treatment similar to what our Vietnam vets received when they came home was very troubling to me. I couldn’t stand the idea of our troops going off to fight Al Qaeda on our behalf and then being mistreated upon return. We couldn’t make the same mistake twice.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, I was asked to emcee the Chicago 9/11 memorial event held in Daley Plaza, in the middle of the city. More than one hundred thousand Chicago citizens packed the area, and tears flowed. It was a very somber day. I wasn’t primarily known for my work with veterans yet, but I’d been doing bits and pieces along the way. People knew I’d created the veterans’ nights at Steppenwolf. I’d supported the DAV since 1994 when Forrest Gump came out. I’d helped raise money to build a veterans’ memorial in Lansing, Illinois, and I’d supported the American Veterans Center awards ceremony in 2000. (And over the next decade, I was always somewhere on September 11, hosting some kind of memorial event.)