Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(67)
Wow. It was actually happening—meaning we needed some songs to play. I called Kimo. “Guess what?” I said. “Next February, we’re going on a tour with the USO. And—oh—we gotta figure out something to play.”
Kimo chuckled. “Great, Gary. I’ll call the guys. We’ll figure it out. Let’s get some songs together and rehearse.”
Even I was shaking my head that the USO had agreed to take a chance on us. USO organizers had never heard us in concert, and it’s not like we had a CD we could hand over so they could hear our sound. In addition, I wasn’t a songwriter or a professional musician, and I didn’t have any established music tours that anybody could point to. I didn’t even really have a band at the time. So I have to salute the USO officials, because the decision showed tremendous flexibility and vision on their part.
But they trusted we would deliver a great show. And I think they agreed to send me on tour because I was Lieutenant Dan. I’m sure they crossed their fingers and hoped I could play.
A short while later, they told me where we were going. First up were two back-to-back shows at the Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a small base on a remote island in the Indian Ocean. I’d never heard of it before, but a smaller show was okay by me. Probably the USO representatives figured that if we stunk, nobody would hear about it from the tiny island of Diego Garcia. From there, our schedule called for a stop at a naval base in Singapore where we’d do another show, then on to South Korea for three shows: the US Army Garrison Humphreys, Kunsan Air Force Base, and Camp Casey.
I was excited and also a little nervous. I felt a personal responsibility to put on a professional-caliber show for the troops. Our troops were worth it. I didn’t worry about getting booed off the stage; I just didn’t want to let the troops down with a bad show. Fortunately, our tour was still a couple months away.
Around the same time that the officials from USO World Headquarters in DC agreed to set up a tour, and just before my second handshake tour to Iraq, we asked the Chicago chapter of the USO to set up a concert, preferably at a smaller venue. We needed experience playing for the military under our belts. The USO representatives agreed and set up a show for some two hundred recruits on November 6, 2003, at Naval Station Great Lakes. It’s the navy’s only “boot camp.” We played okay, but I knew we needed more practice. Still, our first show on a military base felt great, and I got to deliver a message that I would continue to deliver over and over in the coming years: Thank you, and I am grateful for you.
A few weeks later in November 2003, I headed back to Iraq for a second time with the USO. This tour had already been set up prior to my band’s creation, so I flew overseas alone. Chris Isaak was set to give a concert at Camp Anaconda near Balad. He found out I played bass and asked me to jump in with his band onstage. Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” proved a big hit with the crowd. The show had maybe five thousand troops in attendance, and between songs I took the mic and said a few words of encouragement. Somehow, the show felt different, although at first, I couldn’t put my finger on why. What was it exactly? Bigger crowds? A bigger name onstage? Then it hit me. I was playing for the first time in a war zone.
Camp Anaconda, also known as Balad Air Base, was a big base. Under Saddam Hussein, it was the most important airfield used by the Iraqi Air Force. The base was captured by the US as part of the invasion in April 2003 and was pretty beat up when I was there in November. Parts of some runways still could not be used because of bomb damage. We visited the base hospital and saw many of the wounded who were being stabilized to be sent home. I was staying in a building that had taken a beating during the battle for the base, and it was very rugged, with no lights or plumbing, a tiny army cot to sleep on, and porta potties down the road. I learned to always keep a large empty plastic water bottle by the bedside.
One night, I awoke to the sound of what I thought were noisy pipes. The sound kept going, and I realized it wasn’t pipes. I got up and walked out into the darkened hall where, for security detail, a few soldiers were standing by. I asked what I’d heard.
“Mortars,” one said. “They’re shelling us on the other side of the base.” My heart sank a bit. But since the soldiers didn’t seem too worried, I went back to the little cot in my room and tried to get some sleep, one eye open for the rest of the night.
Back home, in early February 2004, right before we were to head overseas with the band, Steppenwolf’s board held a fund-raiser golf tournament in Palm Springs. They needed entertainment, so I gathered Kimo and the band and we played, basically cramming our rehearsing in as tight as we could. We learned enough music to play for ninety minutes solid. If a show called for two hours, we were sunk. But hey—the golfers thought we were pretty good.
A week after the fund-raiser, which was our second official practice, Kimo and I and the crew headed overseas as a band for our very first time. Almost until the moment we left, the band still didn’t have a name. But during those first handshake tours in the summer of 2003, it had occurred to me that if I were ever able to bring a band on tour, it needed to be called the Lt. Dan Band. Nobody knew who Gary Sinise was, and the troops always identified strongly with the Forrest Gump character. The Lt. Dan Band seemed natural and proved a straightforward choice. So that’s the band that flew off on that first tour.
Diego Garcia is a million miles from nowhere and takes nearly twenty-four hours to get there. First London, then Hong Kong, then Singapore, then onto a US Navy jet for another five-hour flight to a little atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean where our US military base sits. It’s so far away that getting entertainment to the island is a rare thing. So even though the “Gary Sinise” of Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band was a mystery, Lieutenant Dan was not. The character was well-known already, and word seemed to have spread among the troops that the real Lieutenant Dan was here to play for them. So, while it wasn’t a huge crowd to start, this was our first overseas crowd, and it seemed pretty good to us. And we had another show there the next night, so we assumed word would spread that, although not quite Earth, Wind & Fire, we’d still be a fun show.