Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(79)

Years went by, and our program ran strong. Eventually, as our troops started being pulled out of Iraq, our program began to wind down. We stopped shipping to Iraq in 2011, and continued to ship to Afghanistan until 2013, when we officially closed OIC. Altogether, the program lasted for nine years, and during that time, OIC delivered 340,967 school supply kits, thousands of shoes and backpacks, more than fifty pallets of sports equipment, more than half a million toys, and eight thousand Arabic-language copies of Seabiscuit. OIC remains one of my favorite programs of all those I’ve been involved in.



The children of Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t the only kids affected by the global wars against terrorism. In the early days of the war, I sat in my office thinking about all the casualty reports we kept hearing in the news. A heavy sadness washed over me. By then, I’d already done six or seven USO tours and met a lot of troops, and some of those men and women I’d shaken hands with had now died. My heart ached for their families, specifically for the children of US service personnel who’d lost their moms or dads in the conflicts. (As I write this in 2018, nearly seven thousand Americans have been killed in the wars against terrorism, with many thousands more wounded.)

I went online and searched for organizations specifically geared toward helping children, and found Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. I’d met some folks on my first USO tour who worked with Intrepid, so I reached out to them and ended up on their board for a few years to help raise awareness for their initiatives. They’re connected with the Fisher House Foundation, which provides a network of conveniently located homes where the spouses and children of wounded service members can stay for free while their loved one is recuperating in the hospital. I also got involved with the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS), which focuses on grief management for loved ones of fallen heroes.

Still, I wanted to do more. I received a call from Roy White, who’d been involved with an event held a few weeks earlier, right before Christmas 2006, called the Snowball Express. Roy wanted to know if I’d help the next year. Their idea was simple. They brought the children of our fallen heroes to Disneyland just before Christmas to allow them to meet each other, to see that they were not alone in their grief, and to bring some joy and new happy memories to this special group of children who were experiencing so much sadness, especially at Christmas.

Roy came to my office, along with early event coordinators Greg Young and Bill “Monsoon” Mimiaga, and they showed me a video of the Snowball Express event. I loved it! The kids looked like they were simply having fun, exactly what I wanted to be a part of. This was something that focused specifically on the kids. I made a financial commitment on the spot and donated my band to play for the kids at the 2007 Snowball Express. While we can never do enough for these children and their families, I wanted to do at least something.

There’s no playbook on performing shows for grieving children, and my band and I learned things along the way. The following year, 2007, we held the first Lt. Dan Band concert for the kids at a theater called the Grove in Anaheim. We played the song “Hero” by Mariah Carey, a slower, moving ballad. In advance, we’d thought about this choice in the set list, and I wanted the kids to be strong, to know they are heroes to us. But because it’s an emotional song and I wasn’t sure how they were going to take it, I put Miami Sound Machine’s “Conga” in the set list as our next tune, a fun, fast-moving song, so we could shift the mood, just in case. We often perform “Hero” during our concerts for the troops, and I dedicate it to the families of our fallen and families of our wounded. It is always moving and well received as I remind them that when they are going through these difficult times, they should know there is strength and hope and a hero inside them that will help them find the way. And they are heroes to me. But sure enough, when we played it for the children, we quickly saw that the song meant something different, something heartbreaking—a reminder of the hero they had lost—and the mood quickly became somber. Kids started to cry—not what we wanted at all. We wanted the music to bring them joy and fun and help lift their spirits. We wanted them leaving feeling better than when they walked in. So when the song ended, I stopped the show, bent down, and simply hugged the children in the front row, one after another, as tears ran down their faces. Then we started up again with “Conga,” and that changed the mood and helped spark joy in the kids again. From then on, whenever we played for Snowball, I decided to only do songs that were going to make the kids happy.

One family I saw backstage at Snowball that first year was the wife and children of Air Force Major Troy Gilbert, an F-16 pilot. I’d met the Gilberts in early 2006 at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona when I attended a ceremony for my friend Robin Rand, who was being pinned as a brigadier general. Later that year both Robin and Troy deployed to Iraq with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing under Robin’s command. On November 27, Troy was killed while flying a combat mission in Anbar Province, Iraq, in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He went down with his jet while protecting twenty soldiers on the ground below who were battling insurgents. I saw Troy’s wife, Ginger, and their children that day at Snowball before we played the concert. Surprisingly, nearly ten years later, I would receive a phone call from Robin, now a four-star general, inviting me to attend a funeral for Troy at Arlington National Cemetery. Troy’s body had been missing for a decade. Al Qaeda insurgents had removed him from the crash site. By the time our forces got there, only a piece of his skull was found in his helmet. The skull was buried at Arlington. In 2013, an additional limited amount of remains were recovered, prompting another burial at Arlington. Finally, in 2016, the rest of his remains were recovered by US Special Forces and returned home. On December 19, 2016, Troy was laid to rest. He is the only US service member to have been buried at Arlington three times. At the end of the final ceremony, we all looked to the heavens as the missing man formation of F-16s flew through the sky. One aircraft abruptly broke away from the pack, in memory of the fallen pilot. It was a powerful and emotional moment. Troy’s wife is a wonderfully strong woman, and I know the Snowball event in 2007 helped her and her children through a very difficult time.