Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(90)

When I heard about this story, my heart broke. I wanted to do something to support Louise, as well as encourage the firefighters who’d responded that night. The tragedy hit them all. So I asked our ambassador John Masson, who lives near Fort Bragg and is a former Green Beret, to reach out to the firefighters at the Cotton and Hope Mills fire departments in North Carolina, to see if there was anything they could use. Firefighters from the two small towns had responded to the blaze, and one station needed a new river rescue boat, while the other needed a new equipment trailer.

The foundation decided to purchase both the boat and the trailer and dedicate them in honor of Edward, Isabella, and Natalia. Louise’s little girls had loved dancing, and in their memory Louise had already started a foundation called Dancing Angels to fund scholarships to help young dancers fulfill their dreams. When the equipment was ready, I flew out to North Carolina and we held a ceremony in their honor, surprising Louise with the dedication of the equipment. Moira and I also made a donation to the Dancing Angels Foundation. Louise is an amazing woman full of resilience and courage.

Over the years, the Gary Sinise Foundation has provided grants for equipment and support for families of first responders who have been wounded or killed in service. Among other things, we’ve provided additional transport vehicles to departments around the country. This began with a donation of an SUV Moira and I made to the New York City–based Fire Family Transport Foundation, and to my surprise and delight they named it the “Lt. Dan Van.” Many of the smaller town fire departments are volunteer and barely have any budget to fight fires or provide all that is necessary to keep their firefighters safe. So we try to help where needed, sometimes stepping into the most heartbreaking situations. We built a home for police officer Michael Flamion from Ballwin, Missouri. He was shot in the neck by an assailant during a routine traffic stop and is paralyzed from the neck down. His wife is now his full-time caregiver, and the home, built specifically for Michael’s challenges, provides some much-needed support and relief.

My foundation’s “Soaring Valor” program focuses on supporting our aging World War II veterans. Years ago, Tom Hanks asked me to lend my voice to a film called Beyond All Boundaries that Tom helped produce for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The forty-twominute film lays out the entire broad picture of what happened in the war, and I portrayed the voice of Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent who wrote dispatches from the war zones in Europe and Asia. A special theater was built at the museum to showcase this film.

My involvement with the film sparked a relationship with the museum, and I called my uncle Jack who, at twenty-four, had been the navigator on a B-17 bomber during World War II. I thought about what I was doing when I was twenty-four years old. Uncle Jack was fighting a war at that age, and I was in a basement doing theater. Very different early years. I offered to fly him down to New Orleans to visit the museum for the first time. While he was there, museum staff recorded him on video, discussing the history of his war years. Uncle Jack passed away on October 27, 2014, and afterward I contacted the museum and asked them to send me the DVD my uncle had recorded. When I sat down and watched it, I choked up, grateful that I had this recorded history of Uncle Jack telling his story.

I thought every family of a World War II veteran should have a DVD like this—and every veteran should have the opportunity to see the museum and be recorded. I knew that time was short, because we’re so rapidly losing our World War II veterans. So, in 2015, the foundation created our Soaring Valor program and arranged funding for one of the museum’s historians to travel around the country to record the stories of our veterans who could not visit the museum in New Orleans.

We absolutely need to record and learn the lessons these veterans have to share. Never in the history of this country—and the world—has there been a more devastating and destructive war than World War II. With an estimated eighty to one hundred million people killed, it remains the most horrific conflict in human history. The line between freedom and tyranny was never so thin—and so clear—and all of us today are the beneficiaries of those who sacrificed in defense of freedom during those years. Had Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy succeeded in their attempts at global conquest, each person alive today would be living very differently.

My uncle Jack flew with the Eighth Air Force 379th Bomb Group out of Kimbolton, England. His squadron, the 526th bombardment squadron, attacked enemy targets over Nazi Germany and occupied Europe that included bombing runs during the Battle of Northern France and the Battle of the Bulge. He told me that on many of his missions, as far as he could see—in front of him, behind him, and to the side—were airplanes. Hundreds of airplanes, sometimes more, all heading in the same direction. Many would not make it back. One time, just by chance, another navigator, Don Casey, switched missions with my uncle. On that mission, Don’s B-17 was shot down and the crew had to bail out. Don was captured by the Germans and spent eighteen months in a prison camp before eventually being liberated by Patton’s Third Army. He and Uncle Jack remained friends until their deaths, and Don always reminded Jack how lucky he was to swap flights that day. Of the 330 missions flown by his bomb group in B-17 Flying Fortresses, 141 were shot out of the sky. On one of Jack’s runs, his B-17 was so shot up it only had one engine left, and they barely made it back over the English Channel, crash landing just as they reached the shore. Luckily all survived. It was truly a dangerous duty. Absolute hell above the earth.