Jocko Podcast - 217: Gratitude and Service With Gary Sinise: Grateful American

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

0:00:00 - Opening 0:09:56 – Gary Sinise, "Grateful American" 4:13:19 – Final Thoughts and take-aways 4:18:30 – How to stay on THE PATH. 4:33:46 – Closing GratitudeSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 217 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The chaplain wanted me to visit one family in particular. They were caring for their severely wounded service member, a Marine master sergeant named Eden Pearl, who'd been part of the Marine Corps Forces Special Operation Command Marsok. I'd met a lot of severely wounded vets by then,

but the severity and extent of Eden's wounds set him in a category by himself. His family, especially his wife, Alicia, remained some of the strongest, most courageous people I've ever met. Eden was muscular, tattooed, and once sported a bushy red beard. They called him the Viking. Other Marines knew him as an exemplary combat leader. He served in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001, helping to prevent ethnic cleansing. In 2003, he was one of the first Marines on the ground in Iraq. He redeployed to Iraq in 2004 and 2005, then deployed to Afghanistan in 2009.

In August of 2009, Eden and his unit were involved in a massive gun battle against terrorists in the area surrounding. a small Afghan village. The battle raged so intensely that the Marines made the difficult decision to leave the village so they could return at a more strategic time. As they left, the Humvee that Eden rode in struck a hidden roadside IED,

exploded and burst into flames. The interpreter and the driver, Army Corporal Nick Rauch, were killed immediately. The remaining four troops inside the vehicle received severe burns, but none as terrible as Eden. Here's the remarkable thing. Eden was finally pulled from the vehicle and placed under a burn blanket. Still coherent, the first thing he did was ask if his troops were okay.

The family asked me if I'd go into the intensive care unit for a while to sit with Eden. I nodded and a nurse fitted me with a gown, gloves, and booties and placed a nurse. nylon hat over my hair. The family stayed outside while the nurse led me in. All was quiet in the ICU. My footsteps made no sound as I approached the Marine in the bed. I stood for a moment, taking in what I saw. Eden was burned on more than 90% of his body and was covered by bandages. Burned gel covered any exposed area of his skin. His eyes were slightly open with burned gel covering his face. He'd suffered a traumatic brain injury and was missing both legs and one arm.

I'd seen many, many badly wounded service members by then, but Eden was the most severely wounded I'd ever met. He did not move. The nurse whispered to me that they weren't exactly sure what Eden could hear or comprehend, but they were fairly sure some messages were getting through. I drew closer to Eden and told him that he wasn't alone. that his family was there with him, that they loved him and cared for him deeply,

and that as a country, we were immensely grateful to him for his service. After I finished speaking, Eden's eyelids flickered. Once, twice. The only movement he'd made since I walked into the room. Over the next year, I would reach out to the hospital chaplain to receive updates about Eden.

but the chaplain eventually moved to another assignment and I lost touch. Then in 2012 and I did an event in Chicago for the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, a Chicago police officer started talking with me about a severely wounded Marine he knew. And before he named the man, I said, wait, I know who you're talking about, Eden Pearl. Please tell me what you know about him. Where is he? The police officer put me in touch with Eden's battle buddy Marine Phil Nobleman. A Florida resident.

I called Phil, and he explained how Eden had moved around the country from convalescent home to convalescent home. His family always with him. Phil put me in touch with Eden's wife, and we talked and caught up. I told her about the home building initiative for wounded veterans that we had going by then. We talked through a few specifics of the program. Then I simply said it would be in my honor if you were. would let us do that for you and Eden. Phil Noblen had raised some money to help, so I asked Phil to use those funds to purchase land in San Antonio, not far from the Brook Army Medical Center

burn unit. And my foundation built Eden and his family, especially adapted smart technology home. To see part of the immense burden lifted off his wife and family was gratifying. Over the next few years, in that place of respite, his wife and family helped Eden. live a quiet life as they wanted. Eden received all the help he could and never stopped fighting. His sacrifices were enormous. And I respect Eden and his family tremendously. In 2015, at age 40, after a long six-year fight for healing, Eden Pearl passed away.

He will never be forgotten. 90%. 90% of his body burned. Loss of both legs, loss of one arm, traumatic brain injury, and a brutal six-year battle. And it's hard to even, what do you even call that? The sacrifice doesn't even seem to be a strong enough word. And not just the sacrifice by Eden Pearl himself,

but the sacrifice his family made. a sacrifice that we must never forget. Now, sometimes people ask me how they can serve if they were never in the military. And I always tell people that there are countless ways to serve without actually being in the military. And today I have one such person here who has not served in the military, but does everything in his power to help our American. servicemen and women and first responders as well and the piece that I just read about Eden Pearl is from his book and the book is called Grateful American and the man that wrote it is Gary Seneas an actor founder of a world-renowned theater company a bass

player in a rock and roll band and a true caring patriot. And we are lucky enough to have him here to tonight, tonight to discuss his life and the lessons that he's learned in life with us. So Gary, thank you for coming on by. It's great to be here, Jekyll. Thank you for having me. Yeah, there's multiple stories that you tell in the book about,

you know, some of these wounded warriors that you've, you've had the honor of meeting and seeing in these horrible situations. And, you know, that one right there, when you start talking about somebody that, you know, when you get a burn on your finger, when you burn your finger on the stove and you have a tiny burn on your finger, that's painful and it's annoying. And you could say, okay, well, can you imagine if that was my whole, my whole finger or my whole hand? You get to a point where you're talking about 90% of your body. I mean, you cannot fathom that. You cannot fathom that. And that idea, you know, one of the most horrible things that these roadside bombs do is when they go off, they deform the vehicles because the explosion just, you know, it torques the vehicle so hard that,

that a lot of times the vehicles the doors just like on a car door in a car accident you know you hear about the the firefighters showing up and the doors don't work anymore well the same thing happens in in armored vehicles except for you can't break the windows either because they're bulletproof and then they catch on fire it's a it's a nightmare it's a nightmare um but yeah so as i read through some of those things, man, it was tough to read. And definitely, I appreciate you sharing those stories of what you've seen up close and personal with everyone so that everyone can kind of understand, or at least not understand, but at least get some idea of the sacrifices that are made by our service members across the board. Well, thank you.

Now, your road to, you know, writing this book and actually the road of your life, the journey that you've been through has been, I mean, it's very interesting. I'll just put it that way. It's very interesting. And I can imagine that as you started writing this book, you know, you're thinking yourself, well, what's this stuff going to sound like? Now that you're writing it, you know, in the past, going back, whatever, 30, 40, 50 years in the past of when you were a kid, I talk a lot on this podcast about the dumb things I did as a kid. I haven't had the courage yet to document them as you have done here.

And so I think it's interesting. But I think what's powerful about it is, look, anybody that didn't, do dumb things when they were a kid, you know, they don't exist, I don't think, right? Correct. And so, but seeing, you know, how you grew and how you learned over those years, it's pretty impressive. Well, I want, you know, I didn't know what the book was going to be called or exactly what it was going to be when I started.

I knew I wanted, I was encouraged to document the, um, document the, um, the, um, the, um, um, military support because I've been all over the world and been, you know, engaged with our military for so long and been to so many places and everything. Everything, some folks, agent and whatnot encouraged me to consider writing some of that down. And I eventually kind of accepted, well, you know, I could probably try to do that. But then I thought, you know, well, how did I get to that point where I'm doing all this stuff? What was, what were the steps along the way that kind of led to it? And I couldn't have predicted that I would go all the way back before birth, you know, to getting to that.

But I ended up doing that because I started to trace my own family history and some of the things that had happened along the way from my own family, especially on my father's side of the family, the Italian side of the family. And coming over, you know, through Ellis Island and all of that, settling in Chicago. Is this Vito Sanisi? This is Vito Sanisi. My great grandfather. And the stories, and I didn't know.

you know, I only knew so much. So I actually started researching my own family. It became kind of fascinating and interesting to me to kind of retrace those steps and learn about things. And I wanted to set that up because my grandfather, my father's father, was, when I was younger, he had, you know, he had served in World War I. And I remember as a kid seeing all the stuff in the basement, you know, but the kind of scary grandfather would never talk about any of that stuff or anything like that. And I was a little bit frightened from my big Italian gangster-like grandfather. And it was later after he passed away and things that I talked to his sons, my dad, a little bit more about him and learned about him.

And he had three sons. They were all in the service, two in World War II. and my dad served in the Navy during Korea. And I just started thinking, okay, well, these individuals do play a part in my journey to this service work because as I've gotten more into the service work, I've explored the veterans of my own family a lot deeper and things that I never knew as a kid or never even thought about considered. You know, by the time I was old enough to kind of absorb anything that they had done during their service years, they were well beyond those years. You know, my uncle was a banker, and my other uncle, World War II uncle, was a writer living in Texas.

And my dad was a film editor. And none of them ever talked about anything in the service. So I started wanting to know a lot more. And when was that? When did you start? Was that when you started researching this book? or this is just in your... No, no.

It was... 20s or 30s or something like that? Well, it was actually probably when I really started to ramp up on supporting our veterans and that. I wanted to know more about the veterans and my own family on both my side of the family and my wife's side of the family. So they play an important part in setting the stage for the book. And then I realize the book is a journey. It's a journey from this kind of self-focused Gary. focused on, you know, my theater company, my acting thing and wanting to become, you know, successful and all that to this broader focus of service to others.

And so that's why the subtitle is a journey from self-to-service. You, you know, you're mentioning what your uncles did and your dad. But like, during World War II, going back to the book, during World War II, Uncle Jack flew 30 missions as a navigate. in a B-17 bomber over Europe, while Uncle Jerry, at just 18 years old, served on a U.S. Navy ship in the Pacific, arriving just after the battle for Okinawa ended in mid-June, 1945. I mean, first of all, being on a B-17 bomber over Europe, your chances of survival are not good. Not good. Not good. Yeah, we lost half the soldiers, half the service members that were lost in World War II were lost in the year.

You know, a lot of times when I meet people that aren't in the military, they tell me I grew up in a military family. Did you get that feeling or was it so far in the past for your uncles and stuff that one was a banker and your dad was in film and they just didn't talk about it? Or did you feel it? No, I didn't. No, they never talked about it. I so wish my grandfather would have, you know, I would have been aware enough at the time to talk to him about World War I. He drove an ambulance during the Battle of the Argonne in World War I. We've never lost as many service members in one battle as that.

It was devastating, and he was ferrying our wounded back and, you know, away from the front lines back to the rear and then go back again, and Germans would try to take out the ambulances, and it was very dangerous. He survived that. He was like 17 years old when he was doing that. and yet I never talked to him about it. But I do remember trunks in the basement with stuff, you know, from World War I. Thankfully, the uncle that I mentioned who was in the Pacific, who became a writer and lived in Texas, he wrote about his dad.

And he interviewed his dad, and he tried to get his dad to talk about it. And he said he wouldn't talk much, but he shared certain things. and some of those things I got from my uncle's writing that I put in the book about my grandfather. Yeah, and I always have to make this disclaimer that although I read big chunks of the book, I don't read the whole book here. And so to get all those little details,

you need to get the book, so go get the book. 1963, I mean, these are turbulent times, kind of the beginning of the turbulent times. Kennedy's killed 1964 Back to the book For Christmas I received my first

Guitar Acoustic I had no idea how to play But I loved it The Beach Boys had become my favorite band My first record was Beach Boys concert A live record

And as the songs Spun on my record player I love to hear the crowd cheering in the background So you go out and you make your own band called the beach dwellers, which I guess in Chicago, you got beach in Chicago, I guess, right?

Lake Michigan. Right. And it looked like you focused on that pretty well, but on the other hand, we got this. Every report card I brought home stunk. This has been going on since first grade, reading and writing didn't come easy to me. You say, my future lay in either music or sports.

I could have tossed a coin. I loved sports. In Highland Park, I played baseball each spring. Winters, they'd freeze over the parking lot of my school, and we'd played hockey. I was a huge Blackhawks fan. And Bobby Hall was my favorite player. I also love football and rooted for the Bears. The Bears.

The Bears. We organized a local football league for kids and played each other on the weekends. I was a fast runner, always the quarterback or one of the halfbacks. I usually got the kickoff return guy running for a touchdown every chance I got. I played football through eighth grade in Glenn Ellen, but I was an undisciplined kid. It never showed up for practice, so I never knew any of the plays. The coaches would just put me in to return the kickoff because of my speed, and nine times out of ten, I'd get a touchdown. When I reached high school at Glen Bard West in 1969, I tried out for the team but realized every kid was twice as motivated as me, twice as big and twice as big.

So that ended in my football career. that left me music and dreams of being a rock star. And I figured musicians all needed to be hard partiers, right? Woodstock, rock and roll. My parents liked to entertain and kept a bar stocked with various bottles of liquor. At the end of eighth grade, I decided to experiment. I had a metal box with a latch on it, so I gathered an empty peanut butter jars with lids, cleaned them out, and stashed them in my box.

When no one was looking, I sneaked small amounts of liquor out of my parents' bar, Whiskey into one jar. Vodka into another. Vermooth into another. Wine into another. Always just a bit so mom and dad didn't notice. One Saturday night, I decided it was time. Randy and I shared a bedroom, but there was a small attic room connected to our room.

That was private where we kept some of my music gear. When Randy was asleep, I went to the attic room with my metal box full of jars, shut the door behind me, and tasted the vodka. The whiskey, the vermouth, the gin. The wine. Next thing I knew I was plastered, sick as a dog, puking into my metal case, everything I'd eaten for the past month. My head spun, and I wanted to lie down somewhere, but thought I'd be better to clean out the box so no one would find out what I'd been up to. I bobbed and weave down the front stairs, heard the TV on the other room,

figured the coast was clear, crept into the kitchen, started dumping the vomit into the kitchen sink. I was dizzy and nauseous, and as I looked up, suddenly my mother was standing next to me, her arms folded. She looked puzzled and concerned and angry at the same time. mother, I said in my sugary voice. I'm just cleaning out my box. It was a little messy. How are you this evening? The room started to go dark and I realized I was passing out. Next thing I knew, mom and dad were wiping off my mouth, putting me to bed. I was grounded for a week and no more box. You'd think I would have learned my lesson, but that was just the start for me. The times were changing and the drug culture began to rise. America was exploding in a million different directions just as I entered my teen

years and it felt like the entire country couldn't contain itself. We were at the peak of the Vietnam War and it was going badly. We found ourselves in the age of revolution. Everybody was anti-authority, anti-establishment. I heard about Woodstock, the sexual revolution. Pot was everywhere. And by the end of eighth grade, although I was still on the football team, I felt caught between the athletes and the pot smokers.

For a couple of years, I went crazy. So there you go. Get some. Young Gary. Yeah. So that's, so 1969, you're in eighth grade? Eighth grade and that was my freshman year as well. So you were.

I finished eighth grade and. You were a little too young to be worried about the draft at that point. Or were you thinking about it? No. Weren't even thinking about it. But this was the height of the Vietnam War. Oh, yeah, for sure. 68, 69, 70.

So there was all all the stuff was going on, all the protesting and all the all the you know the riots on college campuses and all of that was going on yet I was still kind of on the young side for all of that. And I do remember and I write about in this book the they would have things they call moratoriums and the moratoriums were on the high school campuses and college campuses and people would just not go to class and they'd sit around and somebody would. would speak and they'd wear black armbands and somebody had a guitar and playing and you were protesting the war so I thought as a freshman I would and and and if you told them you were doing that you told

your teacher you were doing that you would be excused they would give you a break so I thought well that's that's a good thing to do I'm going to get out of class that's that was your big political motivation I went My big political motivation was getting out of class and maybe there's some girls at the protest, you know. So I went and sat there. I couldn't tell you what was said or anything like that. I was just out of class and I didn't have to go. In fact, I looked at the yearbook from those years and they had a picture of one of those protests. Everybody's sitting around and guitars laying and protesting the war with black armbands.

I'm probably in the crowd somewhere there. I couldn't find myself. But you weren't thinking about the draft really. No. No. Yeah. I mean, I imagine when you're, because your eighth grade is like 13, 14 years old. And three or three or four years away seems like the rest, it seems like an eternity.

Like you're never going to get there. So why would I be worried about what's going to happen in four years? I wasn't. Even though the Vietnam War was on television all the time. It was on every night. The, you know, casualty reports were on all the time. what was happening. My parents were fearful that I was, you know, going to get drafted because, you know, they were drafting everybody and especially the kids who were failing in school,

you know, and that was me. Well, that was you. And I thought, you know, my mom was terribly frightened that I would probably, you know, get plucked out of school because I was so bad and have to go to war or something. So I wasn't, you know, it was only, it was. was only later that I really started to analyze those years and how oblivious I was to what was happening to young people just slightly older than I was in the jungles of Vietnam. And then it hit me, you know, a lot of sort of guilt and shame for how oblivious I had been and how I, you know,

wasn't really paying attention. So that, that I think, was galvanizing in some way in in terms of taking on taking action taken on the charge to help our veterans because I go back to the Vietnam War days I'm not I graduated and my class was 1973 and that was the end of the draft that year so I remember having to register for a selective service, but the draft was over. So my parents, you know, breathed the side of relief that I wasn't going to get drafted. But it was only just a few years later, you know, after I met the woman who would become my wife, whose two brothers served in Vietnam, and her sister joined the Army, met a Vietnam veteran

who served in the Army for 22 years. It was after I met them that things started to change for me. I started to really look back at those years and go, you know, I should have been more, paid attention more to what was going on in the country with our service members. But I was a kid. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, too, that you know, because even though you said you didn't feel like you were from a military family, even though you absolutely were from a military family, it's interesting that, you know, your parents, that you didn't connect those dots, right?

Like, hey, my uncle Jack was in the Army. He was in the Army Air Corps. He flew B-17s. And a lot of those, you know, a lot of his friends must have died. And wait a second, what's going on now. It's just. Never thought about it when I was a kid. Exactly.

Exactly. And that's. Because they never talked about it. My uncle was a banker. He wasn't a World War II hero, you know, until later. And then I really spent a lot of time with my Uncle Jack. And then he talked to, he would talk about his experiences a lot. I took him to the National World War II Museum.

We recorded him on video where he's preserved at the World War II Museum. I took him to Memorial Day in D.C. and this and that. And I spent a lot of time with my Uncle Jack in the last 10, 12 years of his life. And he talked a lot about his war day. up to a point, and then you knew like he wouldn't go beyond this place. He would never let him go into an emotional place. Never let himself go there. Because I could tell he was getting close to something like that.

He saw a lot of bad stuff. I mean, his own plane barely made it over the English Channel one time. One engine, and they were about 500 feet off the channel, and they crashed on the ink, you know, in Britain, and they all survived. But he saw a lot of planes go down around them in flames and just crashing everywhere. And some bad stuff. He saw a lot of bad stuff up there, but he went up mission after mission after mission. You know, 30 missions survived them.

there's one story in the book where he swaps he was a navigator and he swaps with a buddy the buddy said hey you know can you take this this mission with my crew I got to go do something and yeah I don't know for for whatever reason they swapped and it was with a guy named Don Casey and he was a navigator as well so my uncle Jack said sure I'll you go with with this mission sure enough playing gets shot down, all the guys abandoned ship, and Don Casey gets captured and spends 18 months in a German prison camp until he escapes. And they were best friends for their whole life. And Don always took the opportunity to remind him how lucky he was to switch missions.

It was just as fate would have it. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that with all that going on, how it just shows you how easy it is for, especially in America, so easy to disconnect from the realities of war, right? And for people to be, you know, going to Starbucks and drinking a coffee when there's guys that are fighting right, right at this moment in time. And it's so easy in this country to be disconnected from that. It's one of the things. It's one of the things I like about your book is you bring that connection back to. together to explain to the people in the civilian world that hey just kind of FYI this stuff's going on you know you know you know Jock I'm that's that's one of the ways I found that I can be useful you know I've got a public platform as an actor there's there there's a you know a forum with which I can talk to people and tell them things that I've seen and and whatnot and And I really wanted to do something to help. So I found the way that I can do that is to try to bridge that disconnect

between the average citizen who may not have a military person in their family or know anybody who's even serving in the military. Try to help them understand what our military does, how exceptional they are, the sacrifices that are made, all those things. I just found that that was the way that I could help. Yeah, and it's huge. It's huge. And I'm glad that you ended up in this very nice place, but I'm going to take it right back to your juvenile delinquent childhood.

It is entertainment. I know. I close out the last part saying for a couple of years, I went crazy, and you just kind of, you do, and you talk about some of the crazy stuff you were doing. One of your buddies had some kind of a music store. You went in there. He had the key. You guys stole some speakers.

You brought them back to your house. I mean, just, and any way you describe this, you say, I'd become a thief and a liar and a near-failing student, and as a 14-year-old, I couldn't care less about any of it. And that's kind of the setup for this next chapter that you roll into, which is, interestingly, it's called baptism. I'm going to go to the book here a little bit. I was a sophomore and played lead guitar in a new band, and me, the bass player, and the drummer, all sloth. slouched against the wall in the glass hall. Part of your school. We called ourselves half-day road after a stretch of highway that divided our two northern Chicago suburbs, Highland Park and Highwood.

We thought we were the real stuff. More than anything, I just wanted to fit in at this new school and jam with my new band. But the life I hoped for was all about the change. She walked straight toward us, a teacher named Mrs. Barbara Patterson. She was a powerhouse of a gal, a tornado of a woman, blonde hair, set jaw, the power of poetry running through her veins. She slowed when she neared us, stopped, and gave a diminutive sniff. Our clothes were cool and raggy, and my bandmates and I all wore scruffy jackets. I'd let my hair grow crazy and curly.

It sprung out horizontally in a wild mass of thicket. Mrs. Patterson was the theater teacher. She looked at us and said, I'm directing West Side Story. for the spring play. You guys look like you play gang members. Come and audition for the play. It sounded like more of a dare than a request. Then she was off and walking fast on her way down the hall.

We shrugged and laughed at all and one of us scoffed. Who cares about plays? You kind of end up just kind of doing it, I would say, just out of, hey, we got nothing better to do. We'll go in. And maybe you had some curiosity in the back of your head, but you sign up to do an audition. and they post the, I don't know what's it called. What's it called? What do they post?

The casting? The casting. The casting. Cast list. So here we go. Next morning in the hallway, near the drama department, a list was posted. Everyone crowded to look. Me too.

I scanned down the list. Way, way down. I kept scanning but didn't recognize any of the names. Well, who cares, I thought, but kept reading. My eyes kept scanning down, scanning down. toward the very end when I saw this a soft light

came on inside my soul. Peppy. Is that right? Peppy? Peppy. Peppy. Pepe. To be played by

Gary Senise. How many lives does Pepey have? Pepey has a couple of words. Oh, okay. Yeah, a couple of words. I wouldn't even call them lines. Okay.

Well, that's something, right? But I was in the gang. I was, you know, it's the sharks and the jets. The sharks and the jets. Everybody knows Westside Storm. Yeah. And I was one of the sharks. So you go on here.

I'd come to high school and fall into a pattern of smoking dope, skipping class, smoking more dope, all the while trying to find friends, just another kid caught up in this American craziness. There wasn't much going, there wasn't much to hold us together. And this is, I could go off tangentially on this forever, but you're talking about basically about America. There wasn't much to hold us together. Culture, that was changing.

Morals. What were they? This was 1971. Religion. My mom my family stopped going to church when I was a little kid and we weren't raised with any sort of faith Nothing to provide an anchor as a family as a nation these were tough times Most days I was floating on the open sea every evening images of the Vietnam War Splashed across the TV screens

So yeah, it's kind of wild times and you're at a party and there's some guy and it's it's I actually picked up on this Immediately when I read it you described some guy that's a guy that's a party and it's it's I actually picked up on this immediately when I read it You described some guy that's in there and some guy at the party and you how do you describe him it's actually kind of funny he looks like he's older like someone's older brother and he wants to buy some pop from you and you sell it to him and as it turns out big surprise he's a cop you get a call from one of your friends dude the police raided the party came in with a real show of force rounded everybody up what are you talking about i said then it clicked the dog catcher wasn't

line about what he did for a living. It was just slang. He worked for the city all right police department. And I'd sold pot to the dog catcher. I was the source of weed. Yeah, my friend's voice dropped on the phone. And they're looking for you. And you know what?

I mean, pot is a crime. I mean, 10 years ago in America, I mean, we live in California. Maybe it wasn't that big of a crime. But, you know, it was a crime. Certainly in 1971. Oh, yeah. I mean, that could be jailed.

time without a doubt, right? Yeah, yeah. It was, there was a whole juvenile department at the police headquarters at the police station just to go after young kids that were abusing themselves with drugs. And the head of that was a guy that I write about in here, and that they called Officer Rash. And Officer Rash led this. raid and the dog catcher said well the guy who sold me the pot left right before the raid so but

all these people know who he is so they started asking everybody and blah blah blah I was so scared I mean can you imagine that now this buddy calls me up and he says they raided the house and they're looking for you and you're the you're the big drug pusher you know and so I yeah I ended up getting on a train. We had lived in the town Glen Ellen the year before, and then we moved back to this town Highland Park, and the raid was in Highland Park. So I got on the train and went out to Glen Ellen to hide out. I was on the lamb, you know. And finally I came back and told my parents what happened, and they drove me to the police station and I turned myself in. It was a big thing. And turned myself in. The lights were blaring.

And I was just crying and, you know, I cried and crying. But the main thing there is I had just gotten into this play Westside story. And I felt. You had some words to deliver. I had a couple. Yeah, two words to deliver. And I was fearful that they were going to pull me out, send me to like a juvenile home or something, bust me, really bust me.

And I begged the police officer to let me off the hood. because I just discovered this new thing that I think, you know, is going to change my life. And it did. And it turned everything around for me, being in this play. And all of a sudden, you know, I can't say that I didn't smoke pot anymore or anything like that. But through high school. But I found this thing that I was good at. I was a terrible student, as I said.

And I was struggling all the time. And really, I was probably near being kicked out of school at the time that this thing and this incident with the police happened. Was that just a regular public school? Or was it a private? It was a regular public school? Yeah, public school. You know, big school. I mean, like 2,500 students at the high school.

So it was a pretty big, big school. But it had a wonderful theater department. And this teacher that I mentioned there was just, she changed my whole life. Barbara Peterson. standing in a hallway. We've all had moments where something happens or an individual walks into our lives that we didn't see coming

and the course of our lives just changes, you know, and we go this way. And that's what happened there, standing in that hallway. She sent me right to the theater world, and from that moment on, I never stopped doing it. You guys, you do four shows of West Side Story, and the last show, you know, you obviously get better each time. And the fourth show, you know, you guys crush it.

And here we go. Back to the book, the lights came down. The audience burst into applause as one of the sharks. I was part of the gang that carried Tony's dead body off stage. We sharks set the body down behind the curtain. And Tony came to life again as just good old Jeff Perry, a high school kid who was quickly becoming one of my best friends. Jeff gave me a huge hug and I burst into tears. And in the glorious pandemonium off stage, everybody was hugging and slapping each other on the back with no chance to blow away the snop because it was time for curtain call.

Out in the auditorium, the audience continued their applause, cheering, shouting, whistling their congratulations and all the supporting players and chorus members came out on stage in a pack, including me. And the ensemble and all the gang members kind of get their applause. And then the leads go out. The leads took their bows together. I still hung far in the back, sobbing harder. than ever. My eyes scrunched tight against the tears. Then in the midst of all the commotion, I felt a hand of my shoulder. I opened my eyes. It was the hand of Jeff Melvoins. Am I saying that right? Jeff Melvoid. Jeff the senior, Bernardo the shark. He reached back, grabbed me, pulled me up

toward the front of the pack where the six leads stood. He shouted in my ear to take a bow with all the leads. So I did. Me, the sophomore screw up, still bawling my eyes out. I stood out the front of the pack and the audience was still standing still applauding cheering for us I took one long glorious look around trying to wipe my nose with my sleeve and we all bowed again altogether and I suddenly realized I'd fallen in love with this new community of students with this new life of theater who's almost too much to take in the entire cast had seen who I was before the play and what had happened to me during those five weeks now I had so many new friends it was powerful something had really changed for me I was going forward again I had been

baptized my life of purpose had begun. You were crying. What emotion is that? Oh, it was, well, it was very, because the play was over. And I didn't want it to be over. I didn't want it to end. It had changed my life so completely and introduced me to a new community in the school. And I just wanted as much of it as I could get.

And now it was over. The show was over. And my heart was kind of broken. And so I was sobbing at the end of the thing. And the whole cast kind of, you know, this was my first play. I'd never done it before. A lot of the kids had been in plays and part of the theater department. They were used to it and this and that.

But here comes this kid who's just kind of messed up and really struggling, nearly kicked out of school. and I discovered this new world, and they recognized that. And it was really emotional. It was really quite beautiful. And, you know, people ask me quite often, you know, what are some of the top things you've done in your career and, you know, the movies and, you know,

what are the pinnacles and everything like that? And there's several good things that I've done. But among the top things, I, I, I always, this part with two words is always at the top because it was the first thing. You know, it's the first moment that I discovered this thing that would be what I would do for my life. West Side Story, 72. Who wants some? Well, when I was reading this, I was trying to, I'm trying to put what I'm reading into something in my own mind, trying to relate it to things that I understand. And the other day we did a podcast about a guy, young British guy that was, he ended up in World War II, but in 1937 he joins the British Army.

And he goes in this little paragraph about how they went out and did parade. And they did the entire 20 minute presentation of close order drill with no commands. So it's just silent. Until the last thing, they give one command and everyone executes the one command. And you could, you know, he talks just a couple sentences about this incredible pride that he had that he was part of this group, right, that had drilled and trained and practiced to get ready for this particular moment. And I was thinking, okay, well, that's what you have here, right? Well, that guy was a young kid that joined the army because the civilian life didn't have much to offer him as a 16-year-old British kid and tough times. And here you are, tough times, young kid, and all of a sudden this group is there and you've got to practice and train to get ready to do this presentation.

Then you do it. And the big difference is in this one, you're allowed to kind of express your emotions. And on top of that, the crowd can express their emotions. And so you get this whole thing. And I started realizing, okay, so here's what that's what's going on. It's a very similar thing. you got you became part of this for lack of a better word but it opens up a whole new category of thinking you became part of this gang right this gang of friends and just like this guy reg

Curtis became a part of this gang of troopers soldiers you became a part of this gang the other thing that I realized about it and it's what you say you don't use the same words as I use because I spent my entire adult life in the military but you always you were all of a sudden had a mission. You know, you had a mission like, oh, here's this thing. I could, you know what happened to me when I was 18 years old? I joined the Navy and that became my mission. And all of a sudden, all the dumb things that I did, which thankfully I haven't had

to write about, all those dumb things didn't matter anymore. And all of a sudden, I just had a mission. And I was now part of a gang. And then the more I stayed in the Navy and the further I went along, the tighter the gang got and the more focused I got on the mission. So I think there's some element of that when some when you know I always say to veterans when they get out you know because veterans when they get out They can get lost they lose their way because they don't have a mission anymore and so I'm always saying hey Find a new mission find a new mission find a new mission

But if you just take that to a 13 14 year old kid well 13 14 year old kid doesn't have a mission and the interesting thing is A 13 14 year old kid They might not have a mission but they have energy and they have talent and and they have potential. And if you don't harness that stuff and point it somewhere, well, then guess what it does? It steals booze from its parents. It steals speakers from its neighbors.

And, you know, that's what it does. You take that energy, and if you can focus it somewhere, all of a sudden it turns good. And I got one more, a friend of mine named Scott, you know, we were all raising our kids kind of together. And, you know, we'd be talking about what it is, how you make your kid not stray off into the bad, you know, the bad tendencies that people can go down.

And he said, you know, I just want my kids to be really into something. And I thought, that's a good point. And whether it's surfing or skateboarding or shooting bows or jujitsu or acting, whatever it's going to be, if you get that kid with a mission, all of a sudden it keeps them on somewhat of a good path. Of course, something positive. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And each one of those things, by the way, you know,

I mean, every one of those things, there's subcultures, you know, you can be in a music scene and be a total, you know, you can get sucked into drugs, rock and roll, right? The acting scene, I'm sure, can suck you down that path. Surfing, for sure, there's been, there's plenty of sad stories along the path of that course, right? So anything you can get sidetracked on, especially if it comes a little taste of fame, right? Fame and ego. So you get on this path, though, and you don't do great in school.

And by the time, here we go, back to the book, there I was, class of 73, the end of my senior year, all my friends graduated except me. I didn't have enough credits. I'd aaste all my theater classes, but bombed everything else. So I needed to return in September for one additional semester. I felt like a failure. So, you know, that's got to suck. I remember that was hard yeah and then you say this in January 1974 I finally graduated from high school today if people ask I just laugh and tell them I was part of the class of 1973 and a half

college wasn't on my radar I just wanted to keep doing plays with these pals of mine so with two friends who were still in high school Rick Argosch Rick Argosch and Leslie Wilson we gathered some other kids We got to know we knew and we got ready to do a show. My parents knew the architects of a Unitarian Church and Deerfield with a big open space. I asked them to ask the church folks if they would let us do a play down there. And they said, yes. We started rehearsing a play called And Miss Reardon drinks a little. A complex comedy about three middle-aged sisters who faced their problems after the death of their mother.

Since everyone was still in school except me, we rehearsed after school hours and into the night. It felt great to be working on a play again in our own little space. an idea that was almost all our own doing during rehearsals we got ready to print programs and I said okay We need to call this outfit something We threw out all kinds of names Rick was reading a Herman Hess novel called Steppenwolf And while everyone was making suggestions He didn't say anything he just held up his novel and pointed to it and said and I said great Rick Let's put that on the program I hadn't read it but it sounded good

Steppenwolf theater company We needed a programs quickly so step and wolf it was I will I felt so hopeful about what we were doing excited to think we were creating a company I pulled we pulled a few books together bucks together to buy a rubber stamp with step and wolf inscribed on it and stamped our name everywhere we could stamp step and wolf stamp step and wolf stamp step and wolf none of us grasp yet what none of us grasp yet was the magnitude of the moment when step and wolf was named. We couldn't see. What we couldn't see was a bigger future than any of us could

imagine, something that would last for decades and is still going strong today, the Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago. Pretty big moment. Pretty big branding moment. Now, did you guys, did you know the band Steppenwolf? You had to. Yeah, sure. I played some of their songs. And you didn't think that was, you didn't think that was, you know, kind of encroaching on their, their style? Like I said, we were looking at the book. We weren't thinking about the band. We just looked at the book. And it's a...

The cool... The book, it's like the conflict. It's the dichotomy, right? The dichotomy. Yes. The dichotomy, people always accuse me and rightfully so of that being possibly my favorite word. Yes.

The dichotomy of the kind of spiritual, high-minded part of you as a human being. And then the other part, which is the wolf of the step, which is in German, Das Steppenwolf. But that's kind of cool because this is what's kind of tugging at humans, right? And the thing that when I was saying earlier

that like I kind of, I don't know if we were recording yet, but the thing that I kind of related, like when I was a kid, you know, we all had bands. I was into hardcore and punk. rock and it was everything was kind of DIY that was the that was the mindset was the mindset was we're doing this ourselves like oh the man doesn't want to support us cool we'll do we're doing

this ourselves i still have that attitude i started my own publishing company why because i didn't like what my publisher said about something i was like cool i got this watch this i have my own publishing company now you know so that attitude it's pretty cool that you guys had this attitude of yeah we're going to start our own theater company we're going to And there you go. You make the name and you start getting it out there. And it's been around now for however many years, almost 50 years. Well, it's 46 years.

Yeah. And, you know, we own several buildings that we built from the ground up. We're building another one right now. It really is a great American dream story where you start off with just some kids with kind of a passionate, desire to do something and at you know 46 years later it's it's a multi-million dollar gigantic place and lots of great actors come out of there and it's you know when you look when we walk in I always think about the 18 year old kid who's in high school who

walks into that place and looks at all the you know all the pictures and everything and it's a giant theater there's three or four theaters in there restaurants everything like that And then you can see this picture of 18-year-old kids up there on the wall and think they're like me. You know, they built this thing. You know, it really is an inspirational sort of theater story, I think. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not just inspirational theater story. It's an inspirational story of what's what human beings free human beings are capable of executing if they put their mind to it.

Yeah, and in the book, I write about a lot of the early years, all the struggles, all the ups and downs, all the crazy stuff that happened. You didn't think I was going to get away with not talking about any of that, did you? I don't know if you want to go through there, but there's some. You say here, eventually we ended up with a total of nine people for our new Steppenwolf, and today these nine are sometimes referred to as the original members, even though the name Steppenwolf had already been used since 1974. The nine original members were John Malkovich, Moira Harris, Nancy Evans, H. H.E. Bacchus. Is that right? Lori Metcalf, Al Wilder,

and the three founders, which is Terry Kinney, Jeffrey Perry, and you, Gary Sinise. And again, just kind of what you were just referring to. In the summer of 1976, not everything was so neatly resolved as our ensemble was getting wild, trying to get along and learn to work together.

In those first months of Steppenwolf, things quickly grew messy. and complicated his personal life and theater life intertwined. Moira Harris had particularly caught my eye. She was a brilliant young actor, beautiful, passionate, full of fire. I convinced her to date me. We soon fell in love. She was unlike anyone I'd ever met, but our love affair wasn't without its ups and downs.

We were all over the place in our relationship. Two passionate personalities on again, off again, in love, out of love, clinging to each other, mad at each other, breaking up, making up. You know, I work with businesses all the time. I have a leadership consulting company. And getting grown adult educated human beings to resolve problems is challenging. Having these, you know, whatever, 9, 18, 19, 20, 21 year old kids, all of them, you know, with these fiery personalities and passionately.

It must have been crazy. It was. Not to mention you mix in, you know. Chemicals and whatnot and it gets really crazy You go here at one point Terry decided to leave again and again I skip a bunch here some of the things that you're talking about about the craziness so I skip some of that but That's why people need to get the book at one point Terry decided to leave again then he wanted back in again This time we held a meeting to decide if Terry could rejoin. We all argued and shouted about standing on our principles and being fully committed

Moira was there and we were still dating although out Although our relationship was constantly up and down, off and on. Her father was dying of cancer then, and all the chaos and stress, the meeting prompted Moira to boil over. Her passion turned to fury, and she lost it. I mean, absolutely lost it. Started yelling. How can we not let our friend back in the company?

My father is dying, and all this is so stupid. If we're a company, then we're a company, and we should stay together no matter what. She ran out of the basement into the grassy yard, the school, yelling at the top of her lungs. We all ran out in the yard after her. Her logic made sense. Terry was our friend. Moyer's dad was dying. Terry wanted back in the company.

Why did we care so passionately about something so trivial when life and death issues were all around us? Moria was still screaming and crying. We grabbed hold of her and hung on. Neighbors poked their head out of doorway. She screamed and screamed and the commotion grew so loud. The police showed up. Morira calmed down. The police left.

We all felt bad for Moira, bad for Terry. And we ended the meeting. Of course, Terry was back in the company. He was a founder in our friend. In those early days, the drama wasn't limited to the stage. I don't think any of us knew exactly. What exactly what we were doing. The basement cocoon we've created gave us a foundation to try anything, do anything, become

anything. And the freedom of the space allowed us to ultimately glimpse the world through a wider lens. All of us were committed to becoming better at what we were doing. And we often mixed and mingled our directing and performing, directing one play, acting in the next, sometimes doing both. In those early days, we didn't talk about going to Hollywood or New York or be in the movies. We wanted to do our own thing there in Chicago land. And I think by being there in the basement,

isolated we developed the chip on our shoulder necessary to survive we felt like we had a lot of emerging talent and we wanted our work to feel real and raw and fearless and we worked hard to keep it deeply rooted in the sheer grit that we had on stage together whether it was true or not we needed to somehow believe our work was different unique special it would take some time and effort before anyone tried to branch out beyond our city but I think those early days we all felt like we were getting better and stronger and more confident as artists and the sky could be the limit eventually What I know today is that our theater benefited from a larger institution, the United States of America. The country of our birth allowed us any number of freedoms that we subconsciously used and enjoyed and benefited from, even though we didn't realize it.

We had freedom of speech at Steppenwolf. We could express our thoughts and ideas about anything in public or private. The people around us might disagree or debate or push back, but when they thought we were being stupid, when they thought we were being stupid, But by no means were we ever stifled in what we said or thought. We exercised freedom to assemble We used this sort of we used a sort of freedom of religion although nothing we did was religious Which was a freedom all its own No one forces to dress a certain way or talk a certain way because of their beliefs We were free to live or travel anywhere we wanted and we were free to work any job we wanted so we played in bands and created our own theater and worked in sewers

Where we found baby raccoons We were free to educate ourselves by any means, possible, formal, or practical, and all this freedom led to something. It allowed us to create and innovate. It allowed us to dream big. Gratefully, it allowed us to be us. Awesome. The baby raccoons thing, that's a reference to a job that one of our buddies had. Because we all worked in those early days, and I'm describing.

there. Everyone worked day jobs. Yeah, right. And then we would go to the theater. We had this little basement of a Catholic school that the Catholics, it was a closed-down Catholic school. And they had a basement there that they had used for a teen center. And some, the, a guy at the Chamber of Commerce, I went to the Chamber of Commerce and I said, do you know any place that kids could make a theater? And he said, Well, sure. Let's go over here, this basement in the Catholic school. And it was perfect. And we built an 88-seat theater in there.

So we were in there, in this basement. But, you know, we weren't making any money. I mean, we were just trying to get people to come see the shows for whatever. And so everybody had day jobs. And, you know, the raccoon, the guy worked in the sewer. He was actually, you know, kind of a technical guy, never did any acting with the company. But I worked on the loading dock at Neiman Marcus on packing boxes and, you know, kind of the shipping clerk type stuff. Malcovic was a, in that first summer, he was a school bus

driver for a summer camp. So I always, that's a movie in its own right. I always worry about those children. Did they turn out all right? Yeah. And everybody had different jobs, you know, that we worked in the day and we would go to the theater at night and work into the wee hours in the morning. Then everybody go home, get up, go to their job, go back to the theater at night. And that's how we did it in those early days. And the thing that I think is, when you say like you guys weren't thinking about New York, you weren't thinking about Hollywood, you were just thinking about just doing this thing as to the best of your ability. Yeah, I think the founders of the theater, too,

Two of the guys, Jeff Perry and Terry Kinney, they met each other at Illinois State University. Jeff Perry, as I mentioned, was in West Side Story with me, and we became best friends. And then he went to college, and I went back to high school. And he met Terry Kenny, and they became best friends. Another great actor. And so the three of us kind of galvanized our plans to start the theater company and to get the theater company going. And then that's, and Malcovich went to Illinois State University. University, Moira Harris, all those other people that were in that you mentioned there in the

original group went to Illinois State and then they all moved up to Highland Park, which is where I found the basement of the Catholic school and we started doing plays in there. Continue on here a little bit forward, but back to the book. Moira and I got together as a couple a year after the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and I started to meet her family members who had served in the U.S. Army. Moira's brother, Arthur Harris, was a helicopter pilot, having flown 800 combat hours in Vietnam. Moria's oldest brother, Boyd-McCanna, am I saying that right? McKenna, Mack Harris, had been to Vietnam twice, first as a lieutenant and platoon leader,

and second as a captain and company commander. He'd received the Silver Star for Gallantry in combat. Moira's sister, Amy, went through ROTC in college and went into the Army herself after graduation. She met and married a great guy Jack Treese, who served as a combat medic with the 101st Airborne Division of Vietnam. Jack earned two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. When Arthur came home from Vietnam, he withdrew from things. And I would see him only on rare occasions when Moira and I would visit her mother. But from time to time, Mac, Jack, and Amy came to visit us in Chicago and would see our plays.

I didn't spend a ton of time with these veterans at first, but any time we got together, we talked about deeper matters. And as I slowly learned more and more about the people who protected our freedoms, I began to look for a ways to give back. In 1976 and 1977, Mack came to see a few of our basement plays whenever he was on leave from assignment as a tactical officer at West Point. I was a pretty ragged kid then with torn up jeans and a t-shirt and lots of hair. He was spit, shined, strong as Atlas, and had a deep, powerful voice. Gary, what are your goals? Mack asked me one day after a show. He wasn't grilling me.

I sensed kindness within this roughness. He was interested in other people's lives and genuinely wanted to know about my goals, but I wasn't sure if he was asking about my goals in life or my designs on his sister. Possibly he wanted to know where we wanted to go as a theater company. So I described my goals for Steppenwolf and how I wanted it to make it as big as possible. We had a conversation, a real conversation. This elite former company commander in me, a long-haired American 20-year-old with big dreams of all things, we connected on the subject of leadership. In high school, at the height of the war, I'd been oblivious to so much of what was happening in Vietnam.

Yet in the early years of Steppenwolf, I began to form genuine friendships with these military veterans. They began to open my eyes so much more. I knew the war hadn't gone well. I remembered casualty reports on the news and knew the reports were grim. But now I was meeting actual veterans who lived there, served there, fought there, and I knew that many of the Vietnam veterans

who'd returned home hadn't been honored for their service. I didn't know what to do yet about this, if anything. But I felt something stirring inside of me. Honor needed to be granted. Respect was due. A simple thanks needed to be said. It would take a few years before I figured out

any sort of next step, but in the meantime, I had a theater and Moira's family members, and I knew something in our country desperately needed to change. I would start where I could with Steppenwolf. And without being able to articulate it in this way yet, I would begin to do my part to give back. So what I really liked about that, not to say that I'm any thing close to a guy that like Mac, but when I meet people, right, like I'll meet, you know, some friend of my daughters or some friend of my sisters, you know, some people that are, whatever, they're clearly

pretty close to, you know, a long-haired Gary Seneas in 1975 or whatever. And, you know, you can, I can feel that they're looking at me thinking this, some stereotypical image of what I'm going to be like, right? And I, and, you know, I'll just have a genuine conversation with him because I am genuine, like, oh, so what do you do? You know, so what, where are you heading in life? And I think it's like the same way you said, hey, this was, what you call him, this, this elite former company commander, and you're having a normal conversation with him. And there's a, there's like a, a, a revelation that, oh, this guy's a person. This guy's just a person that, yeah, he's got spit, shine, and yeah, he's got a high and tight. But he's just a person.

And he's going to come and watch our freaking crazy plays in our theater, which the plays are kind of crazy. Some of them are really crazy. I forget. Is the one where everyone's naked on stage yet? Is that one happened yet at this point? That's a little bit later. Yeah. That was, yeah, one of the plays that you guys do is about, what are they, native Peruvians?

Is it Peruvians? What country? Yeah, down in South America. And it's a small, small tribe. living, you know, very remote, in a very remote area of the jungle. So you guys put 25 actors on stage naked. Don't blame it on me. I didn't.

This was Malcovich's idea. So Malcovich decides 25. And you know what? Actually, when I heard that, I was like, okay, you know what? I get it. You know, that they're trying to, you know, break down some barriers. But then what got me was you go into the details of that, the fact that this place is really small, it's hot.

And all of a sudden, you're sitting in a, small room. I mean, there's only 88 seats. So you got 88 people in the bleachers or whatever in the seats, and there's 30 people naked on stage. You're almost outnumbered by sweaty, naked people. It wasn't the biggest hit of our early days. But I could see Mack rolling in there from West Point going, what is my sister doing? Yeah, no, he didn't see that. Thankfully, he didn't see that. Thankfully. Thankfully, he didn't see that. Uh, so. So were you going to, did I cut you off? No, no, that, Matt was an interesting guy.

Let me just talk about, you know, he passed away in 1983 of cancer. But he made a very big impression on me as some, you know, I'd never met anyone like him before. As I said, I had veterans in my own family, but I never really met, you know, West Point graduate, a two-tour Vietnam veteran. In fact, you know, General Vince Brooks? I don't know him, but... General Mike Scaparati, right? These are two...

They're newly retired, but they're friends of mine. And I met them... I met Mike when he was a two-star, and I met Vince when he was one-star. They both went on to earn four stars. They retired their final jobs. Vince's last... assignment was running Korea, and Scaparades was the Supreme Allied commander in Europe, right?

So both of these guys were at West Point when Mack was there. And that's why I'm close with them, because when I met them earlier on in their stardom, they said they went to West Point, and I said, well, did you happen to know Mack Harris? And both of them, when I met each of them, their faces lit up, and they started gushing about my brother-in-law and how much of an influence he had on them when he was a tack officer at West Point. So he was a really significant guy. And they actually, just about four years ago, 2016, they inducted Mack, and this is 30 years after his death, into the Fort Leavenworth Hall of Fame. And, you know, Omar Bradley and General Patton, all those kind of people are in the Fort Levinworth.

Leavenworth Hall of Fame because he revolutionized some things in the Army back in the day, back in 1976, 77, and into, you know, 81, 82, 83 when his final assignment was at Leavenworth, where he rewrote the leadership manual. And that manual is still taught today and principles that he championed and he came up with. And so they thought it was a significant contribution to today's army. So they put him in the Fort Levin with Hall of Fame. And this is the guy who came, and, you know, I was a little bit scared of him and everything, but then I got to know him, and he was a lovely, lovely guy, just unlike anyone I'd ever met, and he made a big impression on me.

And I went to his funeral, you know, I went to his military funeral when he died in 1983, and that was very, very powerful. And so when, you know, 10 years later, when I started working with our wounded and getting more involved and everything like that, all those memories of spending time with this particular individual came flooding back in some pretty significant ways. And that's why I write about them in the book. Well, I mentioned to Echo, Charles, before we started recording before you got here today. I said you're going to see some layers today because Echo likes to talk about layers, the way things are connected. and we often infuse layers intentionally into things, but we record, we do podcasts about a lot of podcasts about military stuff,

and we've covered dozens of military manuals on this podcast. And I think podcast 172, we cover FM Field Manual, 22, TAC 10, which is an, earlier edition written in 1951 of leadership for the army so now we get to go back and I will I will get the newer version I'll get the one that Mac wrote and I'll compare the two and see what things what lessons he brought because if you think about it the reason I picked 1951 was is post-World War II right so we're talking immediately after World War II these are the guys that sat down and said hey here's what we should be teaching so

I don't even think they revised it after Korea, but now Max will be post-Vietnam. So it'll be an interesting study. And you're right, you know, these guys that, and one thing that I've talked about, I talk about a lot of these manuals when we cover them is, you know, I'll be saying, I'll be saying whoever wrote that.

Like, who wrote that part right there? That right there is solid. That one. And, you know, I always use, sometimes I joke about it being a committee in there, There's one guy that's really good, and Lieutenant Colonel Pogue or Colonel Pogue is on the other side saying, we can't say that type of thing. That'll be offensive.

You know, whatever. There's always that guy. And then there's like the combat vet that's putting it straight. So now I got a name to go with the combat guy that's putting it straight. His name is Mack Harris. Yeah. And, you know, just so you know, he got, he was, his last assignment was to rewrite the leadership manual at Leavenworth. And he got a lot of pushback from top folks who didn't want to go in the direction that he was taking it.

And he wanted to talk about leadership through very personal stories of history. And those leadership manuals can be very sort of dry and a little bit technical and just sort of blah, blah, blah. And Mack tells stories about Little Rom Top. and Pickett's Charge and all this stuff in there. And he was getting a lot of pushback from people, but he pushed back himself. And they made, they, you know, published the Leadership Manual about a month after he passed away.

It was, it was finally published and brought to light. And they're still using it today at West Point and throughout the Army. Yeah, that's awesome. Jump forward a little bit here. Moira and I made a decision to break from Steppenwolf. Move out to Los Angeles. Your parents had moved out there and live with my parents for a while. We also decided to get married.

Mom was thrilled and jumped into wedding planning with Moira, but I could tell something was churning in Moira's mind. One day shortly, and again, I'm skipping around because I can't read this whole book. People got to buy the book. One day shortly before the wedding date, Moira told me she planned to fly home to Illinois to spend some time with her mom before coming back for the wedding. A couple of days after she landed in Chicago, the phone rang.

Gary, I don't want to get married, Moira said. I'm not coming back. Well, what, I said? She paused and added, I can't do it. Wait, invitations have gone out. We've got all the food ordered. I know, but I'm not going to do it. I can't.

I just can't. So that's kind of... And you, I mean, that's got to be a big hit. Oh, were you nervous about it? too enough to be like, well, I guess we're good. Well, because how old were you? There were some, I was more afraid of my mom who was spending the money on the napkins and the tablecloths and things like that.

And, okay, I accepted it. You know, I was disappointed, but then I accepted it. And we kind of went our separate ways for about a year and a half. And here we are all these years later, back together. And we've been married many, many years now. I had to talk about this. In late summer, 1979, I found out that Robert Redford was making a big movie called Ordinary People. And I landed an audition, but didn't get called back.

How could that be? I was perfect for this role, I thought. Mr. Redford didn't know what he was missing. The story takes place in Lake Forest, Illinois, right next to Highland Park, where I grew up. This is me. I already know this character inside and out. I should be playing this part. I'd heard all these Hollywood urban myths,

like the one where Steven Spielberg climbs over the fence at Universal Studios and gets his start in the film industry. I thought, hey, I can do that too. As soon as he sees me, Mr. Redford will cast me. All I need is for him to see me face to face. So I sneaked into the Warner Brothers lot, planted myself down on the couch in the office of the casting director Penny Perry

and informed the receptionist that I wouldn't leave until I could have an audition with Mr. Redford himself. The receptionist asked if I had an appointment. I said no, but explain the story. The receptionist went and told Penny, and Penny came out and asked in a kind

but very flat voice, Gary, what are you doing? I know I wasn't cast, I said, but I grew up in Highland Park. I'm perfect for this movie. I need to see Robert Redford. She sighed. Sorry, you are not going to see Robert Redford.

Well, I'm not leaving. I'm going to sit right on this couch until I do. She crossed her arms. Gary, don't do this. If you don't get off the couch, I'm going to have to call security. Please, I grew up right there. Penny's eyebrows lowered. You auditioned.

You didn't get called back. Leave the building or you will be taken off the lot. I stared back at her, silent, hang dog. Reluctantly, I accepted the fact that Robert Wedford would not be meeting Gary Seneas that afternoon. I slowly got up, utterly defeated, left the office, and walked out the front of the gate of the studios. I wasn't doing very well in this town. The thought of heading back to Chicago sounded better and better. On the way home, I came to the conclusion that had been brewing in me for a while now.

Hollywood hates me. Timothy Hutton landed the part. It was his first acting gig since playing a bit role in a movie. when he was a kid, plus a few small TV slots on Disney. Tim had never lived anywhere close to Highland Park, but for his performance in ordinary people, he ended up winning an Oscar. He was only 20 when he won the youngest male actor

to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. And I had to admit it. He was really good. That's how it goes in Hollywood. And nope, to this day, I've never met Robert Redford. having decided Hollywood hated me, I started packing up to go on. So that's a great story of rejection.

Yeah. Well, that's, that's, that's, you have to learn to live with rejection if you're going to be an actor. Yeah. Because it's, you're going to be rejected more often than, then accept it. You know, there's more actors than parts. So how many actors go up for a part, you know, for one part, you know, hundreds of actors go up and try to get one part I went to I was working with a company up in LA and I went up to speak to them and they were located around the corner from a casting whatever place and there's I

show up there and there's call it 400 10 year old kids in this line with their parents and I you know I go to talk to the company that I'm talking to and I'm just talking to the executives and as I show up there I'm like hey what are all these people doing here and They said, yeah, there's a casting call for, you know, obviously for some kids' movie or TV show or a commercial. Who knows? So, yeah, I was going to say there's more actors than there are people in L.A. Oh, I was rejected a lot in the early days of the Hollywood thing, you know. That was when I was living in California.

Moira and I had come out. We broke up, but I stayed for a while and kept trying. to audition and get parts and whatnot. I was there for about a year, a year and a half. Never got anything until I made a decision to leave and go back to Chicago. Then I landed one little part on Knott's Landing. The, you know, people always hear, what do they call? What's the bias?

Echo, I need your help on the bias. Survival bias? Survival bias. So you always hear about survival shit bias. You always hear about the person that went in, stormed into the office that I need to addition for this role and then they got it and then everything's cool. You don't hear this one. We're like you storm in you're committed until you're believing in yourself and you stand there and say no I need to talk to Robert Redford. I'm here. Gary Sanis is in the house.

And he's like, uh, cool. Get out. Call it security. You don't get to hear that's why I like this story because because people think, A, they think if they do that whatever that thing is, that it's going to work. And it doesn't always work. Doesn't always work. I, gosh, I remember times where I auditioned for something in Hollywood, and I remember at the end of the audition,

the casting director goes to me. Where did you study? And I said, well, I didn't study. I have my own theater company. I've been working with my own theater company. I did acting in high school, well, don't you think you should study a little bit? And I said, well, I have my own theater company. We've been doing

really well and I'm you know what I think you should come back here after you've studied and she was telling me to go get acting lessons you know because I wasn't good enough and I never forgot that I never forgot that so I went back to Chicago and and did my theater company and came in the back door I was going to say don't you think if there's someone in Hollywood that had to pay their little dues they had to go to their acting they had to do all these things and then you show up trying to sneak in the back door that they kind of hold that against you? Well, you know what I mean by sneak in the back door is I focused on the theater company and building the theater company in Chicago and doing our work. We eventually

moved some of that work to New York City where it became very, very popular. So now we're doing shows in New York and all the casting directors and producers and people from Hollywood are going to New York and they're seeing our shows. And next thing I know, people know who I am, I can get the audition if I want. And it's just because we were able to show our work, show what we do on stage. When you go in an audition, you're sitting in a room like this and you got two guys like that and they're looking at you and you're emoting, you know, or you're doing whatever you're doing. and somebody's reading, you know, reading the other parts and they're kind of flat and you're,

you're supposed to act with them and all that stuff. It's really, you know, or you're in a hotel room and you're doing that. And it's really, it's no fun. I prefer to just go back to Chicago, do our work, and show what we do. And that ended up working. Yeah, that's the DIY. That's the punk rock mentality. I know that you're basically too old.

to be part of that scene, but that's pretty punk rock to say, oh, you know what? Okay, I'm not going to play your game. I'll be over here, building an empire. What do you got? Yeah, you talk about that,

but just before I left Hollywood, my agent landed me in audition for a bit, part on primetime evening soap opera, Notts Landing, playing a teenager, doing some underage drinking at a party on the beach. Well, at least you were kind of, you know,

that wasn't really a stretch. It was my wheelhouse. I got the part. My character's name was, Lee Maddox and had a couple of lines and a makeout scene with a girl while sitting beside a campfire my very first time acting film Let's just say it wasn't from here to eternity Certainly not enough to keep me in Los Angeles any longer Steppenwolf opened the 1980 season in March

I moved back with no place to live I just showed up with my bags and said hi I'm back what can I do? Steppenwolf folded me into the company immediately Although our current season was already underway so I had no former roles to play Then you did some stand-ins when guys were sick or whatever. Steppenwolf wasn't rolling in dough, but we could finally pay our actors a bit. And that's a big step. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You did a play called Getting Out. I received my first award nomination called the Joseph Jefferson Award. The nomination was for Best Supporting Actor, and I won. I loved Chicago. In Hollywood, I was a dopey disco dancer in the background with Luke and Laura. I was a loser guy on the beach. and I'd been thrown out off the lot of Warner Brothers

and told by a casting director to come back when I had some acting lessons. I couldn't get ahead no matter how hard I tried, but back in Chicago, I went to work as an actor almost right away, got paid for it, and won a recognized award all within six months. Meanwhile, this is going on.

Moro, finished nursing school in California, yet she never worked as a nurse. She moved back to Chicago in 1981 and rejoined the company and we formally rekindled our relationship somewhere in the middle of the revival production of bomb of how do you say this bomb in gilead bomb and gilead moira and i took a good look at each other shrugged and said to each other hey let's get married so you're back in the game

uh h e bacchus keep forgetting if bachus bachus achi bachus was the artistic director he quits and then it's between you and malcovitch being suggested to be the ad artistic director you like that echo Charles yes he's kind of a Hollywood guy the ensemble voted and you landed the position you thought Malcovich was relieved and this is where I I sent some Mac Harris I was convinced so now you're taking over as the artistic director which so what does that mean you're picking the plays yeah run the company yeah basically there's a managing director who deals with the business, the artistic director kind of deals with the season and how the plays are going to work

and the casting and all that kind of stuff. Are you allowed to veto some weird directing ideas? Yeah. Okay. So you're kind of the man. Decision maker. Check. So you take over as AD?

Although, can I say one thing? Yeah. H.E. Bacchus, when he was the artistic director, we appointed him in the first season. Nobody wanted to do it, so we made him do it. And H.E. was very diplomatic and easy going. He listened to everybody and everything like that. So people were kind of used to a little bit more free-flowing, whatever. Let's do this and do that.

I came in and I had a very different style. Yeah. No question. It's interesting that even this group, so I'll work with companies where they're, I've worked with companies where they have literally a flat organization, meaning no one's in charge. And they're always very proud of this. Doesn't usually work great.

So I find it interesting that even you guys, this group of, you know, crazy actors and actresses, says, hey, you know what, we need somebody to be in charge of this ship, right? It's just very interesting from a leadership perspective. Even if the leader is a guy like H.E., who's laid back and not really, you know, a heavy leadership presence on every decision. but he's he's at least got some oversight of the deal.

Yeah, and he's smart and people respect him. Yeah, and he's steering it, right, somewhat, even if he's steering it subtly. So in groups, we need leaders, just kind of making that point. So you roll in, rolling in hot, as they say. I was convinced we needed to approach our work more like a business. The following Monday, I came in with a new set of rules. High on the list was all staff members in my 9 a.m. every day. I made several other changes and even fired someone.

Good Lord, the new rules and approach came as a shock to the ensemble, sort of like General Patton had just walked in. While we still maintained our collaborative approach to the direction we wanted to go as a company, as AD I felt it was time to approach things a bit differently to step up our game and allow the artistic director to lead in a new way. One rule I implemented was the now infamous, at least among the company, no pot rule. No pot could be smoked.

or eaten anywhere around the theater until after showtime. No beer either. Everyone thought the no pot rule was hilarious coming from a guy who openly partook from time to time, but for the most part everyone along with it.

So what I find interesting about this is I wrote another book here. The book is called Discipline equals Freedom, field manual. And what I find interesting about this is I'm often explaining to companies that you as an individual human being, if you want to have freedom, then you need to have discipline.

And I explain to companies that as a company, as a business, if you want to have freedom, you have to have discipline. You have to come up with standard operating procedures. You have to do things like everyone get to work by nine. So I find it interesting that you recognize these things. You obviously saw that, hey, we're doing okay right now, but if we're going to really step up our game, I'm going to need to impose some discipline here.

Well, yeah, and that's what it was. I mean, at that time, you know, people would just show up. And, I mean, we rehearsed our plays. We were very serious on stage. I mean, everybody loved acting. We loved doing the work on stage. But it was a little undisciplined, you know, as a business. And we were raising money.

We were, we had a board of directors. We were trying to sell subscriptions now at this point. theater were you guys in at this point? Now we had moved from Highland Park into the city of Chicago, and so we're in about a 134-seat theater that was already built. We just rented it. And we, you know, we were building our board, all that. So I wanted to improve all of those things. And I really kind of saw us eventually taking one of our shows and moving it to New York to get international and national recognition and exposure. And I thought that would help us grow in the in the city of Chicago.

So, you know, I had to, you know, I had ideas about how I wanted to lead the company. And sometimes they worked with everybody. Sometimes they didn't work with everybody. And, you know, we'd have to have to duke it out a little bit or vote on things, you know, and stuff. But eventually, you know, people got used to just the fact that now somebody was making real serious, hard decisions

and changing the way we did things. Another thing that I talk about, it sounds like there's a little bit of this somewhere. And it's actually a bunch of it in this new book I wrote leadership strategy and tactics is when there is a void of leadership. When there's a leadership vacuum, people, people can sense it and they kind of know it. And if someone steps into that vacuum and starts making decisions, everyone's kind of relieved that it finally happened.

People are like, okay, cool, this guy's actually going to move us. Look, it might not be the perfect direction, but we're all going to move there together and that's good enough. So it sounds like maybe there was some of that as well. I bet if you had jumped in there a few years earlier with this where there was a little bit more egos, people weren't, you know, it might have been resisted more. You may be right, because we're, again, I described in the book that we were all trying to find each other and find ourselves and find our working relationships and people were breaking up and, you know,

there's a lot of personal stuff going on. It was a little crazy, but once we moved into Chicago, once that decision was made to move the company away from the suburb of Highland Park into the city where there were other theaters and theater community going on and to become a part of that, we found ourselves needing a little more discipline and whatnot. So I just came in and did it the way. And believe me, I don't know where that all came from. You know, I just, as a kid, I think I was the guy to organize the baseball game in the neighborhood or, you know, the guy who come up with a set list for the band or whatever.

I always sort of led a little bit like that. But I never led a theater company before. And this was all new. I hate to jump into like trying to figure some of this out. But you got a 134 seat theater in Chicago. How many shows do you do a week? We were doing about eight shows a week. Oh, so you're doing like a show every night and two on Sunday or something like that or two on Saturday?

Yeah. Monday was the day off. And then, oh, so like two on Friday or two on Saturday? on Sunday, something like that? Yeah, stuff like that. And are you filling that thing up? No. No.

You know, from time to time. Okay. I mean, the play, for example, that you mentioned, Baum and Gilead, that ended up being one of our massive hits. And it sold out every night. So it all depended on word of mouth and the reviews and all that kind of thing. The play that I talked about, called Savages. with the naked people and everything. We barely had,

we had more people on stage than we're in the audience for that one. Is 125 people, do you need microphones in that size? Like on the actors? 134 seats? Yeah, sorry, 134 seats.

You're not even using microphones. No, we had like three rows on the floor and then there was a little balcony that had two rows that went around. It was like a three-quarter theater. Okay. you had audience here, audience here, and audience here on three sides, and then the play was right here in the middle.

So no microphones ever can just hear you and it's super raw. Yeah. And if there's 25 naked people on stage, it's super uncomfortable. It was really raw, yeah. Really raw, yeah. And these were all, they were playing Brazilian, you know, Peruvian, you know, a tribe. And so these were all like most of the people that were in the, and playing this, this tribe were like from northwestern students. So, you know, as white as you can be, right?

So they used a very tan makeup on their bodies and everything. And then after the show, they'd have to go to the showers. And there was also a gym with a locker room in this place that we had this thing. theater. And so the entire cast, 25 people go into the showers and hit the showers after the show. Luckily, I wasn't in this show. I was just the artistic director who made the decision to do the show. Well, I hate to say this, but you got to take ownership of that. At the guy in charge, you have to own those 25 naked, sweaty people on stage. I do, but I blame John Malcovic, though. All right. All right. Well, you all let you have to let you guys sort that out. It's a fun memory for everybody. You know, it was a misguided show.

but we all get a kickout. So even though you're paying, your actors, everyone still have day jobs at this point? Some people did, yeah. As artistic director now, I was drawing a little bit of a salary. And that didn't create any hostilities? No, no, no, because we were able to pay certain key people that needed to be there all the time.

The artistic director, the managing director, stage manager, people like that, you know, we were able to, you know, our construction folks, We were building our board. We were selling more tickets. We were selling subscriptions now. Subscription means you can come any night of the week. No, a subscription will mean you pay a certain price

and you're buying all, let's say we get five plays in a season. You're buying all five plays and you get a discount because you're buying all five. And it's a subscription to this season. Okay. And we're making enough money. We're paying some people. All right.

Um, at this point, you know, you delve into a little bit about, you're talking about Mac and you're talking about the impression that they made on you. And we, we kind of already talked about that now. But, um, there's a, a play that you hear about. And it's, it's a play called Tracers, which is written and performed by Vietnam veterans about their experiences before, during and after the war. A light bulb clicked on. This is exactly what I was looking for. On February 20th, 1981, I typed a two-page letter to a Address to the entire Tracers' Ensemble in care of director John Dufusco. Defusco, yeah. The Vietnam vet who conceived the play co-wrote it and owned the rights to it. John DeFusco had never heard of Steppenwolf, wrote back and said, no, sorry, it's a play written and both written and performed by veterans, and we fail it should be done always that way, so we're not letting anybody else do it. So you waited, time pass, eventually you invite.

invite him to Chicago to see one of your shows. Balman Gilliott. Okay. So he sees that place is crowded and he sees that there's, what does he say? You say, gives it gives credibility. Yeah, the play was very, very good, very powerful. So he could see that we were a real theater company at that point. And he didn't know anything about us at that point.

And then you guys, you finally, he says you can do it. And I'll go to the book here. I talked to my brother Mac about, brother-in-law Mack about what he thought about putting on the play. He liked the idea inform me about certain details. I needed to make sure I got right. More than anything, I wanted him to come see the play. But in August, 1983, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Max Manuel for the Army was published in October, 1983. And that same month, his promising career in life were cut short. He passed away at age 39, leaving behind his wife and three-year-old daughter, Katie. you talk about going to the funeral, the honor guard, the flag-draped coffin, the 21-gun salute. I've never forgotten it. Mack was laid to rest beside his father in the cemetery across the street from where he grew up. Lieutenant Colonel Boyd, McKenna, Mack Harris truly lived a life of service to others,

and his passing only put the cap in my commitment to do the playwright. I wanted tracers to honor the Vietnam veterans such as Mack Harris and help them tell their stories. And then as that's happening, October 23rd, 1983, suicide bomber drives a truck in the building in Beirut. So you've got that happening. And your desire to really do a great production

grows even stronger. And you do it. You guys, you guys, you guys, you ran like a boot camp sort of to get ready for it. You know, you guys go out in the field and play little war games to try and get in the minds of the soldiers, which I know they do that all the time now,

it seems when people are doing movies, they always put some kind of a military boot camp thing together for it. Had you ever heard of that before? Did you just kind of think we need to do it? Because I remember a couple years later, this is 1983 that we're, starting to work on this play. And remember the movie Platoon with Charlie Sheen and...

Affirmative. Oliver Stone directed it. So that came out about three years later, and they did a whole boot camp thing in there. They lived in the jungle for two weeks and trained these guys and everything like that. But three years earlier, I took this cast out, and we did something similar in a way,

kind of our own little mini version of boot camp. And I'm not sure where that idea came from. I think it was just the desire to isolate my cast away from everything. And somebody I knew was involved with a summer camp in Michigan that was closed down. And so this is wintertime now that we're rehearsing this play. And they said they could arrange for me to go to the closed down. summer camp and you know stay in the in the in the cabins and I would just have it all to myself and they arranged that so I took my cast to this closed down summer camp in the winter and the snow

is like this and we're playing vietnam guys out in the snow you know doing uh we had um remember Dennis Ferena the actor what was he what would he was in get shorty and he was in a television echo okay yeah if I'm remembering correctly yeah he was in he was in a lot of stuff you'd recognize him he he's a Vietnam veteran himself and he was just getting into acting and I cast him as the drill instructor and so I told Dennis you're going to be the drill instructor up at this summer camp with us and so I want you to wake us up and three in the morning banging on things and make everybody go out in the snow and do push-ups so we did we did a whole thing up there for four or five days and just and it was it was it was just so galvanizing for the cast to come

together in this isolated place nobody was around it's we're out in the middle of the woods and nobody's around and we were just there doing our sort of military thing together and bonding as a cast I directed the play I wasn't in it but I did everything that they were doing and you know went out in the snow and did the whole thing. And it was an ingredient in the preparation of the play that was really, I think, just super to bond this cast together. I was very, very committed because of the Vietnam veterans and my own family to telling these stories properly and having seen the original production twice and watching all

these Vietnam veterans. There were only two of them in that original cast that wrote this play that had done any acting before. All the rest of them were veterans. And they just came together, and over a six-month period, they exercised their demons into a script and wrote a play based on their experiences in Vietnam, what it was like to be there, serve there, come home from there, all that stuff, and they put it into this play. and I saw it. It was very powerful, and they were all veterans performing their own stories. And I thought, I'm going to do my best to live up to that.

They are entrusting me with their script, you know, and they're not giving it to anybody else, and they're entrusting me with the script. And for them and the Vietnam veterans and my own family, I want to make sure that my cast really gets this thing, why we're doing it, the importance of it. And this is 1983. So the wall was opened, you know, just prior to that, right? The Vietnam veteran really hadn't been welcomed home yet. You know, I don't know if you're younger than I am, but in 84, 85, all of a sudden there were some welcome home parades for the Vietnam veteran. The parades that they never got when they came home, the welcome home experience that they were denied. and this play Tracers was happening right around the same time. So something was changing.

And I remember the cast was so powerful. They really got what I was trying to do. We rehearsed the play. We put it on its feet. And I wanted veterans to come see it, right? It was very important to me that veterans would come see this show. So we made Tuesday night free for veterans. And the word spread throughout the community in Chicago, and veterans, especially Vietnam veterans, were coming in droves.

And some nights, some of those Tuesday nights, we would have nothing but veterans almost in the audience. At this point, we were in a new theater, another new theater that had 220 seats. and can you imagine that you know veterans coming with their own family members and they've never talked about their own experiences and now their family members are watching these actors on stage kind of relive some of the things that they'd gone through and we would have discussions after the show and people would ask question and the veterans would talk and they would talk about their experience and their wife is sitting right next to him and she's going and he never said any of this to me before. It was a real cathartic, healing thing that happened with Tracers,

and it changed my life and galvanized something in me that would take root very deeply in the coming years. You say and hear about it, after each performance, we received a standing ovation. The crowd cheered wildly. The reviews all came back positive. decided to provide a free performance which you go into and and then you say this today people often ask me about the highlights my career tracers is one an incredibly meaningful

absolutely extraordinary experience as we did this play I could see that the veterans felt like something was happening for them they've been stuck in the shadows discredited abused or simply ignored and now they were watching these actors honor them and bring their stories out of the shadows I will always be grateful to John DeFusco and the cast of tracers for the opportunity to work on this life-changing play. For the first time, I felt like I was giving back by honoring our veterans, by not letting them fall through the cracks, by not letting them feel unappreciated or forgotten. I met many Vietnam veterans who had attended our free performances. And in the early 1990s, I was asked to help raise funds to build the Lansing Veterans Memorial in Lansing, Illinois.

A Vietnam veteran who had seen tracers, Tom Luberda. Luberda, organized the creation of the memorial. It features the names of our fallen heroes on a black granite wall with a giant U.H1 Huey helicopter mounted overhead, while a statue of a soldier carrying a wounded comrade to the waiting chopper stands as a reminder to never leave anyone behind. I was honored to play some small part in helping Tom and the veterans realize their dream. and to say thanks for my involvement, they put my brother-in-law's name on the wall. Lieutenant Colonel Boyd McKana Harris, U.S. Army 9th Infantry Division,

American Division, Vietnam. Here I'm going to perhaps reveal my own personal lack of culture, which is not very hard to uncover, right? I'm not a very cultured person, right? I grew up in the military. I just, you know, I didn't go to museums or go to see plays or whatever. When you do this, when you do plays, theater, right? Do you ever feel like, hey, it's gone?

Like, you know, we're sitting here talking about tracers. I want to watch it. You know, I want to go watch it. And, you know, you can't. Do you feel like that? or is that something that kind of provides some of the magic to it because it's something that's fleeting? Yeah, it's a living kind of thing that when it's over, it's over.

Unless you've got something like, you know, cats or something, which just, you know, phantom of the opera. Never over. You know, in its fourth decade and it's continuing on. You know, that's the thing about theater. You know, sometimes I've been in things that were over and then restarted again, and then we did it again, and then we did it again. And, you know, because there was more blood to suck out of it. But usually it was because it was something really positive, something really good, something creative, and something that we wanted to keep alive a little bit more.

The Grapes of Wrath was kind of like that. When we put the Grapes of Rath on stage, 650 page. book, and we adapted it for the stage, and we put it on stage in Chicago in 88, then we put it back up again. We took it to La Jolla, California and London in 89, and then we moved it to Broadway in 1990, and it won the Tony Award. That was an ongoing sort of, we kept working on it and kept refining it, kept making it better and everything.

Sometimes you get those kind of projects that have a big life. But generally, when you're doing a season of plays, you're doing five plays, you know, you wrap it up after five weeks and it's done. You go on to the next play. I just did these live gigs. I did six of them. And each one of them was different. So, yeah, each one of them was different.

Like I would, as a matter of fact, the one I did, and I was writing them right before I'd do them. And it was interesting because, Like when we do the podcast, right? It's recorded. It's there for all practical purposes. It's going to be there for a long time, right? It's on the interwebs. Those live gigs were one shot, and that made it very interesting for me

because I knew that I was just going to do this one time. The other thing is I got the feeling of what it was like to have a bunch of people. sitting right there because in the podcast right it's just echo sitting there or you know whoever the guest is sitting there and we're talking about something but you forget that there's a million people out there right where you don't forget it but it's not it's different right the the impact of having these people you know having people sitting there with you in the room is there's a little I started thinking about as you were describing this I'm like oh that's

that thing that's what that's why Why, because let's face it, if you look at it from a pragmatic perspective, go to a movie. Right? From a pragmatic perspective, hey, you don't need to get a bunch of human beings on a weird stage somewhere and do all these lights and have them try and remember their little lines. No, you go and see a movie. But there's a reason why the theater still exists. And that's because there's this thing of going live. It's the same thing with a live rock concert, right?

Hey, why not just watch a DVD of the band playing their hits, right? You could say that that's a pragmatic solution, right? From, you know, from just a practical sense, oh, I'll just put on the DVD. Going to see a fight. Hey, going to see a fight. You get a much better view when you're sitting at home on your 87-inch flat-screen television. And you can record it. you can roll it, you can rewind it, right? You can replay it. But when you're there in the

Coliseum, there's something going on. So I guess that's what I was trying to figure out if you ever felt like, oh, hold on a second, how do we capture this? And I guess part of the magic is that you can't fully capture it. You have to do it live. From night to night, it's going to change, too. I mean, the blueprint is the same. But because the audience, is reacting differently from night to night, the actors adjust too. And you discover things along the way. The play is never the same at the end of the run as it is at the beginning of the run, because it evolves. Once you factor in the audience and their participation with you and the interaction that they have with you while they're watching the play, things evolve. You learn things along

the way, things change. I remember we recorded, we did a play, me and Malcovic, called True West. And the two of us played brothers. And it was a long run. And we were off Broadway. It was the first thing we did in New York. And the thing that kind of put us sort of on a national map. And that play evolved quite a bit.

We were improvising. We were changing things. This was written by Sam Shepard. And a very, very well-written play. A lot of people have done it. But by the end of the run for us, you know, it had gone into a whole other thing. It was simply because John and I are the kinds of actors that are going to give and take and bounce around. He's going to do something different from night to night.

So I'll react differently or vice versa or whatever. And therefore, you know, and if it works, you keep it. And so the play evolves as time goes on. It's really a neat experience, live theater performed. But it's also endurance. It's, you know, eight shows a week if you're doing a play like True West, which is two brothers fighting on stage, beating each other up, you know, going crazy, screaming and yelling, blah, blah, blah, night after night after night, you know,

it's an endurance test. I couldn't do that particular thing as I'm 64 now, you know. I'd like the, I'd play the psychiatrist, sit and ask questions in the chair, you know. I had this weird, so again, I'm only just diving into this a little bit because I have an actual professional here. I was doing these live gigs, and as I was going to do them, so I know a bunch of comedians. And not a bunch, but I know a few comedians. And some of them are really good, like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn. So I have some relationships with some of these guys and I kind of listen to them talk about being a comedian and one of the things that they talk about is when you're making a

Show they go out to like a small club and they do like their routine and then they They do it a little bit better and they change something they add something they take something away. They add something else until they get it and this is what made me think of this You're talking about how you hear the audience react and you go okay. That's good. I'll add to that and you hear the audience react differently I'll remove that. And eventually they get to a point where they go, okay, now I can take this thing out on the road and they do. They do.

They go on tour with it. What was, and I, like, on my second show, because now I'm changing, I was doing something different. And I was like, hey, I don't take any lessons learned from the last one. And I have no idea what everyone's going to think of this one I'm doing tonight, which was kind of not, it might not be smart. But that's what I did.

Doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. When you took that show to New York, not everyone was on board. When you took True West to New York. So there's a little leadership challenge that you faced. And in fact, when you took that show to New York, when you took True West to New York, they told you guys, this isn't Steppenwolf. Right? That's how it went down.

Well, what happened was I wanted to move the show. And we're in this 134 seat theater where we did True West originally, and we had the opportunity to take over another theater that had more seats that had been kind of closed down for a while. And it was sitting there waiting to be rented. And we needed to add more seats. We were building our subscribers. Our audience is getting stronger. We wanted more seats. So we wanted to go from 134 to the 220 in this building.

And this, you know, David Mamet. So William H. Macy, actors like that, they started this theater company called St. Nicholas. They went bankrupt, and this building was just sitting there. And so we wanted to take it over. At the same time, we had the opportunity to open that new theater. We had the opportunity to move True West to New York. Most of the company said they didn't want to go to New York and do that. we had to focus on opening this new theater.

I said as an artistic director, I think we have to do both. And it was my show. I wanted to move it. I brought the producers in. I wanted, John was in it. And they said, and two of the actors that were in it, there's four actors total. John and I were the only ones who wanted to do it. The other actors didn't want to do it and go.

So I said, well, okay, we'll recast those parts in New York. Well, that didn't go over well with the theater company at all. So they said, well, if you're going to do that, then you can't call it a Steppenwolf show. And so we moved it to New York, John and I. I recast the other parts, and we opened the show without calling it Steppenwolf. And there was a lot of tension between John and me and the other people in the company, and they just didn't agree with it, and we made the decision to do it. But in our bios in the program, all the credits we had were Steppenwolf.

It said Gary Seneas is the artistic director of Steppenwolf, the inner John Malikovitch has done all these plays at Steppenwolf and Chicago. So all the critics were reading those bios. Who are these guys from Chicago? And they read about Steppenwolf. So Steppenwolf was now getting all kinds of attention because True West ended up being a big hit. And it was a giant hit, and people were coming from all over the country, really, to see it because it was so popular. And it kind of put Steppenwolf into a more nationally recognized position. We were getting a lot of attention from the New York media.

Great reviews. Lots of people were coming to see it. And it really turned everything around. After that, the company said, oh, that's great. Let's do more in New York. And we started bringing a lot of plays to New York after that. But somebody has to be the first one to kind of go over the hill, you know? And we did.

John and I took it. And we were successful. We did okay. And we moved forward from there. You talk about kind of how you give the reviews. You guys get these great reviews. Everyone's fired up. You say this.

John's performance is especially getting a lot of attention. And his star began to rise. during the run. He was doing media interviews and photo sessions for magazine covers. And you say John was so powerful in the show and getting press, comparing him to Marlon Brando. The week after we opened, John told me he'd been approached by William Morris Talent agent Johnny Planco,

and had signed with him. But after two or three months of running the show, no agents had approached me. I was happy for my friend. He's a great actor. and it was clear to me that he was going to launch into the movie business after we concluded our run of the show. And I couldn't help but wondering if a movie role might be in the cards for me also. Is there like ego involved in this scenario as it's unfolding?

Are you just stoked for your friend? No, both. Both. I mean, yeah, you know, we were on stage together the whole time. Two guys. One of the parts is very, very flashy. It's a great part. part that John played, the older of the two brothers. And he's like this desert rat. He disappears

into the desert and comes out. And the other one is a screenwriter, kind of a little cricket guy. And he's typing and writing. They're very opposite, you know. But they sort of, during the course of the play, they sort of exchange roles in a way. The screenwriter gets crazier and crazier. So the two guys, it's two great parts. They're both on stage, though. time. And I thought, well, and John's coming in and he's saying, you know, I went out with Antonioni last night and Robert DuBall and John Cassavetes and Gene Hackman was here. Did you see him? I went out with him. And I'm like, well, I went to the Greek restaurant by myself. You know, it was kind of like that. And a lot of great things were happening for John. It was

very exciting. It's a flashy part. And he got a lot of attention. I thought, Maybe, you know, something like that was in the cards for me. It wasn't. But I decided to take some initiative. So I went to the box office, and I said, can you give me a list of all the, like, agents and casting directors and people like that who have been to see the show? And they keep tabs on that kind of stuff.

So they gave me the list, and I decided to make those calls myself. They weren't coming to me. So I made a call to some agents, and I ended up getting an agent in New York, and that changed things a little bit. John had a, you know, he rocketed, you know, he was nominated for an Oscar within two years of that play. Yeah, that's, I was reading now, I was like, man, this is,

I could see where, you know, obviously working with a bunch of companies all the time, we always deal with people's egos, and I could see where this, This is a classic scenario where you could get mad and, you know, undermine him and, you know, do whatever. Like all sorts of bad things can come from this. Or you can have a great attitude and be like, hey, awesome for him. That's great. No factor. Move on.

Well, you know, we ended up taping the show at the end of our run. The show ran two years. We did it for the first six months and then I recast it. I was the director too. So I recast it with a bunch of different people. and we taped it for PBS and it aired on PBS you can see it on the internet it's called true west it's kind of malgovich and sinese and we taped it and we took four days to shoot it and then right after that john went off to Thailand to do his first movie it was called the killing fields and great movie and he went off played a part in that within within a couple of years He was in a movie called Places in the Heart and got nominated for an Oscar. When he left to go there, I went back to Chicago and eventually took over again as artistic director of the company.

I think that's what you're talking about here. From 1982 to 1987, we produced even more shows in Chicago and took more to New York. And then in 1990, we opened the Grapes of Wrath on Broadway. That production won us another Tony, and I forget which one won you the first Tony, this time for Best Play. And is that Tony is the best thing you can get in theater? In New York, it's the big award that you can get. The reason I say another one is in 1985, just a couple years after True West went and we were taking other shows there. They gave us an honorary Tony Award for Best Regional Theater with,

a couple of years of of taking true west then there and then in 1990 we won for best play and that kind of precipitates what's going on here in 1990 we realized another dream when step and wolf broke ground at 1650 north halsted street and built our own multi-million dollar building we designed our own theater from the ground up and opened the doors not long afterward the land of our birth had allowed us to pursue our dreams step and wolf had truly arrived so you guys were big time now. I mean, if you're building the building, you're doing some good stuff, obviously. Yeah, so 82 to 90, right? So during that period in the 80s, we became an internationally recognized theater. We took shows to London. We took shows to New York. We were getting

great press from the international media. We went from a local theater that nobody knew about outside of Chicago to an internationally recognized theater which allowed us to attract stronger board members. So, you know, reach a wider audience and eventually raise the money to build our own theater from the ground up. How many seats did you guys put in the new theater? 520. Check. And now we're building another one right next door. Right now? Adding another theater in the round, yeah.

Still on the move. Kind of crazy. You get Sam. Who's Sam, Hollywood guy? Sam introduced you. Might be Sam Cohen, who was my agent at the time. He introduced you to a Hollywood producer named David Putnam. Sam called me and said that David wanted to offer you a directing deal in Hollywood at Columbia.

David would pay me to move to California. He called David and he was asking you about like how much how much do you think you should get He called David then called back and said David thinks you should get 70 thousand 75,000 a year okay by you I was speechless 60,000 sounded like a fortune to me much less 75 they gave me an office and the on the back lot of Warner Brothers where Columbia Pictures was based at the time the same lot incidentally that I'd been thrown out of a few years earlier when I tried so hard to see Robert Redford at the time I was still at the time I made the deal

I was still artistic director at Steppenwolf turned over the reins to Jeff Perry and Randy Arnie so now you go out and they're basically paying you to look for a movie to make is that is that what it is? That's what the first look deal is

if I find a movie that I want to direct I give it to them first to see it. They can say yes or no. Got it. And the movie that you finally come up with is called Farm of the Year. Yeah, another studio had that. So I had to go to David Putnam and say, look, I found a movie I want to do,

but it's at another studio. And he said, go make it, make it great. You know, they had me under contract there, and they wanted me to make movies. So they weren't going to have me hang around and do nothing. I had a movie I wanted to make, and it just happened to be at a small studio. So,

Cinecom? Yeah, that was the company. They say they're going to put $5 million up to make the movie. We shot the movie in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I found my transition from theater directing to film directing a little more difficult than I'd anticipated. Again, I've got to skip through some of this. You talk about some of the challenges you come across,

some of it being that's your first movie and you're not quite 100% sure what you're doing. As you're going through all that, to add to the pressure in the middle of all this confusion, I received a call from the producers who said the selection committee at Cannes Film Festival wanted to see a cut of the movie. Cans, holy crap.

Cairns means red carpet and paparazzi. Big movie starts, chauffered to the front door in limousines. Echo getting fired up over there. Every filmmaker dreams of being in competition at Cairns. A great reception there can really help a movie out. So that's looking good. the studio execs decided to fiddle with the title of film changing it from the farm of the year to miles from home. So miles from home comes out and you say here, it never found its audience.

It fell flat, earning a grand total of $188,000. Yeah, that's falling flat, yeah. Yeah, and that's out of a $5 million investment. It's probably more than that. The experience wasn't all bad for me anyway. Although I'm sure the studio wasn't thrilled. I learned many great lessons. I just need to find the right movie.

And by the way, our first baby was due just after miles from home closed in theaters. The due date was November 8th, 1988, Election Day, the year George H.W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis. On November 9th, we named her Sophia Anna Seneas and called her Sophie. In 1990, Moira discovered she was pregnant again. This time with a boy. That summer, I was acting on Broadway in the grapes of wraths. And Moira now six months pregnant was in Chicago doing a play with Steppenwolf called Love Letters. She's just getting after it.

In multiple phone calls, we discussed what we should name our son. One day, the name became clear to me. I called up Moira. We should call him Mack after your brother. Moira was thrilled. Boyd, McKenna Mack Harris, the Vietnam Vet, Silver Star recipient, West Point instructor, passed away in 1983 of cancer. We all thought of them regularly.

When our son was born on November 10th, 1990, almost two years to the day after Sophie, we named him McKana, Anthony Seneas, Mac for short. The Irish and Italian influences surrounded us and sounded very American. And after Mac is born, you go, and I'm not going to read this part because people should read it for themselves,

but you kind of talk about just how everything kind of hits you that you got these two beautiful children. You got, you know, you're doing well in life. You've got the beautiful family. And you say here, you know, you're driving while this is happening and you get emotional. You say as I brushed away the tears at the stoplight, I think I whispered a semblance of my first prayer. The prayer was hazy, but the intention was clear. Called a longing, perhaps.

The first twinges of belief, two words layered with more than one meaning. Thank you. you wrap up grapes of wrath on stage and you say here I search for what to do next I knew I wanted to do something epic something that moved people preferably another movie but what then Elaine Steinbeck and you talk about where you develop this relationship with her and she she was married to John Steinbeck his widow she controlled all the rights to his material and and you knew her where'd you know her from from from working on the grapes of rash she gave us the rights to do it and she loved the production so she we became friends and so uh elaine had become a real champion of step and wolf she'd seen that we could take on her husband's novels and handle the stories really well on the last day of shooting the PBS version of grapes of wrath i stood with elaine during a break out by the theater's back steps i thought about the box car image swallowed sucked up by my courage and said elaine would you give me the rights to of mice and men i'd like to try and make

a movie out of it i paused and added tentatively i'd need your help too because i don't have any money she chuckled quietly smiled her beautiful delight dignified smile and said well honey it's already been a film three times I got a kick out of that you end up making the deal she eventually gives it to you she gives it to you free of charge by the way which is shows you that she was impressed with you and what you know what you guys had done with her other her husband's other material you start you make this movie You're doing that, and actually, the day the L.A. riots touched off. I was mixing the sound for of mice and men at Sony Studios in Culver City.

One of the technicians called me into the office, and there on his TV, all hell was breaking loose. For the next five days while the riots raged. I tried to work at home while watching the city burn on television. Those are, of course, the Rodney King riots. You get another invite to Cairns. It's can. Oh, okay. Sorry.

Did I mention something about me being uncultured? It's calm. It's French. All right, so you get another invite to cans. You say it how you want to say. Hey, I'm American. There's an S on the end of it. So you get another invite to con.

There you go. And on the way from the hotel to the theater, the streets were lined with cheering people. At the theater of the Red Cross. carpet was packed with paparazzi and journalist. Everybody wore tuxedos or ballgowns. Flash bulbs popped everywhere. As a filmmaker, when your movie is being shown, you can't stand in the back and pace, which

is what I nervously felt like doing. You must sit in the middle of the theater, along with the production team, in the middle of a gigantic crowd. You hope the crowd enjoys the show. If they don't, then you sit there and take your punishment, even if you get booed. And this was my first film as a producer, my second as a show. my second as a director, only my third as an actor. The crowd and I watched the movie.

It started just as I envisioned it on a train inside a box car. We heard the clickety clack on the train going across the tracks. The story progressed. The movie finished and the credits rolled with the light still down. The plot concludes tragically, not triumphantly, and it's not a movie where you walk away feeling happy. Still, the story is deeply moving and powerful, and my hope was that after seeing the film,

viewers might be motivated to do a little more and make sure people aren't alone, abandoned, marginalized, or left on the fringes. When the credits began to roll, a little lull kept into the auditorium. A tense moment of silence. Sometimes the audience waits until the very end of the credits to show their feelings. Sometimes they make their decision with the credits still rolling. I felt my skin crawl.

Will the audience clap? Will they boo? I held my breath waiting for the response. And then it happened. A damn burst. The entire room erupted into applause, huge applause. When the credits still rolling, the audience clapped and clapped. One person stood.

Then another, the entire theater rose to their feet. A standing ovation. The team and I stayed in the middle of the crowd, and they brought the house lights up and shined a spotlight on us. The crowd continued to clap wildly. They cheered through the entire credits. Malkovich and I stood, took a bow and wave. The credits ended and nothing appeared on the screen.

The audience continued to clap and cheer. Malcovic and I sat down and took a few moments. The audience continued to clap and cheer. Then Russ, John, and I stood, and I saw Tom Selleck standing off to one side in the crowd. I had to leave this in there for Echo Charles. I saw Tom Selleck standing off to one side of the crowd, clapping, cheering. I didn't know him personally, but I could put out his familiar face anywhere. He wore a white tux, and as I glanced over, Tom caught my eye and smiled and nodded his only Magnum P.I. could do.

The standing ovation went on and on. The noise in the room was deafening. Someone said later the elevation lasted a full 10 minutes Finally the clapping wound down and I stood again in the cloud to the called the crowd Thank you. Thank you so much tears filled my eyes a wave of emotion nearly choked me We had worked hard and this was our moment of truth. It felt spectacular and there's a little I'm not gonna go to the full thing But there's a Russ is with you and Russ was a co-producer and Russ says

Wow, I'm so glad the MGM executives are here to see this it will be really good for the film. Or is that you said that? I said that. Okay. So you said, oh yeah, yeah. I looked over at Russ and quipped, wow, I'm so glad the MGM executives are here to see this.

Oh, you're really good for the film. And then he says back, either that or I think we just made a French film. Which means that's like an artistic film. Arthouse. An art house film. Which is cool, but not super, what, profitable? Not a lot of people are going to see it. Yeah.

Sounds like you were kind of right. Kind of? I was. You were right. Going here, the execs, I mean, this is the exact. What company made this or what? MGM. The MGM execs considered it an artistic success,

but I think they suspected the movie wasn't going to make much money, so they weren't going to spend much to market it. Columbia's A River Runs Through it, starring Brad Pitt and directed by Robert Redford. He started to get hostile towards this guy. Came out seven days after of mice and men, and although the stories were different,

the heart tone was similar. A river runs through it, went on to win an Oscar and earned 43 million of mice and men received a 10-minute standing ovation at Khan, but grossed just over 5 million. So, yeah, bittersweet. You know, but I'll tell you, I say in the book,

I was disappointed. Obviously, I wanted them to put full-page ads in the paper and do a lot more promotion on it. But the bottom line is that they gave me $8.8 million to make that movie. To make a Misen, nobody thought of Mice and Man was going to be a big blockbuster or anything like that. But they gave me the money to make it. And they left me alone pretty much when I was making it to make my own decisions and do what I want. So I'm very grateful to MGM and Alan Ladd and the people there who supported it, even though it wasn't a big hit. When you see the movie now, you made the movie that you wanted to make, right?

Yeah. You don't look at it now and go, I should have done this, I should have done that? Now? You know, I haven't seen it for quite a long time. But the last time I saw it was with a small group of folks, and I felt like the movie holds up. it's just it's sort of a timeless story you know and the way it's made is not there's no filmmaking technique that happened to be the the the fad at the time and or anything like that it's shot very straightforward it's pretty to look at the it's about the acting and the story is good and so for

that reason i think it holds up and i've i've received countless letters from high school kids all over the country for the last 30 years because they study of mice and men in school and then they watch the movie. And so more kids have seen that movie than ever saw it in the theater when it opened. Where can people see it right now? Is it on Netflix?

It probably is and DVDs and that kind of thing. Sure, yeah, Netflix. Are they still making DVDs, Echo? I don't think. You don't know anything about that. You don't know what that is. That thing better be on TV. Well, people are going to go watch it,

It's a good movie. Yeah. And Malcovich is in it. We play George and Lenny and it's a good movie. I'm proud of it. Six weeks before the opening of mice and men, our third child was due. Born August 20th, 1992, Ella was our smallest baby. And two weeks after her birth, we sat at an appointment with our pediatrician.

She listened to Ella's little heart and said, I want you to go see a cardiologist right away. There's something odd in Ella's heartbeat. I tell you when a pediatrician says, that your life clouds with fear. So you guys take her to the cardiologist. They run all kinds of tests. They find out that she's got some issues. And they say that she's,

they want to see what happens over time. She's got some holes in her heart. But sometimes the holes close up on their own and they want to see what's going to happen. And when I say they want to see what's going to happen, it's a years that they want to wait. Yeah. Yeah.

Are you sweating the entire time? Are you constantly, in fear? No, because we would have regular appointments with the cardiologist, and he would just, he would just listen and see eventually, and they would, you know, take pictures and look at what happened. Eventually, when she was five years old, there were three holes when she was born in her heart. Two of them closed up by the time she was five years old, and the last one, the biggest of the they said it's not going to close on its own. We're going to have to do surgery on it.

So now we're dealing with our little five-year-old having heart surgery. And then it was scary. But these heart surgeons are remarkable. And we had a remarkable heart surgeon who took very good care of her. And she was home within two days, I think, of the surgery. and, you know, she's perfect. About five years later, you know, we had to take her to the cardiologist. He kept checking.

Five years later, we went in. She's about 10 years old, and he said, I've got good news and bad news. The good news is everything's good. Your heart's great. The bad news is you don't have to see me anymore. So we stopped taking her, and she's a beautiful, beautiful girl married now, and her little baby. Yeah, on the backdrop of that,

I couldn't not read this part. In the fall of 1992, my agents set up a general meeting for me to sit down with Stephen Spielberg. As a director and producer, Stephen Spielberg was already legendary, having pulled off a string of blockbuster, including jaws.

Which I could just stop right there. Because anybody that knows me, knows that when I was a kid, videotape machines. had just come out. And my dad got a videotape machine. And we had, so, like, we probably had three movies on videotape. But one of them was Jaws.

We watched that continually for years. We call those VCRs, we don't say. Oh, videotape machines, right? Okay. We don't say that. Video cassette recorder. VCR. Yeah.

So we had that. So Jaws, close encounters of the third kind. Raiders of the Lost Ark E.T. the extraterrestrial. Stephen asked me what I was doing. I told him about of mice and men. He said, oh, I'd love to see it. Will you show it to me? Just bring it over to my house. I've got a screening room there. We'll watch

it together. And I said, of course. We set up the screening just outside the theater in Stephen's house. He had a little lobby with a popcorn machine and a candy counter. His wife, Kate Capshaw, joined us. We all grabbed some popcorn and sodas and sat down to watch of mice and men together.

It was surreal. Stephen and Kate were both very gracious. They loved the movie. Afterward, we stood outside their home saying our goodbyes. Kate gave me a little hug and Stephen turned to me while I racked my brain. Think, Gary, think. I was desperate to ask Stephen one brilliant question. But all I could muster was, Stephen, how do you know where to put the camera?

He chuckled and said, I just watch a lot of movies. So simple, so profound. So profound to become a great filmmaker, you must study the greats. You learn to steal. You learn and steal from people you admire. Over the years, I'd endlessly studied actors I admired. Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, De Niro, Voigt, Duval, Hoffman, Brando, many others. Stephen took this last sip of soda and added, oh, and Gary, based on what I just saw in of Mice of Men, you should definitely keep directing.

directing now you go on a little bit further you said I couldn't have known what was just over the horizon it was an amazing opportunity for me one that would open a new world and not only in acting incidentally after completing of mice and men

I haven't directed a movie since yeah that was it yeah you know I often tell the story that like the reason I started a podcast was because Tim Ferriss who was a very popular podcaster and Joe Rogan who's a very popular podcaster both told me to start

podcast. I listened to them. If Steven Spielberg would have told me to direct more, I might listen. No offense, Gary. Well, what happened, you know, it kept me away from Drake. Because what happened next? Yeah. And that's the stand. The Stephen King, you get a, you get a role, a big role in that Stephen King. What, mini-series? It was a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was like a four-night miniseries. Yeah, like eight hours worth. This was back in the day where they would, when they would do that, they'd play them like four nights in a row.

That's right, yeah. Get America. It was a huge ratings. I mean, millions and millions of people watched it. Yeah. You know, overnight, I was a recognizable guy. That was a huge deal then. Yeah, yeah.

This year, this particular year, 1994, when the stand. came out was was turned air and turned the whole career into a different thing and especially for my acting as I said so I I never you know I was never a frustrated I was acting but I really wanted to be directing it wasn't anything like that the directing I did be it was kind of because I loved acting I wanted to put myself in a mizzen I think Mel Gibson sure did did he an Academy Award for Braveheart? Braveheart, yeah. He directed it, right?

And I think I saw a clip of his speech when he won the Academy Award for directing that movie. And he said something along the lines of, now I'm going to go back to doing what all directors want to do. Act. Pretty clever. The stand cost more than $28 million to produce, was well-promoted, received good reviews,

ended up winning a few Emmy Awards. We finished shooting in June and returned to California. Then another call came. This one, an addition in a Paramount Picture to play the part of a wounded Vietnam veteran. The movie's working title was simply the name of the main character, Forrest Gump. From the start, I wanted this role.

Any project that dealt with Vietnam War interested in me due to the work I'd done in the 1980s with Vietnam vets, in addition to my close connection with Vietnam vets and my family, the innovative director, Robert, How do you say his name? Zemeckis? Zemecus. Zemecus.

Back to the future, man. Okay. There you go. Roger Rabin. Just kind of, FYI. Echo has seen most movies. I haven't. Oh, here we go.

You called it Echo. He'd had a string of hits, including Back to the Future. Romancing the Stone, who framed Roger Rabbit, Rabbit, would helm the film. The project based on a 1986, novel by Vietnam veteran Winston Groom was set to star Tom Hanks and the screenplay adapted

by Eric Roth, another wonderful writer. I knew it stood a chance of being a terrific project all around, but I didn't get the role at first. So why didn't you get the role at first? Well, I didn't hear about it for quite a while. So you auditioned, but you just don't know. And then I kept asking my agent, do you know, did they say anything? Did they cast it?

No, they haven't cast. They haven't made up their mind yet. So, you know, you've got to go forward, right? I can't wait around to find out I didn't get the part, so I started auditioning for other things. So you auditioned for Little Buddha? You auditioned for Wyatt Earp. You auditioned for a Disney movie called Tall Tale.

And then you're all set to say yes to Tell Tale. Back to the book when the phone rang. I'd landed the role of Lieutenant Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. It would mean I'd need to turn down the Disney movie. Did I still want Forrest Gump? Moira and I talked it over. We decided I needed to place my bets with Forrest Gump.

Plus, I really wanted to play the rule of a Vietnam veteran while she took the role of the mother in a tall tale. Yeah, we auditioned together for Tall Tale, and she got the part of the mother and I got the part of the father. But then Lieutenant Dan came along, and I had to say, honey, I think I should do this one. You go to that one, and that's what we did. Yeah, that's a smart move,

kind of hedging your bets a little bit. I think it was in right move. You say here, I wanted to give all to my character of the wounded Vietnam veterans, so I began reading the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography, fortunate son by Lewis Polar Jr., a United States Marine Corps officer who had been severely injured when he stepped on a booby-trap bomb.

Both his legs were vaporized and he lost his left hand and nearly all of his fingers on his right. Puller was the son of the most decorated Marine officer in the history of the Marine Corps. Chesty Puller. And if you are listening to this and you don't know that story,

then you should immediately go and listen to podcast number 121, 122, and 123. And that's all I'm going to say about that. So obviously you picked a heavy book to try and figure out, you know, what kind of emotions, what kind of person, Lieutenant Dan was going to be. Now you do your little boot camp thing. This is sort of an official military movie thing nowadays, that if you're going to do a military movie, you're going to do some kind of military boot camp.

You guys head back to the book, headed in the woods for four days with other actors in Lieutenant Dan's potential. to train with technical advisor named Dale Dye, a decorated Vietnam veteran, who I've been playing tag with to come on the podcast. Captain Dye had served in the United States Marine Corps and trained the actors for a platoon as well as serving as a technical advisor for many other military-themed movies over the years.

He put us through our paces. Sound like he ran you guys through some good training. Oh, yeah. You guys had a good time. Yeah, I learned a lot from Dale. It was important. And he pushed me. He pushed me as Lieutenant Dan.

and pushed me. So the military part of the character really was, you know, I kind of thought about my brother-in-law Mack quite a bit, leading a platoon in Vietnam, which he did. And Dale sort of pulled that lieutenant leader out of me and helped me sort of galvanize that soldier part of the character. There's a couple of different parts of the character. There's the soldier, everything pre-injury,

and then there's Lieutenant Dan in the throes of despair and, you know, kind of withdrawing from life and all of that kind of different thing, long hair and the beard and all that stuff. It's, you decided that he went to VMI. Is that this character? Yeah. Instead of West Point.

Why did you pick VMI instead of West Point? I wanted a little bit of an accent. Oh, okay. I mean, I could have gone to West Point, but then they said, well, why do you sound like this? Yeah. I had a little bit of a little bit of a drawl as Lieutenant Dan. Yeah. You know, and I just decided, let's have him be sort of from that part of the country.

You talk here. Lieutenant Dan meets Bubba and Forrest and gives them a few lessons on how to behave in the field. The meeting is the first image viewer see of Lieutenant Dan. He's on the way to the outhouse toilet paper in hand, wearing only boxer shorts, flip-flops. The shot was made strategically because we wanted viewers to first see Lieutenant Dan standing on two good legs. Those legs would soon be gone. During the shooting of the Vietnam scenes, I invited my brother-in-law Jack Treese, who'd been a combat medic in Vietnam. The costume designer had issued me a set of dog tags, but when Jack was in Vietnam, he'd made a set of rosary beads

out of string and rope and hung his dog tags on it. Jack let me wear his actual dog tags and rosary in the movie. Jack wasn't Catholic, but told me that in Vietnam, he wanted all the help he could get. That's awesome. I wish I had those. Lost them along the way. I have the original ones that they issued me, that the designers issued me, that I never wore. And they're hanging in my office.

But you lost the dang rosary bead ones? Yeah, misplaced it somewhere along the way. I wish I had them. You can see them. And they were his in Vietnam? Yeah. He was just glad because you can see the movie and you can see him. Yeah.

No. And when you mentioned that, I was like, oh, wow. You know, like, I think that's such an iconic role and everybody sees the dog tags all the time in every war movie. And then you see those dog tags and they're different and they stand out. So, yeah, it's a part of the role. Again, you talk a lot more about the movie and how kind of behind the scenes and people should get the book to read those. I'm going to skip through some of that. Forrest Gump came out on July 6, 1994.

It was an instant box office smash hit. I couldn't tell you exactly why the film worked to the degree it did, but it played to a lot of different emotions, covered a lot of territory, had lovable characters at the center of it anchored by Tom as Forrest and Sally Fields as his mom. When Forrest Gump crossed the 100 million mark, Paramount sent gifts to the cast and producers, an Apple computer each, a nod to the scene where Forrest invests in some kind of fruit company. When the movie crossed 200 million mark, Paramount sent another gift. I've forgotten what it was now. When it crossed the $300 million mark, Bob Zemeckis and called and said Steven Spielberg wanted to take Moira, me, Tom, and Tom's wife, Rita Wilson out to dinner. to celebrate. It wasn't, I wasn't typically paling around with high-powered Hollywood rollers, so it felt good to be included. A couple of days later, Paramount sent another gift, a giant replica

of the park bench featured in the film. The base was made from concrete. It must have weighed 450 pounds. Forrest Gump garnered a long list of awards, including 13 Academy Award nominations and six wins, including a win for Best Picture. I received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. Were you now big time? Things had changed. I was in the biggest miniseries of the year and two months later Forrest Gump came out and it was the biggest movie of the year and got a lot of recognition from that and that

that'll tend to change your career. I had a lot of good opportunities happen. Good roles came along after that over the next several years. Apollo 13 up next. This was an interesting part. As the words coming out about Apollo 13 being made, who's it being made by Ron Howard? And you say,

I usually need to get a call back from an audition, but Tom had vouched for me. And when Ron came to the premier of Forrest Gump, he met me in the lobby and said, really great job. I'm glad I cast you. And just like that, I was set to be in Apollo 13.

Yeah, I had just met Ron, you know, shortly before the premiere of Forrest Gump. And he put me in the movie. And it was going to be Tom's next movie. And he came to the premiere and he said, well, I'm glad we're. Because he obviously liked Lieutenant Dan and the job I did in the movie. Apollo 13 came out on June 30, 1995. It was a big hit, garnering stellar reviews and eventually bringing more than 350 million worldwide. It was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture, and won two, along with a host of other awards.

Ron Howard's next movie was a crime thriller called Ransom. Ron asked me to play the villain, a detective gone bad named Jimmy Shaker, who kidnaps Mel Gibson's young son and holds him for ransom. In the end, Ransom was a big hit. Critics like the movie, very different film for Ron Howard, a tense, suspenseful. drama. It ended up burning more than $309 million at the box office. And again, you go into a lot of details, really interesting stuff that I'm skipping through because I don't want this to be a 14-hour podcast. Well, you don't want to go through my whole career. Wait a minute. Everything I've done. There's a lot of movies in there. Yeah. No, it's, it's, you're on a roll, though. And what I was

thinking about is, you know, if you're in that Hollywood scene, right? I mean, let's face it, when you go and apply to be Lieutenant Dan, there's got to be a hundred people that could play that role. And maybe they wouldn't do it exactly the same as you, but maybe it wouldn't be quite as good, maybe be a little better, maybe a little bit of a worse, but the chances of you getting a role have got to be microscopic. Well, you know, that's, I'm not. I, you know, that's, I I think that's one of the reasons they didn't tell me right away that I got it. It was two or three weeks because they were seeing a lot of different people. And I heard that, you know, Bruce Willis was toying with the idea of doing the part at one point.

They were probably going through a list of should we get, you know, recognizable actors to play this role. And they decided to get, you know, I did a good audition for it. They decided to go with a newcomer. I mean, I'd only done a few parts, but I did have, you know, I did have mice and men, and they could see that I was kind of a serious guy. I produced the movie. I acted in it, and I directed it. So I think that caught their attention a little bit.

Tough business. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because there's a thousand people that would want to play in that movie. They didn't get it. There's only one person that gets it. Crazy. I was lucky to get it. Crazy.

Yeah, good fortune. You jump into this next chapter. It's called Darkness and Light is the name of the chapter. A very common theme on this podcast. Part of getting into the chapter a little bit, you say, back in the mid-1970s, a young, incredibly talented theater student joined us at those early meetings held at Illinois State University to discuss the creation of Steppenwolf. As one of the meetings was winding down, she pulled a fifth of Scotts. out of her purse and announced, come on, everyone, let's go. Everybody laughed. We were all into partying. Pot and booze were always available on college campuses, and the fact that this young theater

student kept a bottle of whiskey in her purse didn't seem unusual to any of us. That student was Moira before I knew her very well, and I drank and partied right along with her and the rest of our friends in those days. Over the years, I've known many wonderful performers who are explosive and funny on stage, but who are shy, fearful, reserved. and even a bit awkward in daily life. Performing gives them the confidence and feeling of self-worth. Sometimes they will add a little alcohol

on top of that. And Moira wrestled with self-confidence and fear. Performing an alcohol, an alcohol helped quiet those feelings. One night, and again, I'm jumping through some... I'm jumping through stuff. I'd kind of jump over some of that and, you know, maybe just...

This is kind of a difficult chapter. and I tend not to go through it too much. But, you know, Cliff's notes, maybe, maybe. Yeah. It's definitely a tough chapter. Yeah, it was a hard one to write this particular chapter because it's very personal and difficult story, family story for our family.

But it's a hopeful story as well, and that's why we wanted to include it. Yeah, and what I liked about reading it was, look, I hear from people all the time that are caught in this trap. And this is the story of that this trap doesn't have to keep you, that you can get out of it. And that's what you get into. As time went on, going back to the book, I began to see that it was a big deal. As Life and Mortarers, drinking got scarier and scary at one point about 1995 or so, I simply went. stopped drinking with her. I figured if she didn't have me as her drinking buddy anymore,

then that would help and maybe she would stop. But that was wishful thinking. Alcohol was consuming Moira by then. And sometimes she would drink so much she'd pass out. As time went on, I had to be careful what I said and how I said it. Because when she drank, she would react unpredictably and kind of crazy. She started to hide her drinking from me and the family. I'd get rid of booze, all the booze in the house, but I'd find an open cabinet. I'd find a top cabinet with a bottle tucked far away in the back. I'd sometimes find a bottle hidden in the tank of the toilet. At times when I came home,

she'd reek of perfume and mouthwash an effort to hire her drinking from me. And at this point, you had signed on to do a show called George Wallace. Was that a movie? It was a TNT miniseries. Yeah, about the governor of Alabama. And by this time, alcohol

had taken control of Moira. It was as if she had. had two personalities. When she was drinking, she was a beautiful self, respectable, Dr. Jekyll. But when she drank, she turned into an out of control and scary Mr. Hyde. Sophie was nine years old at the worst of Moira's drinking. Mack was six, Ella was five. Moria was always a great mom and tried her best, but because of her drinking, at times I felt afraid for our children. Each night, Moira would drink. Then each morning, she'd feel guilty and apologize. I'd tell her she simply couldn't keep doing this, and she'd say, yes, you

You're right, I'll stop. But the next night, she'd do it again. She couldn't help it. So many good things were happening with my acting career. I'd started rehearsing for George Wallace with John Freakinheimer and was trying to focus on my role. But night after night, when I came home from rehearsals, our home turned into a battlefield.

You say here, jumping ahead, finally it became clear that Moyer had no ability to stop her drinking. I didn't know where to turn. I started going to Al-Anon family groups for people, worried about someone with a drinking problem. I started seeing a psychologist who specialized in alcoholism and helping families through difficult challenges. I learned that family members must become tough in their love.

I need to become ruthless in combating this addiction for the sake of my wife, but it was very hard to do. You want to plead and beg and appeal to the wonderful loving person you know is deep down inside, but that person has been consumed, swallowed up, and cannot hear you. And you kind of get to your wits. end about this.

And you talk to, so John Frankenheimer, was he the director? Of George Wallace. And you finally open up to him, and you tell him what's going on. And back to the book, he'd now been sober for more than 25 years and was a serious attendee of alcoholics anonymous.

He was a hardcore AA warrior and told me what I needed to do. I needed to take more to rehab. I needed to do it right away. So you take her. You take her to rehab. She freaks out on the way there. You compare her to Linda Blair in The Exorcist in terms of her behavior on the way there.

And you're asking yourself, like, who is this person and what's happening? Fast forward a bit here. You say an average stay in rehab is 28 days. My wife stayed in rehab for seven weeks. She was there the entire time I was shooting the movie. I received a call from the facility at one point, and a rehab supervisor indicated they were having a hard time getting Moira to admit she had a problem. She thought she was fine, and then everybody there was messed up.

That meant trouble. If you never admit you have a problem, you'll never get better. And you, when they were telling you that she wasn't admitting to it or she wasn't owning the problem, that you kind of knew this is not good? Yeah, yeah. That was not surprising because I knew she was kind of deep in the throes of the devil had his hands around her neck, you know?

And we had to come up with, try to come up with some additional ways to get her to admit it and to face it. And she wasn't going to get better if she didn't realize what her issue was and that it was real. So rehab, after seven weeks, I brought her home. And within, gosh, probably within four months, she had fallen again and had to go to rehab again. And that's when things began to get better and change after the second time.

Yeah, and it seemed like that was a point where, you know, you describe finding out that she's basically, you're on the road, you're doing another thing, snake eyes. And you're on the road doing that. You get a call from your daughter basically saying what, you know, mom's still drinking. You say here in the book, I wanted to be the loving husband, the gentle husband. I wanted to ask Moira nicely, please don't drink again. But with the vicious enemy of alcohol taking over the life of the woman I loved, I learned that you could show no mercy fighting this enemy.

I called John Frankenheimer and said, Moira has relapsed. I'm heading back to Los Angeles, but I don't know what I'm going to do. John said, it's time to take the gloves off. And he told me exactly what I needed to do. When I arrived home the next day, Moira opened the door, and I spotted it right away. She'd been drinking again. I came in the house, gave her and the kids a hug, acted as if everything was normal and fine. After a short while, I said to Moira, honey, you look tired.

Why don't you go down and take a nap? She said, you know, I am kind of tired. I think I will. She went to lie down in the back bedroom. 20 minutes later, I checked on her. She was out like a light. I packed three suitcases, called a car to pick us up, and wrote Moira, the hardest letter I've ever had to write. I explained we'd reached a point of decision.

She couldn't have our family and still have alcohol. She needed to choose between us and she needed to get serious about her choice because I was finished. I told her I loved her so much and I wanted her to be okay. What I wanted most in life was for her to be sober and happy and for us to be together again as a family. But we couldn't do that if she continued to drink. I was taking the kids. And that's, you know, that's not an easy thing to do. You always want to, you know, I remember, you know,

because I started seeing counselors myself to help me with this issue. I started seeing a counselor who was focused on dealing with alcoholism and problems. And I started going to Al-Anon and doing, you know, where can I turn to get some help? here and you know you keep one day you know the next day after a bender the night before you see the sweet person and she's apologizing and you know you're hugging and everything and that you just want that person to stay there you know and so you kind of you go okay okay and you know and you're you believe them when they say they're going to stop or when they know they misbehavior

you know but then it happens again and then it happens again and the same thing over and over and over and over and at a certain point you do have to get as vicious as the as the demon is you know it's like it really is wrestling a demon and so I did what we had to do which is something to shock her into reality that there no continuing in this cycle anymore for us. And if she, and it did it. She, she's a loving, wonderful person who loves her kids and fighting for her kids, knowing I had taken them back to Montreal with me and they were going to be with me while I made this movie and you don't have anything to worry about now. You don't have to take care of the kids.

They're not there. I've got them. You focus on yourself and this issue. And within a couple of days, she took herself to Betty Ford Clinic and checked herself in, and that's the last time she, you know, right before she went in there,

she had her final drink. I had a friend who, you know, had a lot of money, was very wealthy and lost his, son to opioid overdose and you know he was kind of talking me through what it happened and one of the things he said to me he said you know I had unlimited resources unlimited resources I sent him to every different rehab all kinds of different you know drugs psychologists therapists unlimited resources to try and get his son off of drugs.

And he said the only thing I do was tough love, is the term that he used, which is what you did here, take the gloves off. And I can't imagine how hard that's got to be to hold the line in those situations where, you know, when you're looking at your. kid, your wife, you're looking at your kid and you're thinking, okay, I'm not going to give you any more money. Because that's the other thing. Like not only was this guy investing, sending him to a psychologist, it was also, hey, dad, can I get a hundred bucks to go out to eat? Well, all that money's going to drugs. Hey, dad, can I go to see a concert? Well, all that money's going

to drugs. And oh, by the way, my credit card's missing. By the way, there's 80 bucks missing from my wallet. So he's enabling this behavior the whole time. And the only way to stop it is, okay, you know what, you're getting nothing from me. That means you can't stay in my house. You can't get food from me. And that's the sort of extreme measures when you're fighting against these extreme demons that it seems, and again, I'm not a professional, obviously,

but it seems like when you're going against something that's as powerful as drugs or alcohol, you have to take extreme measures. You do. There's no question about it. And I, you know, as I said, John Frankenheimer came into my life at the right time because he was a hardcore 25-year sober guy. And this is a very, very well-known Hollywood director.

He directed the Manchurian candidate seven days in May, the French Connection to Grand Prix, Black Sunday, all these great movies. And he's directing me. And we became friends. And he shared his story very personal. story where he basically destroyed his career because he wouldn't give up drinking. When he finally did that, he had to go through a lot of soul searching and everything before he found his way back into directing again, and now he was sober for 25 years,

and he knew what it took for him because he was stubborn as hell, just like my wife, and he was not going to go quietly and give up the booze until, And there was some hard decisions and some people took the gloves off with them. Well, good news. You ended up winning an Emmy for your role in George Wallace. Did a bunch of other movies. The championship season. The Green Mile.

It's the Rage. Bruno. Imposter. Mission to Mars. Reindeer Games. All still career going, you know, solid. Working. Yeah.

Um, Moira ends up, uh, going to a church looking for an AA meeting. She passes an elderly French woman, a member of the parish. Going back to the book, the woman said in a thick French accent, my dear, you need to become a Catholic, you need to convert and walked away. That got Moira to thinking. Here she was playing this Irish woman, because she was in a play at the time, playing this Irish woman searching for strength in a play set in a tavern and in her own life she was searching for strength to help with her sobriety. Nothing was said or done immediately but Moira later told me

she began to feel a quiet yearning for her own shooting star and that's a reference that you talk about earlier about recognizing that there are other forces bigger than ourselves and you are you moving around a bit but Moira turned to me. quite out of the blue and said, oh, when we get back home, I'm going to become a Catholic, and our kids are going to go to Catholic school. That's right. Fast forward a bit. Morira got confirmed.

Ella started third grade, Mac started fourth, and Sophie started six at the local Catholic school. Fast forward a bit more on Christmas Eve 2010. I told my wife and kids to get dressed up. We were headed for a special family dinner at Morton Steakhouse, a place we all enjoyed. On our way to dinner, I suddenly pulled into the church parking lot. A mass was underway and my family looked confused. It was too late to attend mass. What were we doing there?

Without any family members knowing I had been attending private sessions to be officially confirmed into the church, our priest was expecting us. And in a small quiet ceremony on Christmas Eve, surrounded by the family I love and cherished dearly, I was officially confirmed into the Catholic Church. It was a very special night in our lives. Moira was so touched. She had come a long way. Our family had come a long way.

and I wanted to belong to the faith as Moira did. It meant so much to me, to her, to all of us. You know, I had to, obviously, this was a difficult story to tell this chapter, chapter nine, and I wanted Moira's full consent, you know. Should I tell the story in the book of what we went through, the darkness and light of it, and how it plays into us, into our lives, And she said, yes, you know, maybe someone struggling with this kind of thing will read it and find hope, you know, in it that, hey, maybe I can overcome this particular demon myself. You know, during this period of time, everything on the outside, my career, Lieutenant Dan, ransom, you know, all these different things.

We're having winning awards. I played Harry Truman. I got the Golden Globe and the SAG Awards and the Emmys and, you know, all this stuff was happening that was all very positive and wonderful and everything. And at home, you know, it was dark. It was tough. It was difficult. We were struggling and the family was really going through some difficult things. So nobody ever knew that.

We decided to tell that story because at a time where it looked like Gary Sneeze was on the rise and everything was rosy and everything. It was rosy and everything. We were struggling with some very serious issues at home, but we came through it and some very, very positive things that happened because of it. So you never know. A difficult, difficult, difficult period in your life

can manifest itself into something that you never could have predicted would be positive, you know, at another time, you know. I mean, you can't, you know, you wait, you know, years from now. You know, I know you're going through this right now, but down the road, everything's going to be better. And when you're going through that, you can't see that, you know, you just can't see. Somebody might tell you that, but you can't see it. I couldn't picture getting out of this and how it was going to.

I didn't want my relationship to be destroyed because of alcohol or my. wife to go down that road. I was so blessed that she kind of, it worked. Taking the kids and go on leaving her by herself to confront this demon did the trick. And she's been so over 22 years now. Yeah. Well, like I said, as we started that chapter, you know, you said maybe someone will hear this and it'll help them. There's no maybe on that. I promise you that people will hear that and they will shed some light into their lives and help them get through to fight this powerful, powerful demon. I guarantee it. Well, I hope so. I mean, that's the purpose that we decided to share it in the book. It's played a role.

in my service life because, you know, becoming a, you know, a member of the Catholic Church and the service aspect of the faith and whatnot, there was definitely a role that that faith played in my turning from self-to-service. There's no question about it. Speaking of turning from self-to-service, jumping ahead here a bit, one morning of September, about 6.30, Moira, as Moira helped the kids get ready for school, our phone rang. I was still sleeping. Terry Kinney, who lived in New York, was on the line. Simultaneously, Moira turned on the TV. Hi, Terry, I said. Gary, are you watching TV right now? I just got up, buddy. What's going on? Two planes have hit the World Trade Center. The tops of both buildings are on fire. Terry's words spilled out. We're under attack. Gary, terrorists have come. clashed airplanes into those buildings.

It's bad, really bad. Every American alive then remembers that moment and can answer the inevitable question of where were you when you first heard the news? I stared in shock and disbelief along with the entire country, the entire world, as smoke poured from the tops of both buildings. Horrified, we watched on live TV as people leapt to their deaths from the upper floors of the Trade Center. As soon as the report soon arrived that a third airplane had crashed into the Pentagon.

About 20 minutes later, a fourth airplane crashed. near shanksville pennsylvania we heard it was united flight ninety three seemingly bound for the white house the target was ultimately determined by the 9-11 commission report to be the capital building People on board flight 93 had discovered that terrorists were crashing planes into buildings and the passengers Courageously yet faithfully chosen to take back the plane We watched the south tower collapse and crumble in a fury of dust and smoke Then the north tower fell Horror enveloped us all

You say while driving through one of the canyons, and this is on September 11th, I clicked on the radio news. News, newscasters speculated that today's attacks were only the beginning of more attacks to come. The reality of the morning sank and even deeper. Our country was under attack, vulnerable. Thousands of innocent people have been killed that day. More horror lay ahead. I couldn't tell you exactly why I did this. Perhaps in solidarity, defiance tribute, but I rolled down my window, stuck out my arm and made a fist and held it high.

Tears welled up in my eyes as I listened to the news. for some time as I rode along, I held my arm outstretched as high as it would reach. You were living in California at the time, in L.A.? Malibu. In Malibu. And even in Malibu, they broke out the American flags.

Yeah. Yeah, on Friday night, so it was a Tuesday, and there were candlelight vigils all over the place, if you remember. and we heard about something going on on one of the corners in our neighborhood. So I grabbed an American flag that I had hanging by my front door, and we walked down the street with the kids, and we went, and all the neighbors were gathering around, and people were singing,

and at one point, everybody, I had my flag up, And at one point, everyone turned and said the Pledge of Allegiance, and it was God Bless America, and it was America the beautiful, and it was the star, you know, the national anthem. And people were just singing with candles on the corner in Malibu just coming together. People were in pain all over the place, and everyone was looking for something. And during the day that day, we went to our little Catholic church. I don't know if you remember, but George Bush said that he was going. going to make that Friday a national day of prayer for the nation. And so the churches and

houses of worship everywhere in the country were just jam-packed with people trying to find some peace, some, you know, some like trying to understand what was going on and trying to find something. And we got to our little Catholic church at the school that my kids went to, and there was only standing room. It was packed. And we ended up standing off to the side, leaning against the wall. I remember the priest, his first thing he said, I don't remember everything he said, but he said, this has been a tough week.

And everybody was just, oh, you know. And at the end of the mass, we sang God bless America in the church. and I couldn't even get the words out. I mean, it was just tears rolling down my face. Everything changed for me at that point. The chapter in the book that kind of explores that is called Turning Point. And it was, you know, the things we talked about in the 80s with regards to the Vietnam veterans of my family and tracers

and all these Vietnam veteran things, then Lieutenant Dan comes along and I start working with our wounded after that with the Disabled American Veterans Organization. They contacted me and asked me to come to their national convention. They gave me an award for playing Lieutenant Dan. And there was a sea of wheelchairs and wounded veterans from going back to World War II. And they were all applauding me and everything. I was very moved by that.

Stayed involved with them. Tried to support the DAV for a number of years. And then along come September 11th. And the seeds that had been planted in those 80s years with the veterans of my family, Vietnam veterans and working in support of the DAV. That all kind of grew into this thing after September 11th. And I turned never to return to business as usual. I turned towards service in a very active way.

And it just got more and more and more. And I wanted to help our veterans, the men and women who were responding to those attacks and deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. And I wanted to support them. One of the things that you say here around that is throughout my entire life, I'd always been the type of person who chose to act. Not in the theater sense of the way, word, although I did a lot of that. But I mean take action. whether it was starting a band that lip synced for a living room full neighborhood kids or working with my fellow high school students to fashion our own theater company

or taking a great production to New York or moving out to Los Angeles so I could work in the movies. I'd never been the kind of guy who sat around and talked or wondered or thought about stuff without doing something about it, at least not for long. My response had always been to take action and hopefully doing so would benefit other people along the way. In those early months of 2003 and again, I jumped ahead to get here. I realized like never before the cost of freedom And I knew freedom needed to be defended I knew places that existed in our world without freedom

And I knew that without freedom Nothing of the good and fulfilling ways we in America Aspired to live our lives would be possible This realization helped fuel me more than ever before It made me profoundly grateful for being an American able to live in this land of freedom, able to make something of my life When it came to service I wanted to be all in all the time living out my calling every single day for the rest of my life.

I can say most certainly that what happened to our country on September 11th broke my heart and changed me forever. It forced me to rethink everything. What do I really believe? How do I want to raise my kids? What kind of example do I want to set for them? What can I do to give this great country? What can I do to give back to this great country I love?

How can I use my good fortune to help? It was a turning point and marked the beginning of a new level of service. I found that the more I gave, the more I healed. Two months after watching the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down, I was on a plane to Kuwait. Nothing would ever be the same. We kind of kicked off. The name of this next chapter is a bridge between worlds and bridging this thing.

And you got this here. Hi, I'm Gary Seneas and I'd like to go on a USO tour. Please call me back. I left my number on the voicemail. A couple of weeks went by, all I heard was crickets. I concluded the USO must receive a large volume of calls with similar requests as mine. So I called again and left a second message. Hi, this is Gary Seneas and I'd like to go on a USO tour to support the troops.

Please get back to me. Churp, chirp, chirp. Those crickets were deafening. Now you get tactical and you say I called again in May and left a third message, this time more strategic. Hi, this is Gary Seneese calling again. I'd like to go on a USO tour. I want to do as much as I can to support the troops.

Please call me back. Oh, by the way, I'm the guy who played Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump. Representative from the USO returned my call the very next day. Yeah, I wasn't a recognizable name at that point. But Lieutenant Dan was. Lieutenant Dan is everybody knows Lieutenant Dan. So that starts it. You go to Camp Doha, you go to Camp Udari, you end up at one of these bases.

USO representative motioned for us to follow him and led us to the big tent near the center of camp. The tent had an entrance on each side. Generators working overtime to pump in air conditioning. We headed for one door and at the other side a line of at least 1,000 troops waited in the heat to get in. As we headed in, they started to applaud. The atmosphere inside crackled. Maybe another 1,000 uniform troops already inside the tent. broke into applause when we came into the tent.

I took a deep breath. What have we done? They deserve the applause, not us. But wow, this is amazing. Even with a little air conditioning, it was hot as hell in there. Nobody seemed to care. We lined up and the troops lined up and started a file past us. We smiled and shook hands and posed for pictures.

And everything happened quite quickly. The very first soldier I met said, hey, Lieutenant Dan, you got legs. And then each one down the line just kept calling me Lieutenant Dan over and over. I realized they didn't know my real name, so I went with it. I tried to look each person in the eye, tried to ask each soldier where he or she was from, tried to ask how things were going. But nothing I did felt very deep

because we had to keep the line moving. There were so many people. And then you guys have to leave, and you kind of ask yourself, did we do any good? Now you're traveling around, you're getting ready for a next trip. I think you're heading into Baghdad.

You say this, the man to the right of me, or a button on his shirt bearing the photo of two young men, a New York City police officer and the other, a firefighter with the FDNY. We struck up quite a conversation, and I learned he wasn't an entertainer. The two young men were his sons,

and both sons had died on 9-11. He was there because he wanted the troops overseas to know that America supported them. The man was maybe in his mid-60s and spoke with a low rasp. Scars ran across his neck, and later I found out he'd survived throat cancer. The man carried a chunk of rock, concrete maybe. He showed it to me, then passed it in my direction so I could feel it too.

I ran my hands over its rough surface. It felt like an old piece of rubble. I asked him what it was all about, why he was carrying all this extra weight. He swallowed once twice, then his eyes grew wet. He whispered more hoarsely than before. It's a piece of the World Trade Center. You guys land at the... Saddam International Airport, well, what was formerly the Saddam International Airport,

which by this time was called the Baghdad International Airport. And by the way, I wanted to mention this. No, it was still Saddam International when we were there. I was going to tell you that you beat me to Iraq because you went to Iraq for the first time in June of 2003. 2003. I didn't get to Iraq until I think it was late September, early October, 2003. So I was on point Yeah, I was a new guy

I was setting the stage for you I was a cherry boy Yeah But I got to leave after five days Yeah that's a little bit different Yeah Yeah that's but that's impressive That you got in there that quick

I would have really liked to have Joined you Now you're landing there When we clattered down the cargoes The planes ramp I can only shake my head And disbelief in front of us Waiting in two long rows

of uniforms and stood American soldiers thousand strong lining our route all the way from the cargo plane to the hangar like a happy gauntlet. We simply walked forward and shook hands on our way to the destination. Soldier after soldier, marine after marine, sailor after sailor after airman after airman, smile after smile. I felt choked up inside,

happy to be there, honored, grateful, so incredibly grateful. We were here for them but they had our backs. They weren't going to let anything happen to us. They were here for us. Then you guys make you wait. to the stage. This was the first

U.S.O. tour after the statue came down. So the statute came down in April. And in June, now this was the first big entertainment tour. Northwest Airlines gave us a 747. There were 180 people on the plane. Kid Rock was there with his band.

Leanne Womack, Robert De Niro. I mean, it was an endless sea of, celebrities and people that were going over there. The basketball players, football players, cheerleaders from the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders were there. I mean, it was Paul Rodriguez. I mean, it was a lot of entertainers that were going on this trip. So it was the first entertainment tour to Iraq. And they split us up into a lot of groups.

And I remember getting back from Kuwait, we went out to Udari, which it was called Udari at the time. It was renamed Camp Buren later on. But Udari, we flew back. That's with the tent and all the sweaty people and the thousand in there and everything. We flew back. And I got back about 11 o'clock at night and I get a phone call from the U.S.O. representative saying, Tommy Franks, General Tommy Franks, is going up to Baghdad tomorrow. He wants to take a small group of people and he wants you to come.

So I said, absolutely. So we went up to Baghdad. you know, went into the palaces, you know, this thing with Kid Rock and everything at the airport, thousands of people. It was pretty amazing just to be there with so many soldiers. We entertained them there in the hangar, maybe 4,000 people in the hangar. You know, I got to see the palaces. I got to meet a lot of troops during this trip.

It was an amazing trip. And I kind of befriended Tommy Franks from that moment on. We ended up going to Doha after that to Central Command, and we did some shows there and met a lot of people. It was amazing. I was back in Iraq within six months, again, for another trip. I'll say this, too. And when you, like I said, so all that took place,

I hadn't even gone to Iraq yet. I was waiting to go to Iraq. When did you go? October. Fall of 2003. Yeah. So I was back in November. You were back in November.

Yeah. But I'll say this. At this time, that early, like the war had a different feel to it. No question. We were kind of just winning. You know? Hey, look, we were taking some casualties for sure. But there was.

There was no insurgency yet. There was some former regime elements were running around. We had the deck of cards we were going after. We were doing pretty good. We didn't get Saddam until later that year. But I was there when we got Saddam. Not we, me, but American forces got Saddam. But still, it was the, it was still seemed like everything was going pretty good.

I mean, there's no other way to put it. But when I deployed there in 2003, 2004, if you would have asked me at the end of my deployment how much longer the war in Iraq was going to last, I would have said, oh, probably another three, four months. You know, there'll be less and less combat operations. And then, you know, it'll be, you know, I'm sure we'll still have some troops there, but it'll be pretty settled down. So, you know, I was wrong and we were wrong as a country because it wasn't even getting

started yet. And so that's why when I picture all these celebrities rolling in there, you know, thinking back to the glory days of Bob Hope like, oh yeah, this is kind of, hey, that's what, that's what, and I've said this before. That's what us young guys that hadn't been to combat before, we were like, we want to go. We want to go. We want to make sure we do. You know, we want to do our part. And I could see, you know, everyone thinking we want to do our part, we want to help out. And it seemed like, for lack of a better word, it seemed like things were going to do. really well and this wasn't going to last too long and we'd all come home and have a big victory parade and be done well it would be it would be four years before i went back so during those

intervening four years oh yeah things got really bad so when did you go back when what was seven oh yeah yeah and it was calming down a little bit yeah and we were up in romadi and the and uh you know the surge and happen uh all of that yeah the time period in between you know well oh five oh six was not good was not good and then I went back again in 08 and I went back a couple years ago what year did you go back most recently it's 2017 okay well you got more trips to Iraq than I do what's up with that yeah but they're shorter they're much shorter uh jumping back to here on September 11th, 2003, two years after the attacks on our country, I walked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center and National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda for the first time meeting

wounded troops in both hospitals in one day. Walter Reed, at Walter Reed, I met a soldier wheeling himself down the hallway whom I'd seen two weeks earlier at Longstool. Back in Germany, he was fresh off the line, unable to get out of bed. Now back in Washington, D.C., he was able to get around in a wheelchair. It was good to see progress. And then you see. say, you know, you did six trips in six months. I mean, going. And, you know, your family's sticking by you. Yeah, two of those trips were Iraq, June, and November.

And then in between I went to Germany and I went to Italy. And, you know, they were all troop trips. I'd come home and say, send me someplace else. And I didn't have a job at the time. So I had a lot of time. And I said, you know, let's make use of it. right now. Then you start talking about the hospitals more.

And here you go into Longstool in Germany. All was quiet at first, somber. I could smell the antiseptic, feel the harshness of the fluorescent lights. A lot of these soldiers had thousand yards stairs. I wore a USO baseball cap and just stood there at first, not knowing how to get started. The silence felt uneasy, awkward. But I knew I needed to dive in.

I needed to go to someone and introduce myself and just say hello. Just then one of the soldiers, One of the wounded soldiers looked up. He looked straight into my face and broke out in a big grin and exclaimed, Lieutenant Dan. A damn broke. All the other guys looked at me and roused themselves.

The ones who could walk crowd around me and the whole mood in the room changed. Soldier after soldier introduced himself. They asked me questions about Forrest Gump, and I told them some funny stories. A USO rep had a Polaroid camera and started taking pictures of me with the guys, so I signed the backs of the Polaroids and handed them out.

Maybe a half hour passed, not long. But when I left that room, I couldn't help but noticed how the mood felt different. Now there was laughter, joy. I knew and I knew I had changed, a change that occurred in me too. This first room full of banged up service members had forced me to get outside of myself. They helped me focused on who I was truly there for, them, not me. It was a reminder that this trip was about lifting them up and not about my own fears. So I walked into the next word, ward.

I told myself to stop thinking about how I felt and focus instead on how the troops felt. My job was to help relieve their pain, to give them something else to think about, to help them heal, to spread a bit of cheer. You know, that became, you know, like you said, part of your mission. And what you were doing was trying to help these guys give something else to think about. Yeah. And lift spirits, you know, that's the one. point of, you know, why am I going just to see stuff or to do something? And I love your perspective and actually like the closing of this book,

Leadership Strategy and Tactics, basically the closing chapter is called, it's all on you, but not about you, right? Like, you're responsible, but it's not about you. Leadership isn't about you. And that's this mental note that you make of, Hey, look, it's hard to go into these rooms, but it's not about me. It's about making these guys feel better. I learned a lot on those first trips.

Landstool was the first military hospital that I went to. They're fresh off the battlefield, as you know. And the guys that I described. Yeah, literally hours. I mean, there could be hours off the battlefield. And as soon as I got there, the bus pulled up, we were just about ready to get out of the bus. and a fresh batch of wounded were, they were just pulling a bus up. The airplane had just gotten in.

They put them on the bus. They brought them to the hospital entrance that we were going in. And they were all of a sudden all these technicians and everybody started running out of the hospital and started unloading this bus, which was just nothing but gurneys with wires and, you know, wounded folks on these. Gurneys and I just sat there and watched them unload the bus of Gurneys and then I had to go in and I was apprehensive about it, tell you the truth. I didn't know how he's going to react to seeing somebody with their legs gone or any of that kind of thing. But I learned a lot on that first trip and within two weeks I was at Bethesda and Walter Reed and I was doing that.

At one point you see Kid Rock doing what Kid Rock does which is delivering the justice of rock and roll. And I was watching MTV with my wife. And on MTV, this was 2000. This was either 1998 or 1999 or 2000. I don't know what I was in Virginia Beach. And Kid Rock, this person no one had ever heard of, was playing the spring break special on MTV.

And he played. Baw to ba, whatever that song is. He played that song, and I looked at my wife and I said, this guy is going to be huge. And sure enough, kid rock. I called it. I called it. Did he have that little person dancing around? I don't know if he had that little dude with him or not.

I remember that. The first time I saw him, I said, this is unusual. But I'll tell you, like, no kidding. When I saw him for the first time, I was like, this guy is, this guy rocked. I called it. Echo Charles. We had a good time together on that. It was fun.

So you see that. And of course, you know, despite you doing this acting and directing whatever, what's your true, what your true desires to be a rock and roll star.

So you say to the USO people, hey, I'd like to, you know, I got a band because you had done a little gig with your friends.

And so now you say, hey, I'd like to go on tour as well. And they kind of shine you on. Yeah. A little bit. I mean, an actor with a band is not interesting. Not much.

But you drive on and you put together the Lieutenant Dan band. And your first show is at Diego Garcia, which only someone in the military could laugh at because Diego Garcia is an island in the middle of the Pacific. It's as far away as you can imagine. It's the most remote place in the world. They're like, oh, you want to go on tour? Cool.

Start with Diego Garcia. Well, here's the thing about that, Jocko. They, you know, I bugged them over and over. I went on six tours that year, and every time I'd go on a tour, I would bug them. You know, I've got musicians I play with. I want to entertain the troops. I'm just shaking hands and taking pictures. Finally, after six tours, they knew I was serious, and they said, okay, we'll set up a tour for you.

They didn't ask me for a CD to even hear if the band was any good. So what they did was just send us as far away as possible. Yes, they did. And nobody would ever hear about us, I guess. And you end up playing 30, 40, 50 shows a year? We've, the first stuff we did was in 03. The first place we played was Great Lakes Naval Base, which was right near where I grew up.

And we played there in November of 2003, right before my second tour to Iraq, a handshake tour. And then they set up the tour to Korea, Diego Garcia, Singapore in February of 2004. And I haven't stopped since. Now my foundation produces most of our shows. I do only a few with the USO each year. But I think from 2003 to now, we're almost nearing 500 shows for. or the military in that 16-year period.

Impressive. And that's the only reason I have the band. I don't play for money. I play for free. I have to pay the band and everything, but I play for free. I make my living as an actor. So the band is a part of my foundation.

And people donate to the USO. You know they're going to send entertainment. You donate to the Gary Senees Foundation. And one of the things that we do is we provide this, this entertainment piece and I've played on bases all over the world with this band. And then we continue to do it. You know, a couple of days we're at Naval Medical Center doing one of our festivals. So we continue to get out there and get at it.

Another thing you do is you pick up the lead role in CSI, New York. That's a huge deal that happens. This is another little layer, if you will, as you're figuring out the character. You want him to be a vet. The character's original name was Rick Carlucci. And you didn't write, you didn't really like that. You were meeting with Anthony.

Who's Anthony, the writer? Anthony's created CSI. Got it. And so you say, hey, can we change the name? Anthony asked me for ideas for a new name. I gave him a list of suggestions for both the first and last name. The name I like most was Mac for obvious reasons. For the last name, I suggested the surname of Lieutenant Dan.

Anthony wrestled around with suggestions along with some others before coming to me and saying, let's do it. Right away, I felt gung-ho for my character's new name, Mack Taylor. Yeah, that's a good layer, we'll say. And then just about the, about the CSI, New York, from 2004 until 2013, nine seasons, It's 197 original episodes. I portrayed Detective Mack Taylor on CSI, New York. The show ranked as high as number 17 on Nielsen and evened out to about 10 million viewers per episode,

considered quite good. Today it's been shown in more than 200 markets all over the world and continues to run in syndication. Eventually, comic books, novels, a video game, and even a slot machine in Vegas came out based on the show. Although at first I didn't see what a blessing it would be, the series became one of the greatest gifts ever handed to me. nine seasons on television is this tremendous success.

It gave me the resources I could never have imagined. It allowed me the financial and logistical freedom to take good care of my family and continue my mission of supporting the troops. I will always be proud to have portrayed U.S. Marine Corps veteran and 9-11 family member, Detective Mack Taylor on CSI, New York. What's the role that you get recognized for the most? Still, Lieutenant Dan? Could be, yeah.

CSI New York when you're on television every week, you know, I mean, for a decade. Yeah, you know, it changed. And then I did another series, Criminal Minds Beyond Borders, for a couple of seasons after that. So, you know, primarily, I think it's probably between Mack Taylor and Lieutenant Dan. But, you know, and when I went overseas, you know, one time I'm up on the DMZ in Korea, right? and I'm doing a tour with the band over in Korea and we go up to the DMZ to look around and get a tour up there

and I'm in the gift shop. There's a gift shop on the DMZ. You know, you've got to go buy some DMZ stuff and a group of Asian tourists, a tour bus pulled up, the Asian tourists come out and they come into the gift shop. And there's 50.

It's packed in there with the tourists and they're looking at stuff and all of a sudden one sees, me and you go, Mike Taylor. And all of a sudden the whole place goes nuts. And here I am on the DMZ in a gift shop with all the tourists screaming about CSI, New York. It was completely surreal. But it was because internationally, it was, it was very popular in certain places. It was very popular in South Korea. Yeah, that's crazy. Next section that you talk about is

You're back in Iraq We suited up in helmets and bulletproof vest And drove out in a convoy of Humvees To visit one of the Iraqi elementary schools That U.S. troops had been working to improve It was November 2003, my second tour of Iraq With the U.S.O The school itself wasn't considered dangerous

But the roads to the school and back were always suspect Particularly when traveling with U.S. military So you roll into this school I couldn't help, but notice. how many children sat at each desk. The desks look longer than typical American school desks, perhaps built to see two comfortably, yet three to four children huddled at each desk.

Each little group would share one pencil stub, passing it back and forth amongst themselves, working on just a few sheets of paper. These desks and pencils were the only school equipment I saw. When I asked why the Iraqi children didn't have more supplies, the surprising answer came back because we can't get them. Skipping forward here, as we headed back to base in our convoy, and our convoy an idea started to percolate in the back of my mind, but I didn't say anything at first.

It wasn't a big idea initially. It was just simply reflecting the phrase that was digging deep into my heart, I can do more. And then you start going and gathering up school supplies for Iraqi children, and that becomes your next, I'd say your next tactical mission was getting these, getting kids school supplies over there. You hook up with Laura Hildenbrand. who wrote Seabiscuit and Unbroken. And you start this thing, Operation Iraqi Children, which eventually becomes Operation International Children. And you guys just supply all this gear to these kids.

Well, the important part of that was that we wanted to give it to the troops to give to the kids. Got it. So our little motto was helping soldiers help children. I just felt, you know, on that first trip to the school, I saw how much the kids were loving the soldiers, you know. The soldiers rebuilt the school. They came in there, put windows in, they did all kinds of stuff for the kids. And the kids were very grateful. The soldiers were just hugging the kids.

And it was a spirit that I thought was very important to preserve in some way. And so I thought, well, maybe we can collect some school supplies and send them to those troops, and they can take them out to the school and give them to the kids. And that's what we did. We collected stuff at my kids' school, and we shipped it over to that base, and they took it out and gave it to the kids, and it turned into a program that lasted nine years, and we sent hundreds of thousands of school supply kits, soccer balls, shoes, all kinds of stuff, So not only Iraq, but Afghanistan, Haiti, all these different places.

Yeah, that's a strategic move, too, because as these young kids see the American soldiers, what do they see of them, right? They see guys with guns. They see guys kicking indoors. And that can obviously give a real negative impression. But then when they see a kid, I mean, they see a soldier, and he's giving them crans and soccer balls and whatnot. All of a sudden they realize, oh, these guys are here to help, which is sometimes not, obvious. That was the important part of what we're trying to do. I knew I couldn't keep running over

to Iraq every month, you know, but I wanted to do something from home. And so supplying the troops with something to give the kids was a way that we could do that. And then, I mean, you just get involved in all kinds of things. Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, Fisher House Foundation, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. You end up doing something called the Snowball Express. idea was simple going from the book. They brought the children of our fallen heroes to Disneyland just before Christmas to allow them to meet each other to see they were not alone in their grief and to bring them some joy and new happy memories to this special group of children

who are experiencing so much sadness, especially at Christmas. And you go on talking about that. I could not be prouder to be part of creating opportunities for joy, friendship, and communal healing by connecting feelings. family struggling with loss to one another. Together they share a common bond and can feel a bigger, part of a bigger family. The children meet and interact with others who understand what they've been through and help each other through this unique and terrible experience.

It cannot be overstated what an event like this can mean to a child who has lost to a parent or in military service. Struggling with their grief can be overwhelming and uniting together with hundreds of other children experiencing similar tragic loss can be the magic. that carries them throughout the year. There's so much joy on their faces during these moments. It's a blessing to interact with kids this way. At the same time, I'm always reminded of the solemnity embedded in these moments of the incredible

cost represented in the faces of the children who come to this event. Last year, one girl wore a t-shirt to the event with these words printed on the back. in honor and memory of and underneath the words was a blank box where kids could write in the name of their fallen hero. In black marker, the girl had simply written

my daddy. And that's a that program, you know, we're about to the foundation, the Gary Sneease Foundation. That was a organization that was started and every year

I would go back and play a concert for the kids and be a part of the event. American Airlines supplies all the transportation to get all the kids from all over the country to the event. And a couple of years ago, we folded that particular thing into the Gary Sinise Foundation as a program. And we moved the event from Dallas where it had been for nine years to Disney World. And so we take over a thousand kids to Disney World along with, you know, four or 500 surviving parent or guardian or who's ever with the kids. And we give them a lot of joy right before Christmas time at the happiest place on Earth. It's extraordinary. And my band has played concerts for the last, I don't know, 13 years, something like that.

Awesome. back to these hospital visits. Back to the book. After a bomb exploded in Iraq in July of 2003, Marine Staff Sergeant Mark Gronkey? Is that right? Lost an eye, hand, fingers, thumb, and right leg. I met Mark on my first visit

to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland on September 11, 2003, where he was recovering. He was the first wounded service member I visited on the first of many trips over the years to the DC military hospitals. He wanted to talk about Lieutenant Dan. And we shared a few stories, and I sat with him for a while before I went on to the next room. That afternoon, I was at Walter Reed for the first time.

I visited with so many wounded heroes that day, including many of the first triple amputees I would meet in the coming years. Just 21 years old, just 21 years old U.S. Army specialist, Hilario Bermanas, was serving with the 82nd Airborne Division in Baghdad. On June 10th, just 10 days before I would be in Baghdad myself, specialist Bermanas and a fellow soldier came under attack while guarding a weapon's turn-in point. A rocket-propelled grenade killed his friend and took both Bermanus's legs and his left hand.

As Bermanus lay in his bed, his father stood by his side and told me what had happened and how Hilario was from one of the tiny islands in the Federid states of Micronesia. Three years earlier, wanting to be an American soldier, he had gone to Guam to sign up for the U.S. Army. The week after my visit in a ceremony at Walter Reed on September 17, 2003, Bermanus was awarded U.S. citizenship.

I'll always remember that first visit meeting specialist Bermanus and so many others, seeing this young man in a hospital bed missing three out of four limbs. It made a lasting impression on me. And at one point, some of your friends and some of the partners from Operation International Children, you weren't able to go to Iraq, so they went over, they delivered supplies,

and they stopped at launch, Duelan Germany on the way back, and going back to the book here, there they met a young soldier named Brendan Morocco, just 22 years old. The first United States service member ever to survive after losing all four limbs in an IED explosion. The blast happened during the early hours of Easter Sunday,

while Brendan was returning from a night mission in the deserts of Iraq. He was in bad shape. In addition to losing both arms and both legs, Brendan's nose, left eye socket, and facial bones were broken. He'd lost eight teeth from the blast and had taken shrapnel in his left eye and face. His face and neck had been burned. His left carotid artery severed and his left ear drum pierced.

Usually a soldier this severely wounded would die, but Army medics have been making remarkable strides in treating battlefield wounds. And you go into some details here, but a guy named Sal Casano. Am I saying that right? He's the commissioner of the New York Fire Department. And they wanted to raise money to build Brendan Morocco, especially adapted smart technology home in Staten Island. They asked if you would help, you know, raise funds.

Going back to the book, as we were planning a fundraising concert for Brendan to be held in Staten Island in August of 2010, I received another call on March 26, 2010, while leading a squad of Marines on a security patrol in Afghanistan, Corporal Todd Nicely, 26, had stepped on an IED buried at the foot of a bridge. His fellow Marines quickly wrapped tourniquets around his wounds and administered morphine. A rescue helicopter arrived within six minutes. He became the second U.S. service member to survivor injuries as a quadruple amputee. I met Todd in the hospital, then simply said to the tunnel to towers guys,

which are the guys that are running this charity, he needs a house too. Let's do another concert. Even before we played Brendan's concert, we received a third call on May 24. 2010, Sergeant John Peck had just finished sweeping a compound with a metal detector checking for bombs when he stepped on an IED. He became America's third surviving quadruple amputee. We decided to raise funds to help build homes for all three quadruple amputees. Back before my foundation was created, it was no simple matter to help raise about a half

a million bucks for each home project. It still isn't a simple matter today, but I wanted to do everything I could do to help. time we built homes for all three quadruple amputees and this new initiative steamrolled from there. The good news was that thanks to new sophisticated life-saving techniques on the battlefield, more soldiers started surviving these horrific injuries. The bad news was that after Brendan, Todd, and John, more soldiers were wounded similarly. Staff Sergeant Travis Mills was our fourth quadruple amputee, a highly capable and resilient squad leader. He later joked that his injury in Afghanistan was only a bad case of the Mondays.

Like so many of the wounded service members I've met, Travis is one of my heroes. And we remain close friends to this day. And Travis was on this podcast, number 90. If you want to realize what a hero sounds like, go listen to that. Navy Petty Officer Taylor Morris, a member of an explosive ordinance disposal team. became our nation's fifth surviving quadruple amputee from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Immediately after the blast that took his four limbs, Taylor lay on the Afghan soil, fully conscious, bleeding to death.

But before medics attended him, Taylor ordered them to wait and make sure the ground surrounding him was clear of IEDs. He didn't want any other service members getting wounded. Where do they find such men? Yeah, that's, I mean, I haven't spent a decent amount of time with Travis. Yeah, that guy's not a hero. Then I have no idea who is. Well, he's an amazing guy and he's doing something really positive with his circumstance, and he's helping fellow veterans with his own foundation,

Travis Mill's Foundation. Obviously he wrote a book. There was a movie. Travis is an ambassador for my foundation, so he'll do things from time to time to help us do more. And, you know, I've met just extraordinary people. We've done over 60 or 70 of these houses now for very, very badly wounded folks, you know, in all branches of the service.

It's been a privilege because I've learned quite a bit from a number of them and have many, many friends who, you know, are in the, wounded community. As I said, I've been involved with the DAV for many, many years, and so I have many wounded pals from a lot of different wars. They give me a lot of inspiration, a lot of motivation, a lot of motivation to keep doing more. Go on here, another busy year is planned for 2010, 35 concerts, and additional events in support of our troops. They were still out there fighting, and I kept doing so much because it needed to be done. But I was tired.

I was wondering how long I could keep up this pace. Would I be able to continue like this or would I burn out? Yet I envisioned a future doing still more. And I wanted to figure out a way to ramp up, not pull back my work since I could see the positive efforts we were having. The question was how I began to consider consolidating my mission under one umbrella, continuing to work while focusing my priorities in the most effective way possible. Having teamed up with many organizations and efforts in the military support space, I learned a great deal about many different areas of need. I could strategically harness the incredible power of the many volunteers who worked alongside me over the years and could help serve them, our military veterans and first responder communities more effectively too.

I could still point donors in a good direction and encourage generosity of the American people to support quality projects I was involved in, but I could do it more consistently under this one umbrella. thinking through all of that, the solution became clear, my own foundation. And you call it out here. I'd been involved in so many different types of initiatives at this point, and even though I was consolidating efforts, I still wanted to keep the mission statement broad, reflecting the support work I'd done over the years, and so we could always adapt to changing needs of our veterans. We came up with this mission statement.

At the Gary Seneas Foundation, we serve our nation by honoring our defenders, veterans, first responders, their families, and those in need. We do this by creating and supporting unique programs designed to entertain, educate, inspire, strengthen, and build communities. Yeah, you got to a point where you had to kind of consolidate your efforts. Yeah, in the back of the book there, there's a list of maybe 30 different charities that I was supporting. And, you know, in various ways, I would, I wanted to do a lot for as many veterans as possible. So I chose to do that initially by not only doing U.S.O. tours, but supporting nonprofit organizations that were really doing a good job in the military support space. So I would do PSAs for them. I would fundraise for them. I would lend my name. I'd be on their honorary advisory boards.

I would blah, blah, blah. It went on and on and on. And then I was like, you know, you know, You know, right before I started the foundation, I launched the foundation, Gary Steney's Foundation, 2011. So the chapter in the book called Flurry of Action kind of talks about 2009, 2010, the two years leading up to the founding of the foundation. Because those years, I was just ramping more, more, more. And all the while, I was shooting a television series, by the way, at the same time. So I was never home. I was shooting the show or gone on the weekends, doing something. helping some organization out. And I thought, this is, you know, I need to figure out some other

way to do this. And having been involved with so many military charities over the years and had established a good reputation within the support space, you know, it's a, you know, people knew I was there for real, and I kept coming back. And I, you know, it wasn't something I did once. And I was ongoing. It was part of my life. So I thought, let's keep. capitalize on that in some way and create an organization that can, you know, act as a reliable resource for people who want to support our veterans and military community. And that's why I named it the Gary Snee's Foundation. I mean, people knew who I was at that point. They knew I was in this for good. I could have called it the Help the Troops Foundation or something like that, but I

decided to put my name on it because I had, you know, I'd take an act. action and people were supporting that. So I thought, well, the whole purpose of having a foundation is to raise money so that you can do more. And I wanted to raise a lot of money to do a lot more. And that's what we're doing. Well, just like any brand, when you know the brand and you know its quality, because let's face it, I mean, the charitable organizations, there's good ones and there's bad ones. And so if you have a good reputation inside of a brand that people know that you're doing the right thing,

then why not, like you said, capitalize on that and make it obvious? Yeah, because I made a decision that this is, look, this isn't something I'm going to stop doing. I'm going to keep doing it. So let's figure out the best way to do it in the most effective way that we'll be there for a long time. I hope to create a foundation, and I think we're well on our way to doing that. that is here for the long term. Hopefully it will survive me and go on and keep helping people in the spirit of personal touches that I've tried to give it,

and it will be there, you know, and last, you know, for decades. That's what I hope. I'm in it for good. It's a meaningful mission. service has been a great thing for my life and I think you know we're helping a lot of people now and I can see that that what we've you know the building blocks that we've laid here over this time are solid and people trust it and want to support it well some of the work that you're doing is incredible and like um you got this we built a home for U.S. Army Ranger Sergeant First Class

Michael Schlitz, who served as a rifleman and platoon sergeant in southern Iraq on February 27, 2007. Mike and his crew were conducting road clearing mission near Baghdad when their vehicle struck a hidden IED and burst into flame. His gunner, Sergeant Richard Sukenko and Medic Sergeant Jonathan Cadivaro, were killed instantly. His driver, Corporal Lorne Henry Jr. passed away shortly after the bar. blast. Mike rode in the passenger seat, engulfed in flames. He was thrown from the vehicle. He lost both hands on the sight in his left eye and sustained burns over 85% of his body. Early in Mike's recovery, he started going to a program at UCLA called Operation Mend, consisting of a team of surgeons who helped provide free surgeries to our severely wounded veterans. When I first met Mike, he was so severely

burned, he didn't have a nose and he talked through a hole in his throat. We struck up a friendship. Over the years, he's had multiple reconstructive surgeries to repair the damage to his eyelids, mouth, and nose and other parts of his body where the skin was burned. Having lost both arms, he now uses two prosthetic hooks. Mike's living situation posed innumerable challenges for him. Because of the fragility of his skin, Mike preferred colder temperatures and often needed to turn the air conditioner on full blast. His mom, Robbie, in his full-time caregiver, and she wore heavy coats to keep warm in the house. Direct sunlight is hard on Mike's eyes,

so he preferred to keep all the shades drawn. We built them a home with one section for Mike and another for his mom where the temperature and light in each section of the house can be individually governed. Mike has a special shower and a gym that he can navigate by himself. We helped restore Mike's independence and helped empower them both. Mike is an amazing individual

who's dedicating his life to honoring his following brothers through serving his fellow veterans. An ambassador for my foundation, he helps us with our veterans outreach as our military and veterans resource manager. With our smart home program, we work with each wounded service member to provide exactly what they need.

Master Sergeant John Mason is married and has three kids on October 16, 2010, while conducting village stability operations in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, John, a medic with the 20th Special Forces Group, stepped on a hidden IED, and lost both legs and his left arm.

Due to the severity of his amputations, he can't wear prosthetics, and he's confined to a wheelchair. The hallways in his house were too narrow for a wheelchair. Additionally, he couldn't reach anything in the closets, and the bathroom was too small for him to navigate alone. So he built John a house for him and his family that allows him to be independent,

and in turn allows his wife and children to worry less about caring for him. We built a home for Captain Luis Avila and his family. Luis served five combat tourists in Afghanistan and Iraq. On December 27, 2011, Luis's vehicle ran over an IED. Luis lost his left leg, then suffered two strokes and two heart attacks, resulting in traumatic brain injury. Ultimately, he was left almost completely paralyzed. Today, he continues to heal while maintaining an incredibly positive attitude and sense of humor. His wife, Claudia, is his full-time caregiver and never leaves his side. She is one of the fierce fighters for the needs of our wounded service members and reminds us of the importance of also supporting our caregivers.

Each smart home is given to the veteran free of charge. The mortgage for the house and land is completely underwritten. The veteran can select what part of the country. he or she wants to live in. We built a home for police officer, Michael Flamian, from Baldwin, 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. So, I mean, those, if you can listen to those and recognize what you're doing, I mean, that's just phenomenal, phenomenal.

And you know, we already talked about this, but I'll add this little thing. You got a program called Soaring Valor. And one of the things you did with the Navy, with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans is made a film. You did the voiceover for the film. And in the film, the voice you use,

or the person you're, what is it, acting? Portraying. is Ernie Pyle, the famous war correspondent who wrote dispatches from the war zones in Europe and Asia. Yeah, that's how I got involved with the World War II Museum, you know, over 10 years ago. Tom Hanks was one of the producers on that film, and he invited me to play Ernie Pyle. So I did the voiceover for Ernie. That started my relationship with the World War II Museum. now. We've taken, through my foundation and our Soaring Valour program, we've taken hundreds

of World War II veterans down to see the museum, and we've recorded them on video telling their stories, and those stories are preserved in the library at the museum. Well, two things. Number one, we covered Ernie Pyle on this podcast right here, number 39. and if you don't know this about Ernie Pyle, he was actually killed in action in the Battle of Okinawa. And two, I don't know what we can do to get the recordings out of the library and into the interwebs, but we should do that. Let's get him out there.

The stuff that you, you know, again, another example, Staff Sergeant Jason Ross, March 2011, during his second deployment to Afghanistan, Jason lost both of his legs. of his pelvic bone where an ID exploded. Doctors gave him less than 2% chance of survival, but Jason never stopped fighting. Complications set in, and surgeons ended up needing to take more and more from his legs

until eventually all his hips were gone. To date, he's undergone more than 240 surgeries. Basically, the entire lower half of his body is no longer there. We built a smart home for Jason and his family in San Diego. When we handed over the keys to him in his ceremony, his six-year-old daughter, Stacey, asked to speak. My daddy is Jason Ross, she said. When I was little, my daddy got hurt in Afghanistan.

He was in the hospital for a long time. My daddy is strong and brave. Another thing you guys do, you talk about here. My foundation's final program is called Relief and Resiliency Outreach. This is an umbrella program where we simply try to help veterans and their family in any way possible, including those recovering from trauma, injury, or loss. Within the umbrella is a mentoring program. I've had a long relationship with a disabled American veterans,

DAV, and know several wounded veterans who've lived with their injuries for decades, so I thought of providing an opportunity to introduce some of our younger wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to veterans from previous wars. I met with Jim Sersley, a Vietnam veteran triple amputee, and former national commander of the DAV to gauge his interest, and get his thoughts. He responded positively and said he would love to be involved and that he would discuss it with the DAV leadership.

And if you want to know more about Jim Sersley, Layers, Layers, podcast 200 in here talking about his story, which is incredible. And you close this section out by saying the simple story is here that from its creation in 2011, the foundation has grown into a friendly giant. We've gone from one donor, just me in the beginning,

to a base of more than 45,000 donors in an annual budget of nearly 30 million. While we can never do enough to show our gratitude to our nation's defenders, veterans, first responders, and the families who serve alongside them, and you have this little mantra, this little motto,

we can always do a little more. And the idea of we can always do a little more is probably a good place to wrap, even though it's not the last chapter. The last chapter is actually called why I'm still on a mission. And obviously there's an important message there. But that also ties in with the motto

we can always do a little bit more. And I guess they'll have to buy the book to get that last chapter. Yes, indeed. And the book contains a lot of reasons why we all still need to stay on mission. and as I was preparing to do this podcast, I knew that I was going to be reading your words.

And then I thought back to a time when you actually read some of my words. When Mikey Monsor was killed in Iraq, I gave a speech at his memorial service in Ramadi. And the theme of that speech was Roger that. Because I told the story where I had told Mike and the rest of the new guys in the task unit that when the instructor cadre from the training detachment came and told them to do something or corrected them or yelled at them, the only thing they were allowed to say back was Roger that. And so a couple days went by and one of the master chiefs who was a friend of mine, he came up to me and he's like, hey, what the hell is up with this Monsor guy? And I said, what do you mean? He says, every time I tell him to do something or fix something,

he just looks at me and says, Roger that. And I said, hey, man, that's exactly what I told him to say. And that actually became Mikey's attitude. And no matter what he was asked to do, no matter how hard the task, his response was always Roger that, including when a grenade was thrown that threatened the lives of three of our other teammates.

And only one person could save them was Mikey. And in order to do so, he had to smother that grenade with his own body and sacrifice his life. And in that moment of truth, Mons was the same. A few years later, at the Republican National Convention, there was a tribute to Mikey. And it was rooted in the same theme. And clearly it had been taken from the eulogy that I delivered in the dusty hangar with a broken heart in Ramadi Iraq just after Mikey was killed. And that theme was Roger that.

And the tribute for Mikey was delivered by none other than Gary Sinise. It was a fitting tribute. Fit for a hero such as Mikey can use every day to inspire us all of our lives as. So I thank you for doing that. It was a privilege. I didn't know that came from you, Jocko. That's amazing. I looked it up recently.

I told you I wanted to do something. on the one-year anniversary of the commissioning of Mike's ship. And so I posted something on my social media. And I found that video somehow that somebody had kind of filmed of their TV, and it was of that video that they showed that I narrated and included that. And then I wanted to look up some more, and I found the piece that you, wrote after the ship was commissioned and included it there, but did not know that some of those words that I said in that beautiful piece, and I thought they did a very good job with it.

I didn't know that they came from you. God bless you. It was an honor to hear them. And, well, I told you, I wasn't sure how long this was going to take, but it's been over four hours. Thank you. I mean for coming on. It's, you know, thank you, obviously, for what you're doing for the truth. But thanks for swinging by.

Thanks for coming on. I'm sorry, I can't make your gig tomorrow night. You have any, um, you have any closing thoughts before we take off? Look, I'm, I'm thankful that you had me on. You gave me some time to talk and that, uh, that, uh, You were interested in the book. The book came out a year ago. It's done very, very well, and we hope it just keeps on going

because it's a, I think, what I think is, in some ways, a little bit of a call to action. I tried to tell a story of somebody who didn't see it coming, but all of a sudden made a turn toward, service life, which is basically that's what I do now. I've done well in my acting career. I was grateful that I had CSI, New York, because it gave me a lot of resources to do a lot of good things. And now I'm focusing primarily on the mission of the Gary Sinise Foundation and what we're doing, and the book kind of tells a story of how I got there.

If people want to support the Gary Senise Foundation, they can go to Gary Senise Foundation.org. Also on Twitter, on Instagram, and on Facebook, those are all also Gary Senise Foundation, at Gary Sinise Foundation. And then Gary himself is on Twitter and on Facebook at Gary Sinise. then on Instagram at Gary Sanisse official. If you want to check out the social, what is it called? Media. Yeah. The social media.

Yeah. So, Gary, like I said, it's been over four hours. Thank you so much for what you're doing. Thanks for coming on. God bless you. It's been an honor to meet you. And look forward to, you know, having you back on here. And next time you get a spare month, we can have you on here to talk again.

Let me just say this, too, to you for your service to our country. I'm one grateful American. I appreciate what you've done for our country. And I don't for one day take it for granted. So I hope, you know, by spreading the word about what we're doing at the Gary Seney Sound Foundation, we can help more of your fellow service members and take care of them and their families. It was an honor to serve. Thank you.

Thanks for coming on. You bet, bud. And with that, Gary has left the building. Yes. We have a brief message for you when it comes to supporting, right? Sure. We want to do more with our lives. I think that's pretty straightforward.

I agree. Echo, Charles. Yes, sir. You've been relatively quiet today. Yes. We are all grateful for that. Yeah, if you notice, you didn't ask me, oh, echo, you got anything else? because I had a whole list of movie questions.

Oh. So yeah. I'm glad I didn't open that. You dodged the bullet on that. I didn't open that one. What can we do to do more? Be better. What can we do?

Okay. So work out, take extreme ownership, take responsibility, don't complain, and also do Jiu-Jitsu. So various reasons for this, obviously. And, you know, I don't have to go over them.

I will. You want me to? It's been over four hours. How about we just accept the fact that we're going to do jujitsu. Yes, good idea. Good idea. Okay, so you need a geek when you do ghee, you need a rash guard, you're going to do no geet.

I don't need one, but you want to get one for sure, 100%. For a ghee, you do need a guy. So you get an origin ghee. This is why. Factually the best guy in the world, many options, made in America, 100%. Those are the front running reasons. Really no expansion needed. those are all kind of speak for themselves.

Best ghee in the world. Many different options. Made in America 100%. Yep. 100%. Okay. Case closed. We're good on that. What else can we get from origin?

How about some? Supplements. Yes. Big time. Oh, were you going to say genes? Well, you're probably over there thinking, well, you can get genes too, Jock. You don't necessarily need to be a G and a ghee. Yeah, not necessarily. But, yes.

So, gene, okay, yeah, you brought it up. Genes. Yes, I was going to say that at some point. Okay. So, yes, genes. same deal best in the world factually multiple we'll say more than one option more than one that's multiple right yeah more than one technically and more than one and made in america 100% boom jeans by the way did I say it was American denim yes that's what it is yes it's American made

100% also supplements important supplements very good supplements supplements that you should take there's no other two ways around it so take Take joint warfare. Take krill oil all the time. That's just a daily discipline is krill oil, super krill and joint warfare. Get on that. And then you've got some other options. If you need a little, you need to get up on step a little bit.

Cool. Take discipline. You can take discipline go pill. You can take discipline go powder form, mix it up. Or you can take discipline ready to drink in a can, ready to rock and roll. Yes. You may need, so that can give you a little boost. Yes, boost.

A little boost. You might need a boost of your protein intake. If you need that, cool. We got you. If you need dessert, we got you. And those last two, kind of the same thing. Dessert and protein. Dessert and protein.

Mulk. Moke. All day. By the way, there is, there is a thing that you can get on, you can get on board. It's called the Mulk train. Oh, yeah.

Get on, stay on. Get on it, stay on it. And not the split hairs. Discipline go is not the powder. Oh, yes. Discipline. Yes. That's the original.

Original. Hey, let's make a powdered drink that I can drink to get my. Yes. Then, hey, you know what? Sometimes I don't have time to mix up a drink. How about we make a little pill I can take? Cool.

Great. By the way. Yeah. Then sometimes, oh, sometimes I want to. have a little bit and I want it like right now I don't want to mix it up I want it in a can yeah just bungo RTD in a can boom that's and that's just just sort of separate that you know like I said not split hairs but hey you know

these are details that aren't unimportant right you know yes also wear your kid mowke back to the mope train where your kid more for the kids a little bit more engineered towards the kids but let's face it you're gonna get into that that supply oh yeah there's no doubt that I've drank much I've been on the Molk, Thomas the Tank Engine. Thomas the Tank. Thomas the Tank Engine, yeah, yeah. The little kids' milk train.

A lot of people call it the little kids Mulk Train. The Warrior Kid Moke Train. Get your kids on Thomas the Tank Engine, Warrior Kid Mulk Train. And don't forget about Jocko White Tea. Organic. Certifying. Because Echo really likes that part of it. Bro, yes.

And by the way, everything that we just talked about, that's a supplement. you can get it at the vitamin shop nationwide USA America Also if you're not walking into the vitamin shop Nationwide in America Just go to origin main Dot com That's where you get it

And we can get all this stuff Yes all of it Oh yeah yeah the geese as well This is everything everything we just talk about Origin main dot com Also If you want to get Your copy of

Grateful American by Gary Sinise, aka Lieutenant Dan, aka Mac Taylor. Don't worry, I got you. Go to joccopodcast.com. Go click on the top where it says books from the episodes, boom, it'll be right there.

Or you click on there and then go to that page, boom, right there, along with all the other books, all the other books that we cover on this podcast. Also, Jocko is the store. It's called Jocco Store, and this is where you can get Rash Gards' T-shirts. T-shirts, big, that's a big one. You want to represent,

I mean, every day, let's face it, we're wearing T-shirts every single day. Yes. Just about everybody. Everybody. Yeah. Even if you're in the snow, whatever, let's face it. Also, rash guards, more rash guards, hoodies if you're in the snow. Anyway, a lot of good stuff on there.

That are representative of the path. Represent while you're on the pet. Discipline equals freedom. Good, you know. Good attitude is a good attitude to have. Yeah. By the way, you were talking about sometimes we see fakes. Right?

So when you said good, there's like other good quote t-shirts out there. Yeah. Actually, there's a good t-shirt out there that has the entire good speech. Yes, yes, sir. It does. And you can get it on whatever, a website. Yeah, like one of those. You can, but you are not supporting.

Just kind of FYI. Yeah. I get, you know, like, cool. I'm happy that you're trying to be in the game. Yeah. But you're actually giving money to a thief. And the liar. Yeah.

Is that, well, not plagiarism, right? It's called something else. Called stealing. Like copyright or... Called stealing.

Yeah. Yeah. Don't do it. And that's what you, yes, that's true. And official, go to jocco store.

com. Yes. Just be good. And a lot of these knockoffs don't have the layers in it. Like for real layers. Oh yeah. They didn't even get the font right.

No, don't get the font right. But now, but now you know what they're getting the font right now. All right. So they're out there. And usually they're a substandard product. That's for sure.

Yeah, like you get one of those cheap like knockoffs. When you get it, you're like, okay, I'm representing the path in your mind. You know, I'm right. But, man, I don't know how much I'm going to wear this. Maybe I'll wear it the first time when I wash it. No, what sucks is when I read a bad review on one of those? And they say, like, I can't believe Jocco would put his name on this. I didn't.

Yeah, I know. It's like bittersweet, though, you see what I'm saying. I know. But anyways, it's not real hard. You just go to jococococor.com and then you're good. You will be supporting when you do that. Yes. Also, subscribe to the podcast.

If you haven't already on iTunes, Google. Stitcher or sorry Google Play Stitcher you know leave a review if you're in the mood in the mood leave a review That's a good good good move don't forget that we also have the grounded podcast We have the warrior kid podcast And from the warrior kid podcast we also have warrior kid soap did you get killer soap yet? Not yet. I've been check the mail though I will say this it's dull it's legit yeah the fact that it's black is like just that's the cherry But it's also got, it's got like the, you know, you ever use teacher ERO?

Yes. Sometimes it's way powerful. Oh, for a little too much. This is totally perfect. Like you can, you know it and it's just, you feel like, you feel like when you use this stope, so the warrior kid soap from Irish Oaks Ranch.com, you feel like when you've used this soap, you can stay clean. I feel the same way. Yes, Irish, Irish Oaks. Ranch.com. That's where you get it. Also, we have a YouTube channel for the video version of this podcast.

I'm going to watch it on your smart TV while you're working out or while you're not working out. Maybe in your office. I don't know. But you want to watch it, the video version, yes, we have a YouTube channel. So subscribe if you haven't done that, you know, if you want. Also got some excerpts on there too. So there's more benefits to the YouTube channel, as it were. Got psychological warfare. If you need a little. psychological hitter you can proceed there and that little that little hitter that you need It's gonna help you get through that moment of weakness get psychological warfare. It's on iTunes. It's on Google play Amazon music any mp3 platform you can set it for your alarm So we can wake you up in the morning to my soothing voice

And don't forget if you need a visual representation of the path you can go to flipside canvas.com Dakota Meyer, by the way. No big deal. Just Dakota Meyer. He owns that company. And he's making really cool graphic designs. So go to flipsidecampus.com to support that. For books, yes, we have Grateful American written by Gary Sinise.

Lots of powerful stories in there. You can pick that up. You got leadership strategy and tactics. Field manual. Is it still hot off the presses? The technical specs. You know what? It's been out for a month.

I'm considering it warm off the presses. I'll tell you this. If you don't have it yet, you're definitely wrong. Feedback. What's the feedback? 100% approval rating. Yeah. And look, I'm not going to sit here and say your other books weren't like good.

I'm not going to say that. But my favorite, if I'm going to choose a favorite, I'm leaning heavily towards this leadership strategy and tactics. I like the way you think. Of all of them. That's including the kids books? Yes, sir. Oh, wow.

Here's the thing, though. You know, I am thinking of myself. You see what I'm saying? Like that. Typical. But the kid's book has legs, more legs, because it extends to the kids. So I dig it.

I dig it. But still, I said what I said. Okay. So we're going with it. Let's get it. Leadership Strategy and Tactics. One of those, here's the deal. You're in some random group of people.

It's a team. It's a business. It's a company. People are maneuvering. People are trying to stab each other in the back. They're not supporting each other. They're doing all the things that happens inside of a team. Get them this book.

Get them this book. There you go. Get them this book. And you will see people start to do the right thing. Because they'll understand leadership. They'll understand human nature. It will help them. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual.

The Warrior Kid Books, One, Two, and Three. I wish I had those books when I was a kid, but I can't go back in time. Mikey and the Dragons, every kid is born afraid of things in the world. They don't need to be. They just need to read a simple book called Mikey and the Dragons. They'll realize how they can overcome those fears. The discipline equals freedom field manual.

Two pages is a little dose that will propel you forward faster, stronger, and better. That's a weird statement to make. Sounds like a big bold statement to make. I'm telling you. I wrote it. It works on me. I wrote the book. I wrote the book.

If I read two pages, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm going to go a little bit harder. I wrote it. I already know it. You see what I'm saying? Yeah,

this is strange. Yeah, I could see it. I wrote it. I know it. I wrote every word in there. I wrote. I opened it up,

read two pages, and my game goes up. Dang. My discipline increases. Factually. If you want to audio version of that it's not an audible because it was on audible you couldn't use it as an alarm clock to wake you up instead it's on iTunes Amazon music Google play other

MP3 platforms and then of course we got extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership which I wrote with my brother Leif Babin fundamentals of leadership we also have a leadership consultancy it's called Eschalon Front and what we do is solve problems through leadership we have leadership training online called EF online because leadership training is not an unaculation. You don't get it one time and now you're good to go. No.

You got to do repetitive training. You got to drill it in from other angles. The other angles are on EF online. We have the muster, live events about leadership. We're doing one in Orlando, one in Dallas, one in Phoenix. That's the schedule. for 2020. Every event that we have done of any kind has sold out.

If you want to come, go register. And then we have EF Overwatch and EF Legion. If you're a military individual and you're transitioning to civilian sector, go there, put your information in, and we can move you in the right direction for employment, for your next mission. And if you're a civilian company and you want leaders. at every level inside your company,

go there to those EF Overwatch and EF Legion. Fill out the appropriate boxes and we'll get you in the game. And let's say you just haven't gotten enough of my hyper-dramatic reading. You haven't heard enough of my moments of silence. Maybe you need more of that. You want more?

Maybe you want to hear a ridiculous story from Echo Charles about the grocery store. If you need that still, well, we're on the interwebs. On Twitter, Instagram, and Elfizenbuki. Echoes at Echo Charles and I,

I'm at Chalkin-Wilink. And once again, Gary Sinise Foundation, and the foundation is on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Gary Seneese Foundation. Gary himself is on Twitter and Facebook at Gary Seneas, and he's on what Echo calls the gram at Gary Seneas official. And with that, once again, thanks to Gary for coming on,

for sharing his story. And more important, thanks to Gary Seney. for what he is doing and continuing to doing it has done to support the veterans and first responders of our great nation because for many the war doesn't end when the battle's over there is a war that can continue physically mentally spiritually and Gary is doing a lot to support America's heroes for through that transition. And to the heroes that are out there listening to those that are serving and those that have served, thank you for protecting our way of life.

And yes, we are grateful. And the same goes to our police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service. You protect us here at home. And yes, we are grateful for that. as well and to everyone else out there when we talk about being grateful we're not just talking about being grateful for our heroes in the military and our first responders I'm talking about being grateful for life because it's here and it's now

and there are so many men and women that have sacrificed so much for us that we can be here in a world that is overflowing with opportunity so be grateful for that and then show gratitude show gratitude to those that have served not just by saying thank you show gratitude not just with your words but by going out and taking action making things happen show them gratitude by going out there in the world and getting after it Until next time, this is Echo and Jocko.