'I am a grateful American': Gary Sinise hopes to bring his mission of service to Israel - interview

A military jeep drives over a roadside bomb. The explosion takes arms and legs and scars hearts and minds. It’s not a jeep that gets blown apart but lives. The shock wave ripples through families. It deprives children of their parents and robs parents of a piece of their future.

How do the survivors cope? How do they pick up the pieces and move forward? What about war’s other victims – the people left behind?

In 2011, American actor and director Gary Sinise established the Gary Sinise Foundation to support US veterans and first responders, along with their families. Since its inception, the organization has raised more than $600 million for its programs and services.

He has also received numerous honors for his philanthropy and patriotism, including the Presidential Citizens Medal, Honorary Marine by the US Marine Corps, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society Patriot Award, and the Kennedy Center Award for the Human Spirit.

Israelis know well the cost of war and terror. Military service is woven into national life, as are rehabilitation, trauma recovery, and caring for the wounded. Nearly every family is touched by service in some way.

I wanted to understand how Gary Sinise came to make the foundation’s work such a central mission in his life, so I started at the beginning.

What were you like as a kid?

“It’s funny you ask,” he says. “My mom is 94 years old now, and I sat with her yesterday having a conversation about my early childhood.” He was born on the gritty South Side of Chicago, in Blue Island, Illinois, “within 10 days of my dad getting out of the navy.”

His father was a photographer during the Korean War before becoming a film editor in Chicago’s advertising industry. “These were the Mad Men days in Chicago,” Sinise says, referring to the popular television series.

“The agencies would keep him working all day and into the night, so he was not home a lot. My mom had her hands full taking care of my brother, sister, and me, and her mother and her sister, who had moved into our basement after her mother’s divorce. So, my mom was taking care of everybody, and I was left to run a little wild.”

“And did you?” I ask.

“I did,” he laughs.

His memoir, Grateful American: A Journey From Self to Service, fills in a few details on his misbehaving: joyriding in a friend’s father’s borrowed car, skipping classes, failing classes, and experimenting with drugs. “I didn’t develop skills academically early on, so I struggled all the way through high school,” he tells me.

Yet he also believes those years forged a kind of independence. “I developed do-it-yourself/get an idea and go at it skills. I would always be the kid who organized the neighborhood baseball games, or was the captain of the football team, or the leader of the band. I had bands from the time I was in fourth grade. And always doing it myself.

“One of the things I remember about it was that on Saturdays, none of my friends were around. They were going to temple. I didn’t know anything about any of that. I didn’t know anything about Judaism at all.

“And then, I remember back in the ’60s, in the summertime, a lot of my friends would go to Israel, and they would work on a kibbutz. It wasn’t that every friend I had was Jewish, but I had a lot of Jewish friends, and still do, from the Highland Park days. I’ve stayed in touch with a bunch of folks.”

It wasn't an easy transition to Highland Park High at first. His parents moved frequently as they worked their way up the socioeconomic ladder, so he was the new kid, struggling academically without many friends. He felt lost.

Sinise traces the turning point in his life back to the first play he ever did in high school, West Side Story. “It was so wonderful, and felt so good to be doing it.” On the night of the final performance, he broke down backstage. “I just burst into tears when the show was over,” he recalls. “I was this kid who was really having a hard time in school but then found this thing and just fell in love with it.”

Sinise was only in the chorus while his new friend Jeff Melvoin played one of the leads. During the curtain call, Melvoin reached back and pulled Sinise forward to bow alongside the principal cast.

“That was such a galvanizing moment,” Sinise says. “I’ll never forget that Jeff did that.”

I know Melvoin, who went on to become a successful television writer and producer. On Northern Exposure, he wrote the popular episodes “Kaddish for Uncle Manny,” in which the town helps a grieving Joel Fleischman assemble a minyan so he can recite the Jewish prayer for the dead, and “Shofar, So Good,” centered on Joel observing Yom Kippur in Alaska.

Looking back, Sinise sees the high school experience as the beginning of everything that followed. “It set me on a course to start a theater company, and then have a great career in the movies and TV.”

After high school, the future movie star had no interest in college. He wanted to continue performing in plays. So, at 18, he gathered a group of friends who shared “this passionate desire to create together.”

“I remember, we built an early theater in the basement of a closed-down Catholic school,” Sinise says. “We all pitched in. We were all acting in the plays, painting the sets, painting the walls, painting the building. We were all doing everything in those days, and for no money.”

That spirit became Steppenwolf Theatre Company, one of the most influential ensembles in modern American theater. Known for emotionally raw performances and ensemble-driven realism, Steppenwolf helped reshape contemporary theater and launched the careers of many actors including John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Joan Allen, Gary Cole, and Martha Plimpton.

IN 2018, Sinise’s life went into a tailspin.

“My wife was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer,” he said, “and two months later, we found out [his son] Mac had chordoma [rare bone cancer].” The experience of having “two cancer patients fighting for their lives at the same time… [felt] like a gut punch.”

His wife eventually went into remission. Mac’s cancer spread.

Before the illness, Mac had already established himself as a gifted musician. He began playing drums at age nine and later attended USC’s prestigious pop music program. By the time he graduated in 2014, he had grown into an accomplished composer and songwriter.

But cancer gradually stripped away his capacity to perform. By 2023, Mac was in a wheelchair, blind in one eye, and losing movement in his hand. “Bad things were happening to his body.” Music disappeared behind treatments, medications, and daily survival.

Then something shifted.

“One day, he said, ‘Dad, I’ve been thinking about this piece of music I wrote in college. I never finished it, and I think I’d like to try to finish it.’” Working with friends, Mac finished the piece and recorded “Arctic Circles” with an orchestra. “I was knocked out by it,” Sinise told me, “It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful.”

That recording session sparked the desire to complete an entire album. By the end of 2023, they had recorded 10 songs for a project titled Resurrection & Revival. “The album went to press the week that Mac died on January 5, 2024,” Sinise says as he shows me the cover. “He heard all the music. He just never got to hold the record.” Mac had designed the album cover himself using a restored World War I photograph of Sinise’s grandfather, Daniel Sinise, at 17 years old in army training camp.

The response from listeners surprised even Sinise. In May 2025, Forbes reported that Mac’s albums had reached the top 10 most downloaded records on iTunes, alongside artists like Blake Shelton and Morgan Wallen. At one point, Sinise recalls, the first album landed between Lady Gaga and Britney Spears on the iTunes chart. “Mac would have never in a million years thought that,” he says.

After his son’s death, Sinise began sorting through Mac’s files and discovered a vast archive of unfinished compositions. “There’s so much music here,” he remembers thinking. “It’s crazy how much he was doing that I never knew about.” That discovery led to two additional posthumous albums, Resurrection & Revival Parts Two and Three, with Part Three soon to be released.

I had been listening to Resurrection & Revival Part One while driving around town. I was impressed at how cinematic the music felt, reminding me of the landscapes and atmosphere in writer/producer Taylor Sheridan’s Western dramas.

“It’s really neat that you say that,” Sinise says, “because Mac wanted to write music for film.”

I also felt something unexpected in those tracks; a lightness of being. It moved me that a young man enduring so much could create something so uplifting.

Two other tracks especially resonated with me. One was Mac’s harmonica rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which conveyed an emotional vulnerability I had never heard in our national anthem before. The other was “Amazing Grace,” reimagined by Mac’s harmonica in a bluesy, sensual arrangement. I kept hitting the back button and replaying it.

Music has always occupied a central place in Sinise’s life and public service. In 2003, he co-founded the Lt. Dan Band, performing concerts for troops on military bases around the world. It’s a stand-up-at-your-seat-and-dance cover band, raising spirits and bringing joy. He’s been to over 200 bases from the US to Iraq.

Our conversation eventually turned to the role of artists in divided times, including political boycotts targeting Israeli performers. Sinise says the idea saddens him.

“Art is supposed to bring us together. Music is supposed to be the universal language.”

He points to his friend John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, who has publicly supported the families of Israeli hostages and collaborated musically with former hostage Alon Ohel.

Before his illness, Mac worked for and loved the Gary Sinise Foundation. He told his dad that if the album ever sold, he wanted the proceeds to help the mission. The foundation serves US first responders and all branches of the military at US installations, both domestically and abroad.

The foundation has built and gifted a hundred specially adapted smart homes for the severely wounded, supplied essential equipment to first responder departments, and organized retreats for families of the fallen.

Sinise traces his commitment to veterans and military families back to the people closest to him. His grandfather drove an ambulance in World War I, his father served in the navy, his uncles were World War II veterans, and both sides of his extended family included army service members and Vietnam veterans.

I could relate. My grandfather fought in World War I shortly after becoming an American citizen. My father and several uncles served during World War II. My husband served in the navy during the Vietnam War, and my eldest son served five years aboard a fast-attack submarine after college.

Sinise began supporting Vietnam veteran groups in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s. His commitment deepened after he played Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump and became aware of the connection veterans felt with that character. He spent decades volunteering, traveling overseas with the USO, and aiding organizations that support veterans and their families.

But September 11 became the defining turning point.

Sinise remembers being “shaken to the core and fearful about what was going to happen next.” As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unfolded, he worried that political divisions might once again leave service members caught in the middle, much as Vietnam veterans had been decades earlier.

I think that having someone you love in the armed services impacts the way you understand a veteran’s gift to us and, too often, his or her sacrifice. “In Israel, everybody has either served or knows somebody who has served,” I say. “And many people know someone who has paid a heavy price.”

He nods. “Generations upon generations.”

“I don’t think that’s true in the US today, and I think that makes a difference.”

“I have found that there is a fairly sizable disconnect between the average American citizen and the people that defend us,” he responds. And he feels he can help bridge that divide by drawing attention to the experiences of troops and wounded veterans. “I’ve been to the war zones,” he says. “I’ve been to the hospitals, and I’ve seen a lot of things that the average American does not get to see.”

Underlying all of it is his patriotism and gratitude. “I am a grateful American,” he explains. “I value my freedom, I know where it comes from; it has to be fought for, it has to be protected.”

As our interview comes to a close, I ask whether he would consider bringing the Lt. Dan Band to perform for the 6,000 American troops stationed in Israel.

“Oh, I absolutely would,” he says immediately. “Israel is someplace that I have very much wanted to go just in life.”

Military personnel as well?

“Of course, I would,” he says.