Gary Sinise Salutes America’s Pearl Harbor Heroes

In January, the Gary Sinise Foundation was honored to be able to host Joe as part of our Soaring Valor Program. Although he was confined to a wheelchair, Joe was lifted aboard an Amtrak train in Los Angeles for a journey to New Orleans, home of the National World War II Museum. Fittingly, he was saluted and cheered all the way.

He was accompanied by his family—his daughter Belinda Mastrangelo, 68, granddaughters and great-grandson, Mathias, aged 5. Thanks to the American people who donate to Gary Sinise Foundation to support our Soaring Valor trips to the museum, and Amtrak who provided the transportation, they had a chance to grow a little bit closer right at the end of Joe’s life.

“I am just so grateful my great-grandson could be here and experience all this with me,” Joe commented. “This he’ll remember his entire life. From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank everyone involved. You brought back so many old memories and created new ones for my family.”

At every whistle stop along the way, decorations were put up in his honor, and local residents gathered on the platform to cheer the nation’s oldest living Pearl Harbor survivor, waving back to them from his private room.

“When we arrived in New Orleans Sunday night, there was a big American flag all lit up and a crowd of people waiting to greet dad,” Belinda said. “That train trip was the beginning of many tears and emotions we would share throughout the week.”

On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Joe remembered being shot at by a machine gun and being 50 feet from a bomb that landed but didn't detonate. "Luckily nothing happened to me, but I came that close," he recalled. "First with the bomb and then with the machine gun.”

In 2018, I was delighted to be asked by Tim Gray, founder of the WWII Foundation, to narrate his documentary “Lifeline: Pearl Harbor's Unknown Hero,” a film about Joe George, a boatswain's mate second class, who disobeyed an order to cut the line between the USS Vestal, a maintenance ship, and the USS Arizona during the Pearl Harbor attack.

Joe, who died in 1996, had spotted six desperate men on the burning battleship and thrown a line to them, ignoring the order to cast off. He saved their lives. It took 76 years for him to be honored with a Bronze Star with “V” Device for his heroism.

My own family is connected to that day. My uncle Jerry passed through Pearl Harbor in 1944 on his way to the Pacific Theatre. He was 18 when he graduated high school the same month as D-Day and joined the Navy a month later.

He ended up on a landing craft ship that supported the invasions of Okinawa and Iwo Jima and was in the Pacific when Japan surrendered.

It is so easy for us to take everything we have for granted. But we should never forget what our troops have helped build and protect. I've stood on the border between North and South Korea, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and realized that there is freedom on one side, and then — just two feet away — abject misery and servitude on the other.

Freedom comes at a cost, a price that is paid with great sacrifice. I feel so lucky as an American that we have people who will raise their hand and go out and defend our country.

I often imagine what our world would be like if Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany had defeated the United States and our allies in WWII. We would all be living in a different world had tyranny prevailed. It’s because of heroes like Joseph, and Jack, and Joe, and the 16 million who served then that freedom won. I thank God for them.

One day in the not so distant future, all of our World War II heroes will be gone, and it will be up to our park services, our memorials, our history books and our museums — such as the National World War II Museum — to pass the stories of Pearl Harbor onto future generations. We must always remember what these great Americans did for our country and for us.