Terence Knox was hesitant about playing Sgt. Zeke Anderson in Tour of Duty
It's serious business portraying certain characters, especially soldiers. When Terence Knox was offered the part of Sgt. Zeke Anderson in CBS' Tour of Duty, he was hesitant.
"I remember thinking — what right do I have to play a soldier in Vietnam? I wasn't in the war, and I don't know if I would have gone if I'd been called. I always had too many questions about why we got involved in the war, and what we were doing over there," he told The Tribune in 1988. "There've been some attempts to deal with the questions over the years, but I still think there are a lot of questions that remain unanswered."
So what made the actor change his mind? It was the thought of real soldiers who were in the war, the ones we lost and those who came back home. "But then I thought, a lot of people did go to Vietnam, and a lot of them never came back. Some who came back were wounded both physically and psychologically. What about them?" he added.
Knox felt that for more than 15 years no one seemed to attempt to tell their stories, but CBS decided it was time with Tour of Duty. "But you can't do that. No matter what anyone thought about the war, you can't forget what happened to the men — and to the women, too — who were involved in it. Now finally we're getting around to telling some of those stories...CBS did it for the first time on television with our show."
He eventually concluded that it was okay to accept the role. "If I believed that the people who were involved in the war had the right to have their stories told, then I also had every right to do the shows since, as an actor, I could help tell those stories."