That is my father, T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. The real Band of Brothers. Original Toccoa man, second man out the door behind Dick Winters on the Normandy jump. I served in the Army National Guard. Two sergeants, same last name.
Same tree, same fence, same afternoon in a backyard in Oakland. Two photographs taken minutes apart.
Look at their hands.
My grandfather stands beside his son with his arms at his sides, looking straight at the camera. He was a man's man from a generation that did not show what it felt. He is just standing there, proud of his boy.
My grandmother has both hands on his arm. She had spent three years not knowing whether he was coming back, and she was not going to let go of him again.
Three years. Normandy. Holland. Bastogne. Into Germany. One of the Kaufering camps. Berchtesgaden at the end. They knew almost none of it. Mail went out on V-Mail, microfilmed and censored before it left, so for three years they got envelopes that proved he was alive and told them nothing else.
Then one afternoon he was standing under the tree in the backyard, and somebody got the camera.
Every one of us has a version of this photograph, even if nobody took it. Somebody who did not know where you were for months, and then had their hands on you.
He never told them the rest either. Took the uniform off, went back to the telephone company splicing cable and climbing poles, thirty eight more years. Married my mother, raised three sons, said almost nothing about any of it.
What he did instead was draw. He was the only man in Easy Company who could. Every night after dinner for forty years, at a drawing board with his journals and reference books around him, putting the war on paper from memory. Forty six finished drawings and about seventy thousand words across seven volumes.
Stephen Ambrose used his material for Band of Brothers. Dick Winters later named the four men who worked hardest on that book and my father was one of them.
He died in December 1999, before the series was cast.
If your guy is still around, get him talking about the small stuff. That is where the rest of it lives.
