You have seen this moment a hundred times in Band of…
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You have seen this moment a hundred times in Band of Brothers. This is one of the real ones. My father is on the right. 1944.
You have seen this moment. Men in jump gear under an airplane wing, loaded down, waiting. Band of Brothers put those faces in front of the world.
This is not that. This is one of the real ones.
The man on the right is my father, T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. An original Toccoa man. Michael Fassbender played him in the series.
He jumped second in the stick, right behind Dick Winters. Winters wrote to our family and said he wanted his best, most dependable man right behind him, and that was Pat.
Nobody standing in this frame knows yet how any of it turns out. That is what makes the photograph worth something. Not the man he became. The one right there with his gear on, waiting.
He was also the only man in the company who could draw.
He came home. Went back to the telephone company, the same job he left in 1942, and worked there thirty-eight years splicing cables and climbing poles. Married my mother. Raised three sons.
And in the evenings, for the next forty years, he sat at a drawing board with his journals and his reference books spread around him and drew the war from memory. Forty-six finished drawings. My brother said that if a date or a location did not reconcile, Dad would not let it go until he figured out what actually happened. I put those drawings and his own written account together into a book this past year, which is where this photograph is from.
Dick Winters had several of the drawings copied and enlarged and sent to the production company for the series, to give the writers background. Stephen Ambrose, who Dad worked with for years on his book, called them obviously almost priceless. One of them is etched into a memorial in Normandy now.
He was my father. That is what he looked like a few hours before he went out the door.
#history
source
You have seen this moment. Men in jump gear under an airplane wing, loaded down, waiting. Band of Brothers put those faces in front of the world.
This is not that. This is one of the real ones.
The man on the right is my father, T/Sgt. Pat Christenson, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. An original Toccoa man. Michael Fassbender played him in the series.
He jumped second in the stick, right behind Dick Winters. Winters wrote to our family and said he wanted his best, most dependable man right behind him, and that was Pat.
Nobody standing in this frame knows yet how any of it turns out. That is what makes the photograph worth something. Not the man he became. The one right there with his gear on, waiting.
He was also the only man in the company who could draw.
He came home. Went back to the telephone company, the same job he left in 1942, and worked there thirty-eight years splicing cables and climbing poles. Married my mother. Raised three sons.
And in the evenings, for the next forty years, he sat at a drawing board with his journals and his reference books spread around him and drew the war from memory. Forty-six finished drawings. My brother said that if a date or a location did not reconcile, Dad would not let it go until he figured out what actually happened. I put those drawings and his own written account together into a book this past year, which is where this photograph is from.
Dick Winters had several of the drawings copied and enlarged and sent to the production company for the series, to give the writers background. Stephen Ambrose, who Dad worked with for years on his book, called them obviously almost priceless. One of them is etched into a memorial in Normandy now.
He was my father. That is what he looked like a few hours before he went out the door.
#history
source
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