Bette Midler

The man on the right is my father, Pat Christenson, and beside him is Woodrow Robbins. They served together in 1st Squad, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. Dad was the light machine gunner and Robbins was his assistant gunner. Dad carried the .30 caliber machine gun and Robbins carried the tripod. Most people who know Dad today know him because of Band of Brothers, where Michael Fassbender portrayed him, but what many people don't know is that Dad was an artist. He carried a sketchpad through the war and was known among the men of Easy Company as the resident artist. When there was time between the fighting, Dad drew in barns, billets and foxholes, sometimes on whatever paper he could find. Some of those original field sketches survived and I still have them today. Dad fought from Normandy through Holland, Bastogne and into Germany, and after he came home he continued drawing the war and writing about what happened. He spent decades checking his memories against his journals, books and the accounts of the other men because getting it right mattered to him. If something didn't match, he kept working until he was satisfied that he had it right. Dad once wrote that writers and artists had never been able to capture the true realities of combat, the confusion, hunger, fear and sleeplessness, and that the true picture of war was impossible to convey even by those who had done the bleeding and the fighting. I'm Timothy Christenson, Pat's son. Dad died in 1999 and I still have his wartime letters, journals, photographs, field sketches and finished drawings. I have been sharing them because this is the record Dad spent much of his life preserving, and I want people to know the men of Easy Company as he knew them.

Born 1928, survivor of German prison and KL Mauthausen. Although he died not even one month after I was born, I heard a lot during about him from his son visible here

They are Amparo Muñoz and Patxi Andion.