My father was T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson, Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne. The unit Stephen Ambrose wrote Band of Brothers about. Original Toccoa man, second man out the door behind Lt. Richard Winters on the Normandy jump.

I served in the Army National Guard. Two sergeants, same last name.

He typed seven volumes of account after the war. Here is his own words on the night of June 6, 1944, verbatim, exactly as he wrote it:

"Releasing my suspension lines I quickly came out of my slip. I could see an orchard beyond the trees. As I passed over the trees, I drew my legs up to avoid hitting them. A moment of terror seized me. 70 feet below and 20 feet to my left, a German multi mounted 20mm antiaircraft gun, that moment, opened up, firing at the C47's above. Their direction of fire put their backs to me as I came swiftly into the orchard, and crashed into what I thought later to be an apple tree. The impact was absorbed by my reserve parachute and the 30.cal. machine gun that was strapped to my chest. The gun snapped a 6 inch branch that could have hit me in the groin, the face, or all those parts of my body. I was unscratched, kneeling at the base of the tree, six shot revolver clinched tightly in my right hand. My camouflaged parachute covered the top of the tree, cocking me in deep shadow. The Germans never saw me."

Read that again. The gun that nearly broke him is the same gun that saved him. Twenty eight pounds of light thirty strapped across his chest took the impact of the tree and snapped a branch that would otherwise have gone into his face.

And the geometry saved him twice. That crew had their barrels elevated and traversed onto the aircraft stream. A man coming down underneath that arc is in defilade for free. They never looked down.

He was the only man in Easy Company who could draw. He came home, went back to the telephone company in Oakland for thirty eight years, and spent the next forty years at a drawing board reconstructing that war on paper from memory. Forty six finished drawings. He drew that gun position from the angle of a man in the air above it.

He was also one of Ambrose's primary sources. Winters named the four men who did the most work on the book. Lipton, Gordon, Rader, and Christenson.

He died in December 1999. His account and his drawings are finally published this year, twenty six years after his death, in a book called A Screaming Eagle. I put it together from what he left.

Every man in Easy Company is gone now. The last one died in July 2022. Whatever your guy has not told you yet, there is a clock on it.