A Company of Heroes (10 page)

After the war, Dad went to Springfield College in Massachusetts where he majored in physical education and minored in philosophy. He graduated and they moved to the West Coast where he got a job. Dad did okay for a while, but, like a lot of the other guys, he drank a lot. I think that was that generation’s drug of choice. Fortunately, he was a gentle drunk, always an easygoing guy, and always a gentleman. You couldn’t help but love him. He told me once that after World War II and all he had seen, his philosophy of life was that he was simply going to have as much fun as he could. That was basically what he lived by even years later when he found out he had liver cancer. We were sitting near the ocean on a log down in Olympia and he said, “Well, I’ve had my fun.” That’s how he viewed life and death—enjoy each day while you’re still alive—and boy, he sure did. But his fun often trumped any sense of responsibility.

I was twelve when my parents divorced. I stayed with my mom for a while then went to live with my dad in Seattle. He remarried soon and encountered the same problems in his relationship with my stepmother; she just put up with him longer. Mom never did remarry. I think she always loved Dad—and he always loved her—they just couldn’t live together and make it work. There was always the language difference. She didn’t have any extended family nearby. Then there was Dad’s drinking.

When Dad first got out of college he worked for the YMCA in Bellingham as athletic director. He got involved with the Jaycees, and that led to a job as a life insurance salesman, which is what he worked at the rest of his life. When he moved to Seattle he worked for Olympic National Life. Later he moved to Olympia, and he and my stepmom bought a beautiful home on the beach. He worked for Midland National Life then and that’s where he finished his career. He sold life insurance to the GIs up at Fort Lewis. Being an old Airborne Ranger, he had an instant bond with them and was quite successful in his business.

Mom was an accountant after the war. She was a hell of a mathematician. There were five children in the family and three in Dad’s second. A few years after the divorce, Pat Christenson helped get my mother a good job down in California. They had stayed good friends since the war and had always written letters back and forth. Every year he sent Christmas cards of drawings he had done. She packed up the three younger kids and moved down to Sacramento. After a few years, she moved back up to the Pacific Northwest.

I wanted my kids to know their grandparents well, so we used to go often down to Olympia where my dad lived. My stepmother, Susan, was always kind to me and my family, and I have always loved my three sisters from my father’s second marriage. One day Susan took me aside and said, “Your father’s got liver cancer. It’s terminal.”

I was in shock. They had just found out that week. After that, my wife, Marci, and I made an effort to see as much of my father as we could.

It was just a few months after the diagnosis that he passed away. He never really talked about his feelings or what he had been through, but one day we walked out into the garage together. I asked him if there was anything he wanted me to know about. I was thinking more business thoughts, if he had his will all in order, but he really snapped at me. “Nobody ever did anything for me,” he said. That was the only time I ever saw he had had a hard life himself, how his father had never really been there for him, and about the things he had seen in the war.

Dad didn’t want anybody to know he was dying. He flew to the Easy Company reunion that October in South Carolina to see his old buddies one last time again. He didn’t tell anyone it was going to be his last reunion.

I saw Dad the night before he died. Susan was taking care of him at home. He was in one of those hospital beds and was so weak he couldn’t even talk, but I remember looking into his eyes and knowing that he could understand what I was saying. I told him I loved him. I knew it would be soon. He died at home November 13, 1998.

Dad was cremated and is interred at Tahoma National Cemetery. His plaque reads, “For the good times,” the title to an old country song by Kris Kristofferson.

Several years later, when Mom was eighty-three, she was diagnosed with liver and lung cancer. Doctors caught it early enough so they could have treated it, but she refused. She was always a strong woman, very tough and stubborn. She believed in the afterlife and said she wanted to join her father and mother. Dying is a process, and as she was passing away, we’d catch her talking to her father in Polish like he was right next to her. I hadn’t heard my mother talking Polish in years. She lived with my two sisters toward the end, and I saw her consistently before she passed. On her last night I told her that I loved her, that I realized what she’d been through had been so difficult. She died just a few hours after our conversation, at home, on March 11, 2006.

The same year Dad got sick, we found out that Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg had bought the rights to the book. We didn’t know there was going to be a miniseries or anything yet. I said, “Well, Dad, if they make a movie and you’re in it, who would you want to play you?”

“Tom Cruise,” he said.

He had been very proud when the book had come out a few years earlier. He gave me a copy right away and wrote on the inside, “Because of these events, this is the way life was.”

I always had fun with my dad. In my earlier years I drank with him a lot. Dad loved singing. Whenever Dad got drunk he sang. He loved Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte. He’d get me singing with him, too.

Was he an alcoholic? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. At the reunion in Seattle in 1993, Dad got so drunk he couldn’t tie his shoes. Basically it was a four-day booze fest for him. We heard Dad got so drunk at a reunion in Vegas that he passed out in a parking lot. If the men hadn’t reached him in time he would have died of sunstroke. I hate to write that down, but it’s something that children of alcoholics need to wrestle with. Twenty-five years ago I had some problems of my own when it came to drinking. Fortunately that’s behind me now.

Dad’s big problem was that he was never responsible. He never paid attention to anything—bills, rent, child support—he was definitely lucky that Susan took care of him the rest of his life. But there wasn’t a mean bone in his body. No one ever hated him; they excused much because he was so kind and funny. I think he simply didn’t have a clue about how to be a father or husband. I doubt he ever realized how much his irresponsibility affected other lives or hurt people.

It was never easy to get either of my parents to talk about their experiences during the war, but Mom opened up to me quite a bit toward the end of her life. I may be slightly off about a few details, but what I’ve just described is how I remember my mother telling me things. It was her horror story and she always told it through tears.

What’s one thing I’d want people to remember about my parents? Well, I’d want people to know that we’re not far removed from the generation who lived through World War II. People who went through all that horror really existed. If you see documentaries on the History Channel about how horrible it was in Europe or the Pacific during the war, you know what I mean. I’d want people to know my parents went through some incredibly hard things. It was “because of these events” that they were the way they were. They had their flaws, but they also had a lot of good in them, too. What they went through is part of my heritage. World War II still affects this country—and the world—today. People need to realize that the war was very real. It was very horrible. And it wasn’t all that long ago.

 

 

 

“The true picture of war is impossible to convey—even by those who did the bleeding and the fighting.”

So wrote Burton “Pat” Christenson at the start of a pictorial journal he made for his three sons after the war. The journal is the size of a large picture album and runs more than fifty pages. Inside are pictures drawn by Pat, exquisitely detailed pencil sketches of the war he lived through. Underneath each drawing is an excerpt from a journal he kept about his season of fighting in Europe. Sometimes the journal excerpts show straight descriptions of battle scenes; sometimes they are poems or analyses. The art flows from him in various forms as he’s ever seeking to communicate his experiences.

Pat’s art is graphic, vivid, not something you’d show to a six-year-old. One page shows a soldier clutching his hand over one eye. The soldier’s just been hit by shrapnel. Blood gushes from his hand and spills over his face. The soldier’s other eye is still open, shocked, looking straight ahead. “Only those who were wounded severely know the conflicting emotions and anxieties that race through a person’s brain,” wrote Pat underneath, “if one is still conscious after being hit.”

Pat also left an additional journal, the thickness of a small phone book. He wrote in pencil, sometimes printing the words, sometimes writing in large, clear cursive. The journal begins August 12, 1942, and talks about why and how he joined the Army. It ends in 1945, in Saalfelden, Austria, during occupation duties at the end of the war. Much of the journal appears to be reconstructed in later years from recollections, notes, and conversations with other E Company men. Inside the journal are detailed descriptions of army life and combat, including references to maps and separate essays about everything from what it’s like to have flat feet from the long marches while carrying heavy equipment (“Sheer torture. My arches were gone. I found a podiatrist who sold me a pair of steel arch supports.”) to a probing query about motivations for war (“What are we fighting for? Very few men in combat mention patriotic motives. Thoughts of making it through the war and going home are foremost in their minds.”).

The two journals, together with his drawings, leave one of the most complete eyewitness accounts of life in Easy Company. What follows is the story of Burton “Pat” Christenson.

Burton “Pat” Christenson was born in Oakland, California, on August 24, 1922. Few people ever called him Burton. Most of his friends either called him Pat, a nickname he gave himself, or Chris, the shortened form of his last name. His middle name was Paul, so Pat may have been a derivative of that. Family members knew him as Pat. Sometimes he signed letters as Chris.

As a child, he was driven to create. He never studied art professionally except for a few classes during one semester of college, and never worked at art as his career, but it remained a lifelong passion. The gifted boy could draw, play piano, and sing—talents he nurtured his whole life. Well into his seventies, he invited fellow Easy Company members over to his house, including Bill Guarnere, Bob Rader, Tony Garcia, Bill Wingett, Woodrow Robbins, and Mike Ranney, and “they chased the ghosts of the war together,” said his son, Chris. During these impromptu get-togethers, Pat played the piano, the men sang songs from the 1940s, and they drank. “The men were never shy about drinking,” Chris added.

While in the service, Pat and fellow Easy Company members PFC Carl Sawosko and PFC Coburn Johnson sang together with a guitar. Johnson was wounded during the Normandy campaign and sent home. Sawosko was shot in the head in Bastogne and died. Pat described losing his friend Carl as one of his greatest losses.

Pat’s nephew, Gary Van Linge, thirteen years younger, lived just down the street from Pat. “He was always my hero,” said Gary. Before the war, Pat took up archery after watching the movie
Robin Hood
starring Errol Flynn. Gary contracted scarlet fever at age seven and was quite sick for some time. The young boy had a thick book about Robin Hood, and Uncle Pat frequently came to the house and read to the child. “I’ve been involved in archery ever since,” Gary said.

Pat was a creative teen. He made airplane models out of balsa wood kits. Paper was stretched over the wood and glued, then water flicked on the paper to tighten it up. Pat was a master at it, a real artist, noted Gary. The models flew with propellers and rubber bands, and if Pat made a model that wasn’t perfect, he lit it on fire and flew it that way.

Pat could be adventuresome. At age thirteen he jumped off the roof of his house with a large beach umbrella to see if it would break his fall. “I don’t know how much it actually slowed his descent,” Gary said, “because he never did that again.”

Pat was always athletic and physically strong. He made his own weight set by pouring lead into flower pots and sticking pipes in the ends. He was always doing pushups. “He could walk on his hands like nobody I’ve ever seen,” Gary said. “He could walk a hundred yards on his hands, no problem. He was a natural when it came to going into the Airborne.”

Pat taught Gary how to box and made him fight every kid in the neighborhood. It was more a sporting event than malicious fighting, and everybody participated. “All the kids in the neighborhood loved him,” Gary said, “especially when he became a paratrooper. He was a hero to us kids.”

He graduated from Castlemont, a big high school in Oakland, then worked for the Pacific Telephone company for a short time before the war. He enlisted at age twenty. “He wanted to serve his nation,” Chris said, “And I think he wanted the challenge. My dad was a very competitive man.”

Pat’s journals concur. He described how he and a friend from work talked constantly about “getting into the fighting part of the war.” They went to an Army recruiter’s office during their lunch break at the phone company where they saw a brochure for the Airborne that read, “Jump to the Fight.”

They were convinced the paratroopers were the only way to go.

After enlisting, Pat was sent to Toccoa, Georgia, where he wrote that, at first, “the majority of men had little conception of Army life and what was expected of them.” Mostly, “too many men in our ranks were unsuited for the Parachute Infantry,” which prompted heavy washouts. Over time, cohesiveness formed in the unit as the men hardened into soldiers.