The real Easy Company paratrooper later portrayed in Band of Brothers came home from the war looking like this. 1945.
This is my father, T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne.
His wartime service would later be immortalized in Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers and the HBO miniseries, where he was portrayed by Michael Fassbender.
But when this photograph was taken, none of that existed.
The war was finally over.
He had spent more than three years overseas.
He had jumped into Normandy behind Dick Winters.
Fought through Holland.
Survived Bastogne.
Entered Germany.
Helped liberate one of the Kaufering concentration camps.
And stood on Hitler's Eagle's Nest.
Then he came home.
He took off the uniform and quietly returned to the same job he had left in 1942, climbing telephone poles and splicing cables for the telephone company.
He married my mother, raised three sons, and almost never spoke about himself.
But after dinner, something remarkable happened.
Night after night, for nearly forty years, he sat alone at a drawing board surrounded by wartime journals, military maps, photographs, and reference books, painstakingly reconstructing the war exactly as he remembered it.
If a date didn't match...
If a road wasn't quite right...
If one detail couldn't be reconciled...
He simply kept researching until he found the answer.
He wasn't trying to become famous.
He was trying to leave an honest record before the men who remembered those days were gone.
By the time he finished, he had created forty-six combat drawings that Stephen Ambrose described as "almost priceless." Dick Winters thought so highly of them that he had copies enlarged and sent to the Band of Brothers production team as historical reference while the series was being developed.
Growing up, I just knew him as Dad.
Looking back now, I realize the greatest lesson he ever taught me wasn't about war.
It was about humility.
He never believed that what he had done made him extraordinary.
He believed that remembering it accurately was simply his responsibility.
Sometimes I wonder how many extraordinary people we've all walked past without ever knowing what they carried with them.