A Screaming Eagle

He was the second man out the door.

On the night of June 5, 1944, T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson stood in the doorway of a C-47 over Normandy, second in the stick behind Lieutenant Dick Winters, and jumped into the darkness that opened the liberation of Europe. He was a paratrooper with Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, the men Stephen Ambrose would immortalize in Band of Brothers. He was also something no one else in the company was. He was an artist.

A Screaming Eagle: His Drawings, His Words brings together two rare things in a single volume. The first is Pat's own firsthand account of the war, some 70,000 words carried home in seven volumes of manuscript and set down here in full. Normandy, Holland, the frozen siege of Bastogne, and the long drive into Germany, told in the plain and unflinching voice of a man who lived every mile of it. The second is his art. In the years after the war, Pat returned to the moments that words could never quite hold and rendered them in exacting graphite, forty-six finished combat drawings that preserve the faces, the weapons, the country, and the cost of the fight. These are not sketches dashed off under fire. They are the work of a witness who carried the images for a lifetime and refused to let them fade.

Some of what he saw, he never spoke of. When his son asked why he never drew or talked about the concentration camp at Kaufering, Pat's answer was simple. "Some things you don't need to talk about." This book is his son's effort to make sure the rest is never forgotten.

The worth of Pat's work was recognized by the men best placed to judge it. Stephen Ambrose, who built much of his history on Pat's testimony, called the drawings "almost priceless." Dick Winters wanted Pat as his number two man for the Normandy jump and said so plainly. Bill "Wild Bill" Guarnere, seeing the drawings for the first time, said he had never seen anything like them. A selection was exhibited at the Band of Brothers premiere at the Hollywood Bowl in 2001, and one of Pat's drawings is etched into the memorial at Saint-Come-du-Mont, in the same Normandy country where he came down that first night.

More than a memoir and more than a book of art, A Screaming Eagle is the complete record of one Screaming Eagle's war, told in his own words and drawn by his own hand. It is a firsthand piece of history from inside the most storied company of the Second World War, and a son's tribute to the father who lived it.