Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1vn3m8t/michael_fassbenders_first_major_role_was_playing/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/television by /u/PatChristensonSon on 2026-08-13 07:14:04+00:00.

My father was T/Sgt. Burton "Pat" Christenson (Michael Fassbender), Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. He jumped into Normandy on D-Day, second man out the door behind Dick Winters, and he carried the company guidon.

In the first episode, "Currahee," the young paratrooper Christenson is caught drinking from his canteen on a forced night march and Sobel punishes him. It was Fassbender's first major role. Millions of people watched that scene, and for a lot of them it became the defining image of my father.

It did not happen. Not to him.

At the end of thirteen weeks at Toccoa they ran a final physical competition. Obstacle courses, push-ups, broad jumps, pull-ups, wall climbs, duck walks, sprints, mile runs, one after another with almost no rest. My father scored 163 points, the highest in Easy Company. Dick Winters confirmed it years later in a letter to our family.

Here is all my father wrote about winning it:

"I had the highest score in the Company and was awarded a pass to the town of Toccoa for the following Monday."

And here is what he wrote about the marches, the passage the canteen scene was adapted from:

"During these endurance tests, we were miserable, exhausted, and we thought that if we did not get a drink of water we were certain to collapse."

He was describing all of them. Every man. He was not confessing anything. Our family asked the men who were there and the answer came back the same every time: not Christenson.

He died in 1999, two years before the series aired. He never saw another man wear his name and he never got to say any of this himself.

He sent more material to Stephen Ambrose than any other man in Easy Company. Ambrose called the drawings almost priceless. And in 1999, the year my father died, Dick Winters sent his personal file of eighteen of those drawings to the writers of the Hanks and Spielberg production. His work made it into that room. He did not.

The fittest man in Easy Company did not drink from the canteen. He carried the guidon.