[Interview Begins]

BLUMENBERG: Okay, I'll get started. My name is Tom Bloomberg and it is Wednesday, June 2nd. And we are in West Bend, Wisconsin. I am not affiliated with any organization and it is my pleasure to be here today with Douglas Steve Christianson, who also is from West Bend. So welcome, Doug, And we'll get started with the interview as we discussed. Okay. So first of all, tell me tell me where you were born. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Was born and raised [XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX], almost 79 years ago. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And I was raised in rural Fresno, California, on my grandfather's vineyard. 

BLUMENBERG: Oh. 

CHRISTIANSEN: He had a come from Denmark as a young man lured by people selling real estate. And he bought 20 acre vineyard and of Thompson seedless grapes to make raisins. And he, with his 20 acre vineyard, raised five kids. It was a tour of the community elder in the church and said all the kids that wanted to go to college. 

BLUMENBERG: And we all ages grapes and. 

CHRISTIANSEN: We had. 

BLUMENBERG: Raisin. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Raisins. The percent participated in drying the raisins that were done in the field, you know, paper trays. And he had to turn the trays to see that they dried properly. And so that was where I was raised. 

BLUMENBERG: And what was your father's name? 

CHRISTIANSEN: My father's name was Steve. My father deserted the family when I was seven years old. And my mother raised myself and my two brothers. And I think she did a pretty good job of it. Yeah. So that was before welfare. You know, that's the days when it was a disgrace to take any a welfare. So my mother went to work as a secretary and she continued to work in the insurance business until she was in her mid seventies before she finally retired. 

BLUMENBERG: And what was her name? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Frieda. Frieda burg. 

BLUMENBERG: Christianson, Byrd V rg, if you know her. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Her parents immigrated from Russia. They were ethnic Germans in Russia and they immigrated with a great number of people. The same thing. There was a church there in Fresno that I think every second Sunday of the month the service was in German. 

BLUMENBERG: Oh, yeah. Okay. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And. There's it, a large extended family. There were seven kids in my mother's family. My mother was the oldest, one. 

BLUMENBERG: Of big family. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Big family, close knit. We pretty much had every Thanksgiving and every Christmas together as a family, extended family. And so that was my whole life. 

BLUMENBERG: Was it? 

CHRISTIANSEN: I went to a three room school, four through eighth grade. 

BLUMENBERG: And and that was in Fresno. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Or just it was in a in rural Fresno, just called Bolles Elementary School. And the building now for the last 50 years or so has been a rest home. They consolidated the smaller schools in the area, made a big school out of it, and the quality of education declined dramatically. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you mentioned you had was it about five siblings? 

CHRISTIANSEN: No. Two brothers. Two, three, three, three of us. Okay. They were both. My older brother was went into the Air Force as a navigator and he retired. He stayed in. He retired after almost 26 years, I think, as a major. And my younger brother was in the Navy and he was aboard a ship at the same time I was in Vietnam. My brother, the Air Force major, was in Vietnam. He was at a lieutenant and my younger brother was on a ship off shore. 

BLUMENBERG: So everybody was serving. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Everybody was serving. 

BLUMENBERG: Well, tell me about. You went to school outside of Fresno there, and then. You had mentioned to me you ended up going to college for a while. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. I went to two years of college at Fresno State College, and I was at the end of the two years, I wasn't doing very well and I didn't have any particular place to go or things to do, and I was blocked by a recruiter on campus. And he said, How would you like to fly airplanes? And I stopped and I said, That doesn't sound too bad. What do you mean? Well, if you had two years of college, they had a program called Mach had program Marine Aviation Cadet program that you sent to Pensacola. And Marquette was a quasi between enlisted officer. Seniority. You were just a cadet until you received your wings. When you received your wings, you. You were commissioned as a second lieutenant and you had three years of service that you owed the government for the flight training. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. So that happened pretty fast? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, that happened pretty fast. The first airplane I was ever on was a national airline eight from San Francisco to Pensacola. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: It was my first flight. And they. You had military training along with the academics and flight training at the same time. So there were two groups of marine aviation cadets and Navy aviation cadets. The Navy program, though, they were almost all college graduates and they were the same way they went through flight training. And when they were commissioned as a engine in the Navy, they had three and a half years of service that they owed the government. You know. 

BLUMENBERG: So well, you're walking down the street and the Marine recruiter finds you. And how do you explain that to your mother? Oh, they're. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Just. So I'm going in and they're going to make me a pilot. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Okay. 

BLUMENBERG: So if you. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Keep in touch. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: You got that one word? Yeah. Yeah. And your brothers? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, I was. I was working at the time. I actually went to work when I was 13 for one of my uncles. He had a machine shop at filling station. So I worked in the machine shop or the filling station from the time I was 13 until I went into the service. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay, so you had plenty of job experience? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: And then when you signed up with your recruiter, what was the process? 

CHRISTIANSEN: It was taking a series of tests and then going up to San Francisco, raising your right hand and swearing, uphold the Constitution. And you were in the service. You were. And then from there, they gave me a plane ticket to go to Pensacola. That was pretty much the extent of it. 

BLUMENBERG: So after Pensacola and when would that be considered boot camp for you? 

CHRISTIANSEN: That was boot camp for me. You know, that was the only military training we had, was actually, I think about a year, about a month in Pensacola, in a barracks situation where you had a sergeant that was yelling at you and, you know, marching practice and that sort of thing. It wasn't very extensive, although we did qualify with weapons and with the M1 and with a 45 pistol and everything else was flight related. 

BLUMENBERG: So you were concentrated on getting in that airplane and. 

CHRISTIANSEN: You started out in the G 34 across the field, which I think it's interesting to note that there's now a federal prison camp where I was my initial flight training was. 

BLUMENBERG: So is that is that still in operation. 

CHRISTIANSEN: In the federal prison Is. But the airfield is no longer a airfield. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. Then tell me about how do you safely spell it softly. 

CHRISTIANSEN: As a u. F. F. L. E. Y. I believe. Okay. 

BLUMENBERG: I'll probably look that up with that is that I find that quite often where the bases change into the well. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And when I went from I was very fortunate and pretty much all the Marines were going into helicopter training out of basic flight training, which was a T 34 and a week before I was to graduate from basic flight training. They called it a jet pipeline opened up where they were going to take five Marines a class and send them to training, which was Meridian, Mississippi, and that was basic training and a T to J. And from there I went back to Pensacola to take your initial carrier qualification also in the T2 and then to basic to advanced training, which was at Leesville, Texas. Interesting to note that Leesville, Texas is also a federal prison that I was just before my time. 

BLUMENBERG: I think it's a good thing. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. And advanced training was in the afternoon in f 11 airplanes, which also include carrier qualification in the afternoon before you got your wings. And when you got the wings, which were you're certified a pilot and Navy pilot. And had you qualified, you had to qualify out carriers before you did that, before they gave it to you? 

BLUMENBERG: Well, since I don't know anything about flying an airplane, how does one get how does one get trained? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, you've got a classroom where they they actually teach you the the theory of flight, how the wings work and how the controls work for the airplanes. And then. It just build from there. If you sit in a practice cockpit, which is pictures of the controls in there and you have to memorize each one of the controls and be able to point them out to the instructor, then you get into the airplane and after I think about 13 hours and they let you show them, they have a whole program of what you go through. You know, it started start out turning and climbing, and then you can do basic care of that extreme later on. But it's all one thing after another. And the syllabus is set for everybody. And until you pass a syllabus, you know, you can't continue on to the next level. 

BLUMENBERG: You know. Well, so pretty standardized, but that's how you get there. 

CHRISTIANSEN: That's how you get there. You start have to walk before you can run. 

BLUMENBERG: So, okay, then you went through your training. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Okay. 

BLUMENBERG: Well, I think there's more to it. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, at the end of the training and you were assigned to a squadron and such, I was a jet pilot. I was assigned to af8 squadron in El Toro, California. And there we were flying f a crusader, which was the last of the daylight fighters you're supposed to see, see the guy and shoot him down. You know, that's what it was. It had guns and we would practice gunnery at Yuma, Arizona, and it was a regular practice, dogfighting and shoot the other guy down, sort of it at the. They sort of guaranteed you 18 months in a squadron and then at the end of the 18 months, you, they would do whatever with you. Most of the people in the squadron I was in my age, the young guys, as they came up under 18 months, they were getting orders to fact school fact as a forward air controller and the way the Marines did it, he went down to Camp Pendleton. You put a radio on your back and you said, drop it over here. No, that didn't seem like what I really wanted to do with my life or the length of my life. And so, truth be told, I was having a couple of beers in the old club bemoaning my fate with the major that I had met there, which was kind of unusual. Second lieutenants socialize with majors and vice versa. Anyway, I was bemoaning my fate that when he become a forward air controller and a major in the squadron I was in kept getting letters down from the group, which is squadrons in a group and for second tour pilots for C-130s. So I had asked the CEO to put in for that and he said, You're not a second tier pilot. I said, Well, I'm here my first term. If I go over there, that'll be second term. And he kicked me out of his office. So this major that I was talking to, he said, you know, he says, if I were you, I'd get my name over to the group any way I could. So I said, okay. So the next weekend that junior lieutenants had had the duty, I was in there. I went into the administration office and I wrote a note, Christian said, For C-130s, it scribbled a signature on the bottom and threw it in the outbox. And a about a week later, I get orders to go to C-130s. The squadron was on the base at El Toro, up just another squadron in that group, and C.O. was not very happy. And I said, What do you want me to do, disobey my orders? And it turns out the guy I had been drinking with was the one placement officer. And when I got in to see what Virgil went through training there, mostly I had it in a flight of C-130, and a couple of weeks later he shows up. He said, Christian said you had a pretty good idea there. 

BLUMENBERG: I think. 

CHRISTIANSEN: He wrote himself orders for that to. 

BLUMENBERG: Go well. Good for both of you. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, well, you have to be your own advocate. Yes. So you really do. And that was just a part, if you like, a spot. 

BLUMENBERG: So what's it like to fly a C-130? A you know, I saw those coming, a little Iraqi Air force base, and they're just massive. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, they're not really very large as as far as an aircraft is. It has a four engines. It's very responsive and it's a very good airplane. And the props create a lift over the wing. They're so massive and they can do almost anything. They really are amazing airplanes and they're still in production. And they had been when I was in there in 64, that they were not a new airplane then. 

BLUMENBERG: So have they been around? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Very good design. One of the real military screw ups. 

BLUMENBERG: I think, stayed in service that long. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, well, I think it's interesting. And I also went in the Marine Corps as a pilot. He went to Ohio State and he went to the program for college people that they go spend a month in Quantico, Virginia, doing Marine Corps things for a period of time and a couple of times during their college careers. And then at the end of when they graduate from college, they receive a commission in the service. And he went to pilot school in Pensacola, and he essentially trained on the same airplanes that I trained on. It's amazing a later mile of it. But the t34 that I flew had it had a piston engine in it. The t-34 he flew had a turbine jet turbine engine in it. And the t2i flew it for basic jet safety. Literally, he had two engines and I had had one engine. And then he trained in the A4, which was in service when I was in the service. So I thought that was kind of interesting that he went through there. 

BLUMENBERG: Quite a parallel. 

CHRISTIANSEN: You know, first, and he spent 21 years and he retired as a lieutenant colonel. And very we're blessed with two very good kids. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Right. Well, you fly in C-130s and then what was your next step? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, the mission from the squadron, El Toro, we would fly C-130s all the way over to Okinawa and to Vietnam. It was a that at 300 knots with it, which is fairly fast, but slow for airplane wise. It's a it's like 11 hours from from El Toro to Idaho and then from there to Wake Island, Wake Island, to kill people in the Philippines, from the Philippines. You go to Vietnam and back to the Philippines and then go to Okinawa or both directions going there cause our sister squadron was in Okinawa. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay, Sure. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. And so that's pretty much everybody in the squadron at El Toro was flying in that direction anyway, back and forth, and eventually everybody rotated over to do their Vietnam service to Okinawa. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Well, I know you have a lot of stories, and I want to just back you up one second about your training. Was there any one incident that was like a highlight of your training or a lowlight. 

CHRISTIANSEN: A near-death experience? 

BLUMENBERG: Well, it's something like that. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. And in the afternoon, you were carrier qualifying in Corpus Christi, Texas. And the other show is the landing senior officer. He is the guy that that was the boss of the carrier. And is he tell you, you know, to land or to go round that sort of thing. And the guy we had as our live show was a major name of Brubeck. And that's one of the names you never forget. 

BLUMENBERG: Didn't forget. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. He was very he won't do anything unless I tell you to do. I'll tell you. You don't. You don't have a mind. I. I have control of your mind. And we were. You made. You went out to the carrier. You made three arrested landings and three shots off of the the catapult. And as I was coming around for my third one, they it was what they call a cod, which is a twin engine airplane, going to make a takeoff on the carrier deck, which with a without a most of the jets use all of the jets. He is like catapult. Well, he was just winding up on the end of the deck and he was going to take off just under power alone all and of course, the carrier has is into the wind and speed adds wind down to the deck. So you have actually if you're landing speeds 110, if the carriers go going creating 30 knots a wind your actual. Your actual speed to the carrier is 80. Not so. It's quite a bit slower. But anyway, I was coming down chute and this guy was revving up the engines on the end where I was supposed to land. And he, the guy said, Keep coming. I said, I don't think I can make it. He said, Keep coming out. You when to go to heaven, I'll tell you. So I ended up right down behind him. And when it started to roll and it was obvious I couldn't land with him there. And he told me to go around the net. So I pushed the power up to go around the prop push off the God plane, hit me and flipped me over and over and in the air. So there was a a box of these stood in next to the next to the deck that you landed on. And I the only thing I think saved my life was the fact that I kept it rolling. Instead of trying to do the roll, I was pretty much upside down. So I kept it going over. And I don't know why. I raised the gear and I went down right on the water and it was slowly accelerating and not getting wet. And I look up and I see the heads coming over the side looking to watch me crash. So. So anyway, I went from there back to base. I said I just told him I was leaving. It was bingo fuel. So they didn't say anything. They just gave me a heading to Corpus Christi where we were to refuel before going back to Beaver. So I did. I went back to Beaver. They had an airplane for quite a long time when the helicopter from the cod arrived, from the carrier arrived with the yellow. So on board I met it and and I hit him a good one and he went down and here I am, you know, I've got ready graduate. I've said, look at it, I just hit a major. And so I went over to the hit squatted area. I sat outside the sales office and after a while they said, What are you here for? Well, I just slugged a major. I thought you'd want to talk to me. He said, I don't have anything to say to him. He says, If I were you, I'd go get a beer. 

BLUMENBERG: Really? And he heard about the incident? Yeah, I'm sure you did. Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, so, anyway, I was informed later that the major group Becker had been relieved of his duties as an officer. And so. 

BLUMENBERG: And you're. And you lived to tell about. 

CHRISTIANSEN: It, and I left to tell about. 

BLUMENBERG: Michael, so. 

CHRISTIANSEN: It was close. You know, if I got in the drink, there's every possibility that I could have survived that, you know, if it hadn't been a catastrophic event over any type of thing. But I was pretty I was awful close to the water and the speed. When you're less than wingtip distance, you get a cushion of air underneath you that helps you. Steve, stay up. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I'm sure everybody has one of those. 

BLUMENBERG: So is that the best or the worst or a combination? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, it was. That was the scariest for sure. Of course, when in Vietnam they were shooting at you. That's kind of scary. And. And I flew the C-130 in Vietnam. Airplanes I was piloting were hit on eight different occasions with ground fire. And one occasion we had a holes in the airplanes. So I figure if I played the lottery, it's going to be in there somewhere. 

BLUMENBERG: They are. So you were C-130 and you're you were in Vietnam making your own. 

CHRISTIANSEN: We this the way the military was worked it at the time. And I think it's still pretty much the same thing. We were considered a transport aircraft and if we were based in Vietnam, transport aircraft came under the Air Force control and the Marines had no desire to have any Air Force control over any part of them. So they based us in Okinawa, the squadron. They made this C.O., C.O., a ground brigadier general who was told that flew with that airplane guys. And we had a subunit in Danang, where we essentially spent six days in Okinawa and six days into name, because that's where we figured we could keep the aircrew healthy for six days without too much problem or having to do maintenance there in Vietnam. And so we essentially supported the Air Corps area, which was the northern part of Vietnam. And from the DMZ, there was an airport there, Oh Dong, which is right outside the DMZ. And it truly was a major base for Marines there. And that was one of the I consider it interesting when we were flying out of El Toro. 352 We carry stuff generally to Vietnam up to July or today and where the Marines were and we were they loaded it up with the arresting gear, which shirt runways. They would put these cables out and they had these jet engines that would act as brakes for tension on the line with an airplane with a tail hook, cut the line, and it slowed down so much as a carrier would and the arresting gear on an airplane that we were flying to Vietnam out of El Toro and we would run it down the runway headed for Hawaii. And we kept going and going and going. It wouldn't go into the air. It was just who didn't want to go. So we got, after a very long run, a C-130. We got airborne and we went out over the water and we said, there's something wrong here. We apparently are a lot heavier than we were told we were going to be. And he came back. Yeah, we didn't tell you, but we only weighed gave you the weight from one of the machines and there was two on board. So we were twice as heavy as we were supposed to. The load was twice as much it was supposed to be. So we took the thing in to Hawaii and to Vietnam, but it was very hard getting it off the ground. Each place and getting it to climb was pretty difficult. I know in the Philippines can be points in a bay where the air bases are. They do a lot of actually, I believe, Federal Express but the whole Kiwi point air station and uses it for their far East hub and we had to circle inside the bay three times before we get enough altitude to take off for Vietnam to to like where we left the gear. 

BLUMENBERG: It sounds dangerous. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well yes. You didn't want to lose an engine under those fires, but you did what you had to do. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. So you were carrying supplies. And I guess out of curiosity, you had machines work. What else did you. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, we carried a lot of ammunition, and we carried bodies, carried troops, both U.S. and Vietnamese troops, to various spots. We probably moved some North Vietnamese into their areas where they were going. And we we had a. We called a subunit in Guinea. And when I first got there, it was a junior lieutenant's job to to be in charge of the thing, fill out the paperwork, deal with the people that were there on the base and their name. And we had this one major nice enough guy, but he had this little problem that every time he keyed the microphone with his finger, all of his brains would run down into the end of the finger and he couldn't talk over the radio. It was a we called him Battlefield Bruce because he went down there and they made him the subunit commander. And he loved it. He became total combat brain in there. The joke was he was getting enough weapons shipped out that he was shipping home for his collection, that there was probably a Howitzer going to be under one of the tanks. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Anyway, the old round peg in the round hole. 

BLUMENBERG: And it found this place. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Now, while you were doing that, did you receive any, any promotions while your. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, I, I went over after 18 months. You got an automatic second lieutenant to first Lieutenant. Promotion. That was. That was just basic. And then, well, I was over there about six months after I got first Lieutenant. They made captains because they were growing so fast because of the Vietnam buildup. This was in 66 and early 67 that I was over there. And that's when the buildup really started to go. Okay. Cause I think, you know, so all of us lieutenants became captains, and all the captains became majors. Yeah. Right. In very short period of time, stepping up. 

BLUMENBERG: Well, your, your time over there was. How many? How many months? 

CHRISTIANSEN: 13 months. 

BLUMENBERG: 13 months? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. That was the standard Marine deployment. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. 

CHRISTIANSEN: As if an unaccompanied. You couldn't take your family with you. Where we're on Okinawa, where all the Air Force and Army have their families there. They weren't allowed to. So it was just one of those Marine things. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: So then what happened to you? I mean, you were. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, at the end of the year. I got married when I was flying fighters at El Toro. I get married and then I wave goodbye at sea in 13 months. When I was the end of my deployment, 13 months was the end of my three years commitment. When I got on an airplane out of Okinawa for El Toro. Then when I got off the airplane at El Toro, I went through a release from active duty service there. 

BLUMENBERG: And you were out. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And I was out and. Glad to be out here. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Well, are there any experiences while you were flying Okinawa, the Vietnam War, that stick out in your memory? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Not really. It was the flying in Vietnam was very. We never got above 1500 feet. It was all low level back and forth to these various places. We'd leave in the morning. We didn't fly at night until much later. We would engage, say the battlefield. Bruce would say, You need to move these troops from Dubai to Doha. So we'd get a few by and they'd have to load him up, the troops take him up there and then load up. Did. One of the worst experiences, I guess, was there was a helicopter shot down in the DMZ. And so it was all burned up and everything. So they loaded the bodies on a66 by truck and drove the truck up our end, but tied it down. And there said, take it to Grange registration, which is in Saigon. Well, that's tropics, very hot. And it doesn't take long for a body to become very noticeable. So luckily, our flight engineer crew chief had a bottle of Vic, so we should fix up our noses and food with the windows open, which we could do the ramp open to get airflow going through the plane and took it to Saigon, where they unloaded it, drove the truck off, and then took several days to get the stink out of the airplane. How? 

BLUMENBERG: Well, you mentioned your crew chief. What does your C-130 crew consist of? 

CHRISTIANSEN: You had two pilots playing commander and copilot. It was me. You had a flight engineer and he owned the airplane, actually. And he had a radio operator, loadmaster, who worked for him. And actually, in the end, he was usually a corporal or lance corporal or something like that. So they two of them took care of the airplane. We also had a navigator along through the back and forth to Vietnam because we could navigate ourselves to that distance over water. And the navigator just went back. He didn't he didn't fly with us in Vietnam. So we had the radio operator loadmaster. He took care of all the he and the the flight engineer crew chief who was usually a gunnery officer. Which is a very high enlisted rank in the Marines. 

BLUMENBERG: So you're in pretty close quarters with your fellow crew members and other pilots. Yes. You develop some strong. 

CHRISTIANSEN: I'll show you. I have some pictures in my in my apartment there of a squad tents. That was another thing. Crazy operation. Yeah, the Bruce Battlefield. Bruce, the subunit commander. He found out that Navy needed precision instruments calibrated, and the only place to do that was in the Philippines, in Cuba. So he made a deal over there. We take this, and it was a box, a bay. But yeah, we know that. And there are C-130 in here to to the Philippines. Well. Well, they were calibrating the instruments. We'd fly the pilots and crew would fly over to the Air Force base here in the Philippines because they had a lot better officer club facilities that they did at Cuba point. And so we go there for a steak dinner and everything and then fly back to Cuba. Before we get back to Cuba, we put a sergeant in charge of the clubs there, had a plane load of sand and San Miguel beer ready to load on our C-130. So we have the likes of precision instruments and we have this load of sea of San Miguel beer. I think we paid seven and a half cents a bottle for it to the to the sergeant there. And I have no idea what he paid for it, but we sold it for $0.10 a bottle and we made a fortune in there. And since we were temporary there, we just had tents to live in. And they were building these hard huts. The Seabees were building these huts with plywood sides and screens, stuff like that, which were much nicer than the tents we were living in. So we traded a planeload of San Miguel beer for to get an end of the line for the Seabees to build us these huts. So they built the that's where we lived pretty good after that. Yeah. We also we used to fly every once in a while. We fly in Hong Kong out of Vietnam is the unofficial ah and our flights and we give the the some people that were going on it, give them a hunk of money, buy something for our little club there which we had, you know, pictures and pictures of naked women and black velvet and Yeah. And also a large commercial refrigerator that we kept for the beer and we bartered the beer away for whenever we needed. 

BLUMENBERG: A system of monetary or non-monetary exchange. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: San Miguel was a lot better than the Budweiser they were shipping over there or whatever it was. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Well, you mentioned you got married while you were in El Toro, was it? Yes. And how did you keep in contact with your wife around here? Well. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Letters. They had these little so had little tape recorders with reel to reel tape. And it's one of those home and send one back. 

BLUMENBERG: Nobody know what that is right now. 

CHRISTIANSEN: So, no, they wouldn't know what it is. 

BLUMENBERG: It's amazing. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. You know. 

BLUMENBERG: Now you get go back to El Toro and they signed you out. 

CHRISTIANSEN: You were you were a civilian. 

BLUMENBERG: You were a civilian. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: And then what happened to you? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, then I applied to a bunch of all the airlines I could think of. Okay. And I happened to get with Pan Am. They hired me. I was out of work for almost a little over a month, which is the longest I had ever been out of work in my life. So I went to work for Pan Am, and first flights were back over to Vietnam to tour the ANA flights. Pan Am was flying at a cost plus a dollar for to take. We took troops to Hawaii, which was the marriage had a deal where they could meet their wives there for their I forget how many days R&R they got. We also went to Darwin and Sydney, Australia, from Vietnam also to various other places occasionally. Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Taipei, where they decided that they could take the troops without causing too much damage to the civilian population. 

BLUMENBERG: To get around. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was when I first went to work for Pan Am. They made me a navigator, Navigator and relief copilot. So we'd go all the way around the world with every stop you made you. They had a flight that left the West Coast at the East Coast at the same time in opposite directions around the world. And you go to San Francisco, we go to Honolulu it layover and you catch the flight the next day, take it on, and then you'd go to. Generally Philippines or Tokyo, and from there to Bangkok, in Thailand. From Thailand, you'd go to India, either New Delhi or. They call it Mumbai now. It used to be called something else, which in art, I. 

BLUMENBERG: Can. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Bring it up right now. 

BLUMENBERG: Change the name and. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, and from there to Frankfurt generally, and Frankfurt to London and London polar flight from London to Los Angeles and then to Los Angeles, you go to the dead engine to San Francisco and you are done with a trip that was 13 days, 80, 84 hours or something like that, a flight time, and that it was a month's work. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. A lot of time in the cockpit. 

CHRISTIANSEN: A lot of time in the cockpit as well. 

BLUMENBERG: You know, for this interview. Part of it is going to the I should say, part of it's all going to the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. And so far, we have got out of we've been around the world. We haven't really got you out to California yet. So how does your what's your connection to Wisconsin? 

CHRISTIANSEN: My wife I met on a blind date in California. She was living with her sister, who is from Kimball Shaw, Wisconsin. 

BLUMENBERG: Just up the road. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Just off the road. And I met her on a blind date. One of my high school buddies was dating a gal that worked at the same place her wife worked at. And so we went out on a blind date. We went to Federico Fellini's eight and a half movie at an art theater in Fresno, California. That was it. After that, we went to the outpost where they had a band dancing. That was. There were several places in Fresno and in Wisconsin that had live music on Friday and Saturday nights. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah, dance music. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And music. 

BLUMENBERG: Well, here's your. We're sitting here in West Bend, and I know that there's more to the story in Wisconsin, so. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Okay. I was I was transferred from New York, from San Francisco to Miami by Pan-Am. So we moved to Florida and we bought a home in Naples across the peninsula from the airport where I worked in Miami. And after I'd been there several years, PanAm notified me that I was being furloughed and they said that I would be 3 to 5 years without a pilot's job. Well, I had no known skills other than flying airplanes. And so my wife's parents owned a supper club in New Prospect called Fin and Feather, and they had been trying to sell it for a couple of years. I had nothing to do, and I believe enough to think I could run it. So we bought the restaurant from them. Yeah. And we ran it for three and a half years. And then little. 

BLUMENBERG: Different than flying an airplane. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Little different to fly an airplane. I knew where I was going to be every morning. And then I got recalled to Pan Am, and we sold the restaurant to one of our waitresses and her husband, and it seemed like a good place to raise kids. So we stayed there. We had young children and we first came to Wisconsin and we put him through school. And I went on with Pan Am to be based back in Miami and in New York. And I spent six years based in Berlin, Germany, which was the first part of my entire career. 

BLUMENBERG: Men and women with me in Germany. So interesting. 

CHRISTIANSEN: The flying was all small trips. Pan Am had a deal with the German government. This was from World War to Time or to service Berlin because the Russians would not allow German carriers through the the corridors into Berlin. So we service Pan-Am serviced, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart in German, I guess internal German service. And then Pan Am had a a a hub large hub that Frankfurt. So we connect people from London to Frankfurt to go elsewhere on Pan Am and from Berlin to Frankfurt and the other cities in Germany. And then Reagan said, tear down that wall. And Gorbachev said, okay, in there with that deal. 

BLUMENBERG: And after six years. 

CHRISTIANSEN: After six years, I was there for six years, you know, and I was there when the wall came down. And they celebrated mightily through that. I had an apartment in Zeeland, which is the south part of the of the divided city. And there was I was about a half a block from the wall on the south side where the wall was. There was actually fencing with a space in between where they had guarded houses and another fence and they had dogs there and guard houses with the guns and everything. They said the wall was down, people tore cut holes in the fence, adopted the dogs and riding bicycles in it. The next day of that were the jeeps that serviced the guard towers and said the dogs rode down, which interesting time. 

BLUMENBERG: Really to get to witness that. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Historic. Yeah. Well then then you left Germany and back to. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Back to Miami on a different airplane and then the Pan-Am went under and Delta bought the airplane. I was flying and took some cruise with it. It was the Airbus A310 and I was flying. Internationally. And so then I became a Delta pilot, and that lasted for 11 years until I turned 60. At the time, 60 was mandatory retirement age for airline pilots. It's since been raised to 65, I believe. 

BLUMENBERG: But you could go back and make up for that last time. 

CHRISTIANSEN: No, you didn't. That was part of the stipulation. 

BLUMENBERG: No. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. No going back? 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Yeah, but your family was still in. 

CHRISTIANSEN: The wife and kids were in canvas for a while. I was still in Germany. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. 

CHRISTIANSEN: After I came back from Germany, the. We put the youngest son in college in Stevens Point. We had a U-Haul packed and ready, and we moved to Florida, moved there, and we bought a condo in Lighthouse Point, Florida, which is in the Fort Lauderdale area. And then after a few years, we bought a house on a golf course in Stuart, Florida. And we were living there when I was getting ready to retire and grandchildren were beginning to appear. And so we left that and moved back to Wisconsin to be with our grandchildren. So in our son here. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. And what what what year was that then? 

CHRISTIANSEN: That was around 2001. We moved back. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. 

CHRISTIANSEN: So we moved. We were I was in an apartment in Cincinnati when 911 happened and we were building a house between campus work. You ask him and the wife was there with the builders and she called me up and said, You better turn the TV on. Something's happening, you know. So I turned the TV on and then they hit the second tower. So I didn't figure I'm going to be flying. And I was on standby for flying at the time. So I was in the apartment, so I called them up into the room, you know, where to reach me. So. And I went home. 

BLUMENBERG: How did you get home? 

CHRISTIANSEN: I had a car. Oh, okay. I had a Yeah, Yeah. You could have an apartment near an airport without having a car. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Well, okay. Here we are in West Bend. And I. You've been here for 20 years now, so. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: So reflecting back upon your. Your service. 

CHRISTIANSEN: I got a good story on the reflection back on the service. I was out and we had moved to Fresno and I was trying to work for Pan Am and I got a call from one of my old buddies and he was back in El Toro. He said, They're having a party for a bunch of guys that I knew. Come on, get the wife and come on down and have a good time. So I said, okay. So wife and I got in the car, drove down in L.A. and got a room in the Saddleback Inn, and I remember that. And we went to this party. So this maybe six months after I had gotten out. So we're walking away from this party to go back to the hotel. And I asked the wife, I said, Did I act that way? She said all the time. I said, No wonder you wanted me to get out of the military. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Yeah. So so that kind of goes into the next question. Now, did the military change your life? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, it taught me a trade that I use for the entire life. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah, for sure. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, I it was very good to our son. He enjoyed it the whole time he was in. And he had a very good flying career and. He flew F-18 fighters off in a carrier squadron. He was based mostly in Buford, South Carolina. The only downside to his job was about every two years it's shipping on a carrier for six months. 

BLUMENBERG: And what was the name of that place? Cherry Hill. Cherry Point or Cherry Point? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. He was in Buford, which is another Ranger base. Cherry Point is in North Carolina. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. Geography, isn't it? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, it's Buford, South Carolina. Still the same way. It's Buford in North Carolina. 

BLUMENBERG: You got to know the language, that's for sure. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: You learn how to fly. And then what? What else did the military do to change your life? 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, I think you eventually grow up. You know, you have other duties. Flying was the only duty I had to deal with people and. I was a airfreight officer in the further Far East, which I had a couple hundred people working for. 

BLUMENBERG: Me. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And mostly in order to decide to do the job. But don't bother. Right. Yeah. And that worked out. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: He had no trouble buying a restaurant and running it and learning how to do that at the same time when. 

BLUMENBERG: We didn't have any sergeants. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And a wife. 

BLUMENBERG: And good. Well, yeah, hopefully. Well, then what about your you know, you had you obviously had work experience. You of any general feelings about war and. 

CHRISTIANSEN: What you know, I think the general feeling is when Jane Fonda dies, if she ever does, I hope they put a year in a letter gravesite. 

BLUMENBERG: Okay. 

CHRISTIANSEN: I, I had no qualms about going. I felt that it was a necessary thing at the time. I think it was a real, really poor leadership from the top that no one got us in there and then failed to get us out of there right away. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. Well, you are doing your duty. 

CHRISTIANSEN: You wish you my duty. And McNamara was saying, Well, see, I think I made a mistake. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, no, never. Never lost his job or anything. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. So do you want to leave any messages for people that might be viewing this or doing some research? 

CHRISTIANSEN: I have generally had a good time. I managed to leave before my liver gave out. 

BLUMENBERG: Yeah. And then you survived it. 

CHRISTIANSEN: And survived it. And, you know, I don't I never kept in touch with people I served with. I never felt a need to do that. I just served and got out. 

BLUMENBERG: And went your own way. Yeah. And you had your life after. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only one time was I ever really scared in Vietnam. And that was when I thought I was all done. And then they sent me down back for another three day excursion. And I did not want to go back at all. 

BLUMENBERG: Had a bad feeling about it. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well, yeah, I thought I was done. I was. Had that great relief, you know? Yeah, I was through. And then you go back and you never know if they they're shooting at you and you know they're shooting at you and. And one passenger dies. The whole time we were there, he was shot, and I said we carried ammunition in and we carried a lot of bodies out. 

BLUMENBERG: You know, so. Well, is there anything we did not cover that you would like to mention before we take. So I can't wait to get some more off the record stories from you. And that's what I'm looking forward to. They want to know what you think about other people should know about veterans in general. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Well. Veterans or people that cared in one way or another, they cared. A lot of veterans. And learned how to be a grown up, how to do things, how to deal with people, which is invaluable. They don't teach those things in schools, you know. And I think. Don't really know. Yeah. 

BLUMENBERG: Sounded like you had an interesting career and an interesting life. And I'm glad I got to meet you. 

CHRISTIANSEN: Oh. 

BLUMENBERG: We can do. 

CHRISTIANSEN: This. Thank you. I can help out. Yeah, I can. Although I can't see why anybody would want to. 

BLUMENBERG: Oh, you mean you'd be surprised. So if there is nothing else, I will close by saying that I am Councilwoman Berg. And I am here today with Doug Douglas. Steve Christensen. And it is Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021, in West Bend, Wisconsin. And Doug, thank you for taking the time and thanks for your service. Glad to. 

[Interview Ends]