Branch served: U.S. Navy, 1999–2003
When Eric Christians brought his dad aboard a Navy ship, he could already find his way around in the dark.
His father had joined the trip from San Diego to Everett, WA, as the ship returned from a deployment. For four or five days, he got to see the life his son had come to consider ordinary.
At night, Christians remembers, the ship kept exterior light to a minimum. Getting outside meant passing through one door, closing it, then opening another so light would not spill onto the deck. Christians knew where everything was. Hearing his father’s reactions reminded him of his own first days aboard.
“By that point, I was so accustomed to it; it was just normal,” he said.
Today, Christians works with buyers and sellers through Christians Home Crew, brokered by eXp Realty, in the Fargo-Moorhead area. His background includes years of home inspection work and a college education. But when he talks about becoming someone who could handle responsibility, he returns to the Navy and the four years he served between July 15, 1999, and July 15, 2003.
He joined at 18, interested in seeing the world. Along the way, he learned how to live with people he had never met, supervise other sailors, and finish work that nobody particularly wanted to do.
A Reason to Leave Home
Christians grew up near Herman, MN, on a small hobby farm where there was usually livestock to care for and an assortment of other animals around. He hunted, fished, played football, and ran track.
Military service was familiar in his family. His brother had joined the Army a year before him, and an uncle had served in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Christians listened to his uncle’s experiences, but he was also drawn to a recruiter’s descriptions of ports overseas. The food in Thailand. The beaches in Australia. Places well beyond the Minnesota town where he had grown up.
“That was probably the thing that really got me to go Navy over anything else,” he said.
After a delay in the enlistment process, things moved quickly. Christians signed his paperwork in late June and left in mid-July, giving his mother considerably less time to prepare than she had expected.
