The Christian Philip Skoglund mission photography is organized in two albums:

Album One

Album Two

The church is located in farm country and the parking lot is the size of a corn field. When I arrived I was told that the PGR was to park across the street so there would be enough space for the mourners. Sure enough, the last cars to arrive had to be parked in the handicapped spaces. It was a wonderful turnout.

The photo above shows one of us reading the program for the service. The inside right page lists the sequence of events from Prelude to Doxology. Then at the bottom of that page we are given a small insight into our hero’s character – it says that Christian’s email signature included this quote from Bob Dylan: “A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with freedom.”

Captain Skoglund was a command pilot. I graduated from college three years before he was born. Those two facts make me feel old. And humbled. And grateful.

I didn’t hear the whole service, but his battalion executive officer, LTC Robert Howe, was compelling. He is a very good speaker and he chose the most powerful language. The only place he faltered was when he was saying something about how it is unusual for a senior officer to think of a junior office as his mentor.

So I am glad that we did our small part to support this memorial service. We stood on the walkways between the huge building and the vast parking lot before the service and then again after the service. Our stoic formation was the last thing the many mourners saw before they entered the warm building and we were the first thing they saw when they came back out into the cold. But Denise and Kevin also arrayed our colors along both sides of the long driveway from the street to the parking area. Those flagpoles slid down over metal rods that we pounded into the frozen ground. When it was over, we pulled the flagpoles off the rods and the rods out of the ground. The latter is more easily said than done.

The following series of photos were taken over 90 seconds about 11 minutes after four o’clock. I offer them here confident from what I know of him that Christian would be smiling approvingly.

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