LONGMONT, CO, USA U.S. Navy PO3, 2ND MARDIV FMFLANT CAMP LEJEUENE NC RAMADI, IRAQ 12/04/2006
At age 14, Christopher Anderson became one of Colorado’s youngest ever certified baseball umpires. He maintained grace under pressure.
The grown men would come screaming at him. And he would stand there and listen to them and say: ‘Are you done? Now go back to your dugout and let’s play ball,’ said his grandfather, William Hawkins.
Anderson, 24, of Longmont, Colo., was killed Dec. 4 in Anbar province. He was a 2000 high school graduate, a fourth generation Navy man and was assigned to Camp Lejeune.
Brian Van Ness, 49, a next-door neighbor, recalled that Anderson would mow the lawn for neighbors and help out with other chores.
“He always was getting involved with helping neighbors out,” Van Ness said. He said Christopher had wanted to join the Navy right after the tragedy of Sept. 11. “He was real excited to join the military but didn’t get in right then,” he said.
While awaiting his Navy school starting date, he competed with Navy SEAL candidates and excelled in Navy academics. Anderson was a fourth-generation Navy man who, in his year and a half of service, achieved his goal of earning more ribbons than his Navy SEAL father did in his 20-year career.
At boot camp, he was the honor graduate, voted No. 1 in his class by his peers and senior staff and went on to hospital corpsman medical training and advanced combat medical training. He was deployed to Ramadi, Iraq on Sept. 6, 2006 and while there, Christopher earned the affectionate title of “Doc.” This title is only given to Navy hospital corpsmen that have impressed their U.S. Marine Corps counterparts with medical excellence under field combat conditions.
While in Iraq, Anderson maintained his sense of humor when describing the kind of woman he wanted to meet.
“I have been considered a hopeless romantic, so she better like a gentlemen and enjoy the finer things in life, and Mama has to like her, so she better like to shop to get along with her, she is addicted to Nordstrom”, he wrote on his MySpace page.
Rick Anderson, Christopher’s father and a career Navy SEAL, told CBS 4 News that his son was “serving his community, serving his country and serving his family” at the time of his death, and that his son had been approved to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.