Dr. Christian Jensen loves his country

DENTON – Like the fictional British ship in C.S. Forester’s series of stories depicting the era when Britannia ruled the waves, Dr. Christian Jensen is indefatigable.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines indefatigable as “never giving up or getting tired of doing something.”

At 92, Dr. Jensen said he was “going gangbusters” until a recent health setback. While he has curtailed his office hours somewhat, his mental vigor has not flagged. A lifetime of discipline honed in the military and driven by his small-town upbringing and solid Christian faith have helped him become a rock of dependability and friend to many in Caroline County.

Most Caroline countians know Dr. Jensen as their country doctor, practicing his healing arts at his Corkell Road farm. But before and during his long medical career, he served the nation he loves as a member of the Air Force ROTC in college, a naval officer during Operation Desert Storm and, as a member of the Maryland Defense Force, he wore the uniform of the U.S. Army.

“One of the things (my military service) has confirmed to me is my patriotism,” he said. “I just love the United States. I think that we are a special country.”

“I think that we've got our warts and all. We've got good and bad here, just as they do elsewhere,” Dr. Jensen said. “But it just seems to me that this is a country that God has selected to play a major role in whatever his plan is for the world, and I hope that we are worthy of it and are able to and fulfill that role. In studying the founding of the country, you can't help but think that these were special people. These were unique characters who just happened to all come together just at the time that was necessary.”

Just when it was necessary, Dr. Jensen put on the uniform of a naval officer to serve the country he loves. The Navy celebrated its 250th anniversary Oct. 5.

A 42-year naval career

It was during the Korean War that Dr. Jensen was an undergraduate at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Passing a series of examinations allowed him to continue pursuing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees while avoiding the draft. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude.

His father, a former merchant seaman, suggested his son join the U.S. Navy. In June 1955, Jensen entered Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, launching a naval adventure that sent him around the world.

He began his career in the Navy Supply Corps, beginning with a 6-month course in Athens, Georgia.

“It was a great, great period of time,” Jensen said. “Afterward, I went to what the Supply Corps calls dependent duty, (which) means you have a senior Supply Corps officer over you, and I just got the most wonderful series of duties. I was assigned to the amphibious force down at Little Creek, Virginia, and we went on multiple cruises to the Mediterranean, to the Caribbean back before Castro, and took the Marines around wherever they needed to go.”

“I had such tremendous responsibility for a kid, I can't believe it,” he recalled. “Here I was in my 20s, and I have the responsibility for millions of dollars because I was a chief disbursing officer” of an amphibious unit, headquartered on the attack transport USS Cambria. He was able to spend time in Rome and Naples, southern France, and even Izmir, Turkey, on the Aegean Sea.

After two years, Jensen was assigned to independent duty as the sole supply officer of the destroyer escort USS Rizzi, home ported in Brooklyn Navy Yard, “and that just suited me fine,” he said.

“I had met my wife at that time, and had proposed to her. She lived in Middletown, New Jersey, so I could see her very frequently,” he said. Gail Baxter married Christian Jensen in a military ceremony Nov. 28, 1957, at the New Monmouth Baptist Church. Following their honeymoon, it was time to set sail again.

“It was a wonderful experience on that destroyer escort,” he said. “We went up the Potomac River to the Washington Navy Yard. We passed by Mount Vernon, and we tolled the bell” in honor of President George Washington. Then it was on to Nova Scotia and down to Caribbean ports again before returning to the Bayonne, New Jersey Naval Shipyard for several months to decommission the escort in 1957.

Dr. Jensen was assigned to the Naval Air Station in Atlantic City, and several short-term duty stations, including the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Philadelphia Naval Hospital and others.

When he left active duty he remained a reservist and continued to drill with Naval Reserve units. “I then took up a new specialty within the Navy (as) a transportation officer, and they sent me out to a number of transportation schools, mostly out on the West Coast,” he said. Early on, he belonged to a reserve unit in Brooklyn. “It was such a great unit because we had all the veterans from World War II, and they were able to give us that practical twist to training and experience.”

A time for medical training

As a 30-year-old civilian and reservist, Dr. Jensen said, “I got the idea that I wanted to do something different. … I wanted to become a doctor,” he said. The inspiration for his desire was his little sister, who had cerebral palsy. “I'm sure that that played a role. Somehow, I thought there's something I could do for her, some way I could help her.”

He went back to Rutgers, which had just started a medical school, but he hadn’t taken any pre-med courses. The dean suggested he pursue a Ph.D. instead of an M.D.

“But I didn’t quit,” he said. He looked at schools overseas. Accepted at the University of Bologna in Italy, his wife Gail nixed the idea, and besides, he didn’t speak Italian. “And then I was accepted at the University of Paris, but that too had its problems; namely, I couldn't speak French. And then I was accepted at the University of Cape Town, … and I loaded up the whole family,” boarded a freighter and set out on a nearly month-long voyage to South Africa.

“It was a tremendous medical education,” he said. In his fourth year of the 6-year program, he transferred to Duke University, where he earned his medical degree. In the meantime, he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander in the Navy’s Supply Corps.

After Duke, Dr. Jensen returned to active service in the Navy for further medical training at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. There he saw a classified ad in the National Review for a “conservative physician required by a conservative Eastern Shore community,” he said. Familiar with the Eastern Shore and with an intention to locate to a rural area, he answered the ad and traveled to Denton in 1973.

While camping with his wife Gail and children Wendy and Christian at Martinak State Park with his young family, he met with the town leaders and Dr. Bill Anderson and was hired. He later served as medical director of DuPont’s nylon plant in Seaford, Delaware.

He transferred from the Supply Corps Reserve to the Navy’s Medical Reserve. In 1989, he was promoted to Captain and served as the commanding officer of several Naval Reserve medical units from the Baltimore-D.C. area down to Lewes, Delaware.

When Operation Desert Storm was declared in January 1991, he was mobilized, serving as chief of the ambulatory service at Fleet Hospital 15 in Al Jabail, Saudi Arabia.

“After that, I thought, why don't I just stay in and complete the time required for retirement?” he said. “And I was ordered to the Naval Academy, and I spent several years there. I was the chief of the medical staff on two occasions over there, and I was the director of occupational health, industrial hygiene and preventive medicine. And boy, that was fun too, because that Naval Academy has got every trade, from sail makers to carpenters to librarians – every trade you can think of.”

As a board-certified occupational physician, Dr. Jensen treated diverse conditions – from carpal tunnel syndrome to Legionnaire’s disease. “It was a really good duty,” he said, but with 42 years of total service in 1997, Jensen decided to retire.

Then he learned about the all-volunteer Maryland Defense Force and joined, achieving the rank of colonel immediately, wearing an Army uniform and serving as state surgeon in the MDF for 15 years until he was in his mid-80s.

A small-town upbringing

Dr. Jensen grew up in the tiny town of Leonardo, New Jersey, on the shores of Sandy Hook Bay opposite Staten Island. “We could see on a clear day all the amusements of Coney Island – these things that go round and round, and the towers that you drop from, and things like that. Boy, that was a great childhood,” he said. “You could grow up having your own rowboat right down at the edge of the street where you lived. We didn't have a lot of oversight as kids. Mom would call us in to supper, and that was about it.

He is the eldest of four siblings. His brother Arnold and sister Judy have passed away, but his brother George lives in Dover, Delaware.

He said Monmouth County 90 years ago was “just like Caroline County when I came here 55 years ago. Very rural, very pastoral.”

At a teenager, he attended a revival service at a little Baptist church in his hometown, and answered an altar call with his brother Arnold that hot summer night. When he arrived in Denton, he helped found Calvary Baptist Church and is still a deacon. He has taught his weekly Steadfast Bible Class for over 50 years, preparing his lessons every Saturday.

Dr. Jensen is also a member of Temple Lodge 128 in Denton where he has served as Worshipful Master and recently received recognition for 70 years as a Freemason. He is also a Shriner of Boumi Temple in Baltimore. 

A meaningful naval career

“I wound up with a tremendous number of different kinds of ribbons and awards and medals, the overwhelming majority of which I didn't get because I performed some singular heroic deed, but just because I was there,” Dr. Jensen said.

He quoted the 17th century blind poet John Milton, who wrote, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

“People who are in these supportive organizations like Supply Corps, like Medical Corps – if they weren't for us, someone else would have to be there. And so there we are,” he said. “I think it's being at the right place at the right time – I really do. I never have to wonder about what would have happened if I had been there because I was there, and it all worked out the way the Lord wanted it to.”

As he looks back on his “whole life,” Dr. Jensen said he has no regrets. “God has just been guiding and directing. You think you're making your own decisions. You think you're weighing the pros and the cons. You think you're looking at advantages or disadvantages, and overall, it's him who is guiding and directing your life to where you can do the most good, both for others and yourself.”

At Concord Cemetery, where his wife, who passed away in 2022, parents and siblings are buried, is his tombstone already engraved with the epitaph, He loved his God and his fellow man, “because I really do,” he said.