World War Two shaped Matt Matthews even though he was born twenty years after it ended. As a kid, he was afraid he’d have to do what his father did in the 106th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. As a young adult, he was afraid he wouldn’t. If his father’s silence about war and being a POW said it all, what did it say? That silence and Matthews’ efforts to fill in the blanks molded his evolving definition of manhood and efforts to influence and love his own three sons.

In the summer of 2011, Matthews, his wife, and three boys traced his late father’s WWII footsteps the thousand or so miles from where he was captured in Germany during the Battle of the Bulge to the Clyde River in Glasgow, near where he and 10,000 other seasick American GIs arrived on the RMS Aquitania. Sixty-seven years after his father’s journey, Matthews unwraps spiritual insights about loss, fatherhood, and overlooked graces of daily life.

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