This time every year I think of Dad.

Eighty-one years ago, on Saturday, Dec. 16, the Battle of the Bulge erupted before dawn on the German-Belgian border with a 90-minute barrage of what were called Screaming Meemies. Dad was captured on Tuesday afternoon, the 19th. It was the coldest European winter in 50 years. In the coming months, these World War II prisoners of war ate snow and picked through garbage to survive. Many died of starvation, dysentery, trench foot, exposure and exhaustion.

News about Dad’s capture spread through Hampton, Virginia, and the Matthews’ tight Wythe neighborhood. The Daily Press story was only 99 words: William Matthews. Missing in action. Details meager. Joe and Alice’s youngest boy — only 20 years old — was presumed dead or captured along with 23,554 other Americans.

Growing up, I pestered my poor old man with questions about the war. Do you have nightmares? Why didn’t you keep in touch with any of the men with whom you served? What do you remember? What did you lose?

He was able to answer few of my impossible questions. I was unable to articulate what it was like growing up in the shadow of his war coupled with the rude light cast by nightly televised reports from Vietnam. As a teenager, I feared I’d have to do what he did. As a young man, I feared I wouldn’t.

A decade after he died, I traced Dad’s footsteps from near St. Vith where he was captured to Glasgow where he and 10,000 other seasick troops entered the war effort from New York City on the RMS Aquitania. I pulled out the drawers of his life and shook them upside down. I wrote a book believing if we don’t remember our past, we run the risk of repeating it.

On the January afternoon of Dad’s funeral, an elderly woman shook my hand in the fellowship hall during the after-service reception. She introduced herself as one of the Peakes — Mary Virginia — who grew up on Cherokee Road near the Matthewses.

“We really loved Billy Boy,” she said. “We worried about all the neighborhood boys going off to war.”

I wanted to ask this gentle woman with the halo of wispy white hair to speak up, but I didn’t dare. Some memories must be whispered, or, like birds easily spooked, they scatter away in a feathery blur.

She told me she had dreamed of my father the night before she learned he was missing in action.

“Over there,” is what she called the war. Schönberg, Winterspelt, Namur, Malmedy, the Our, the Muese.

Over there.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my own voice catching, eyes filling with water. “It was a long way away. A long time ago.”

“Many of the boys,” she whispered, “didn’t come home from the war.” She looked past me into their gone-but-not-forgotten young faces. “Many more,” she whispered, “came home not knowing what hit them.”

Dad was one of those boys.

Every December, I picture him on the morning the battle began. He’s pulling his helmet down over his ears attempting to banish the cold and the noise of the nebelwerfer rockets. Snow showers blanket the shuddering ground and shattering trees like a funeral pall.

For a flashing second, our blue eyes catch.

There’s nothing I can do to help, nothing I can say.

Every year I’m left empty-handed, incredulous we insist on putting our sons and daughters in harm’s way over there — Marathon, Waterloo, Khe Sanh, Gettysburg, Korengal Valley, Bastogne.

But every December, sky lowering like a metal lid, I keep vigil. Eight-one years ago, my old man is so young, so afraid, so far away.

I cannot reach him, but every year I try. Every year I wave.

Every year Bill Matthews waves back.

Matt Matthews grew up in Hampton. He serves as co-pastor with his wife Rachel at Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, North Carolina.

https://www.pilotonline.com/2025/12/15/column-dads-coldest-winter-at-the-battle-of-the-bulge/