Matthew A. Rozell books in order

What do you do if you are a reluctant soldier, having been shot at, seen your friends killed, and can no longer even remember what your own mother looks like?

As a combat soldier fighting your way across Europe, what is the plan when you come across a Holocaust train full of suffering humanity that shocks you to your core, even after you think you have seen it all? And what happens when you get to meet the survivors face to face, two generations later?

This is not a novel. It's not 'based on a true story.' It really happened, and I am a witness. You will be, too...

The telephone rings on the hospital floor, and they tell you it is your mother, the phone call you have been dreading. You’ve lost part of your face to a Japanese sniper on Okinawa, and after many surgeries, the doctor has finally told you that at 19, you will never see again. The pain and shock is one thing. But now you have to tell her, from 5000 miles away.

HOW DO YOU THINK YOU FEEL when you wake up in a hospital and find out you killed your own mother?

JUST WHAT DO YOU DO in that moment when your plane’s been hit, and you are about to crash far from home? Dying for freedom isn’t the worst that could happen. Being forgotten is.

Maybe our veterans did not volunteer to tell us their stories; perhaps we were too busy with our own lives to ask. But they opened up to a younger generation, when a history teacher taught his students to engage.

WHAT DO YOU FILL YOUR POCKETS WITH when you’re rousted awake in the middle of a freezing German night to be death-marched across Germany?

WHEN YOUR BUDDY STAGGERS AND FALLS by the side of the road, and no longer even knows who you are, do you keep moving to keep yourself alive?

YOU’VE JUST SHOT A GERMAN SOLDIER, and now you have to lay with him as the enemy counterattacks. What do you do when he starts speaking to you, wounded mortally, and tells you in perfect English that he is from Coney Island in Brooklyn, your old stomping grounds?

YOU ARE ON THE RUN IN ROME, AN ESCAPED PoW behind enemy lines, on a trolley without papers as the German SS board and demand identification from all, working their way back to you. In civilian clothes, what do you tell your friend next to you when you know you are about to be shot?

WHEN YOU STEP OFF THE LANDING CRAFT into the sea, bullets flying at 0630, how do you react to your vision of your mother opening the telegram that you have been killed?

WHEN YOUR GLIDER CRASHES AND BREAKS APART, what do you when you are shot and the Germans are bearing down on you, and you know your dogtags identify you as a Jew?

In THE BULGE AND BEYOND, you will be with the soldiers going into the heart of the bloodiest single battle fought by the US Army in American history, the so-called 'Battle of the Bulge'.

From the Great Depression to Pearl Harbor, from high school to the combat zone, from boot camp to the end of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan, here are more of the stories that we can’t afford not to hear, from a vanishing generation speaking to America today.

In ‘THE BULGE AND BEYOND’, you will be among the columns of young, tired men slogging it out in the malevolent forest, cold, dark, and medieval. You will walk the with the scout to his targeted outpost. You will lay in a freezing minefield by day, hoping to elude the sniper’s bullet, and forever experience the complete inability to ever again feel warm. Nineteen thousand American GIs never saw their mothers again; tens of thousands more were wounded or taken prisoner in Hitler’s last great counter-offensive that shocked the world.

In ‘THE BULGE AND BEYOND’, our veterans sit down and speak to you directly about what they experienced. World War II brought out the worst in humanity, but it also brought out the best; in these narratives you will draw your own lessons. Here are the stories that a special generation of Americans told us for the future when we took the time to be still, to listen, and to draw strength.

In ‘Across The Rhine’, you will begin to liberate a continent with our veterans as they scale the cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc overlooking Omaha Beach. You will jump with the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment to capture bridgeheads in the Netherlands, and re-group to slug it out in the freezing Ardennes Forest in the winter of 1944-45.

The mission will then push you over the Siegfried Line and all the way to Germany’s most formidable western natural defense, the swift and swollen quarter-mile wide Rhine River. As spring 1945 arrives, you will be with our GIs as they arrive at the gates of Dachau and have their very souls shaken as they become eyewitnesses to the greatest crime in the history of the world—the Holocaust; the Nuremberg War Crimes trials will then bring you face to face with the architects of terror, the most notorious war criminals of the twentieth century.

In ‘Across The Rhine’, our veterans sit down and speak to you directly about what they experienced. World War II brought out the worst in humanity, but it also brought out the best; in these narratives you will draw your own lessons. Here are the stories that a special generation of Americans told us for the future when we took the time to be still, to listen, and to draw strength.