Employee Spotlight: John Matthews, Part 2

John with service members

Less than 6 months on the job, John helped a service member’s family after they had passed away in Iraq. “I worked with the funeral home, the family, and Rolling Thunder,” said John. Rolling Thunder, Inc. is an organization that brings awareness to American Prisoners of War and Missing In Action (POW-MIA) service members. Local chapters have motorcycle groups who escort fallen soldiers. “We have a big Rolling Thunder group in Kentucky. Tremendous group,” said John.

One of John’s favorite memories is delivering birth messages. He delivered 2 messages in Romania and 3 in Poznan. “I designed a birth certificate in Romania…The command was excited taking it to the service member. You can’t send them home unless there’s a medical issue. That was a neat thing they got to do.”

It was important to John to give the service members a sense of home and family while deployed. “I managed to do a makeshift Kentucky Derby party and a book drive,” he said. John’s proudest moment was designing “Billy’s Baseballs” for the entire deployment in Romania.

“There was a kid who, for his bar mitzvah, developed this program to have normal citizens write messages on baseballs of thanks and good wishes to the service members and ship them off. I reached out to Billy, who was a freshman in college at that point, and said would you be willing to send a bunch of baseballs.” Billy agreed and John was able to divide the baseballs among the units on base.

John in Romania

Honoring service members is close to John’s heart. He currently wears 3 bracelets on his arm representing lives of service members. He has a black memorial bracelet for Darrin K. Potter, son of our SAF volunteer, Lynn Romans. Darrin was killed outside Baghdad, Iraq at 24 years old. “Black bracelets are for somebody who has died… Anyone who has passed in combat,” said John.

John also wears two POW-MIA bracelets that are silver. “The tradition (with POW-MIA bracelets) is you wear it until they break, or the service member comes home. If they return home, you are supposed to take it off and mail it back to the family, so they know how many people were wearing the bracelet.”

When John is not deployed, he works from Fort Knox. “[At Fort Knox] I work with the veterans and National Guard. I’m doing yellow ribbon events to send National Guard off to deployment. I make sure the needs are met around here. I also teach international humanitarian law and I work with the youth action campaign.”

We are so happy to have John on our team and helping our service members at Fort Knox and around the world! #SAF