You Don't Know Jack

Frank Jackson Matthews knows the Battle of Iwo Jima well—he fought in it—a skinny kid from South Carolina who was the only member of his forty-man platoon to leave the island alive.

You Don’t Know Jack is more than a tale of a marine’s service in an epic battle where so many perished—it’s the tale of a young man who learned to play piano to accompany his minister father’s revivals in the Deep South of the 1930’s and wanted more than anything to be a university music professor—only to have his dream denied.

Matthews served the Marine Corps through the end of World War II. He studied music at the University of North Carolina and played the organ for The Lost Colony play on Roanoke Island. He returned to the Marine Corps as an officer for the Korean conflict and then earned his master’s degree in music at Louisiana State University. He was in arms reach of his professorial dreams when love and duty called him to another destiny.

By turns funny, compelling, and poignant, You Don’t Know Jack is the story of one man’s journey through the epochs of American life.

Alisa M. Murphy grew up in a small town. It was a place where tractors outnumbered cars, everyone's business was everyone's business, and where she found individual's life stories to be as gripping as they were gritty. Few stories were as captivating as her Uncle Jack's.

Murphy has written many human interest, travel, and wellness articles. She is also the author of the children's book Jack the Drop Falls in the Smokies.

Murphy lives on an Appalachian mountaintop with her husband, and the belief that every writer should have at least one black cat.