The words from a Marine captain were according to script, but they tore a hole in a father’s heart.
“I regret to inform you that Lt. Scott Fleming was killed in action,” were the words coming in to the cell phone as Joseph Fleming and his wife sat in a restaurant at the Florida line on Friday, a stop on their way to a vacation.
Their son, Marine Lt. Scott Fleming, was killed in combat in Afghanistan.
Joseph Fleming, speaking to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Saturday, repeated the rest of the death notification by rote. There was small arms fire. His 24-year-old son died at a base hospital.
“I heard that statement from the captain all night long,” the grieving father said from his home in Marietta.
“We’re still numb,” he said of his wife, their daughter and their daughter-in-law who is in Hawaii. “This just happened yesterday. He was with a support team of Marines.”
Scott Fleming was shot as his unit was conducting combat operations Friday in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. His unit was providing security for the parliamentary elections.
In other areas of the country, the voting has drawn rocket attacks and grenade and bomb explosions. The Taliban vowed to disrupt the voting, so turnout was light, according to reports. Many polling stations were attacked and hundreds never opened.
“We had a long discussion about this; what can happen," Joseph Fleming recounted of his talks with his son about going to Afghanistan. "He said ‘I may not come home.’”
The father’s response was “I know.”
Scott Fleming was a sophomore at Blessed Trinity Catholic High School in Roswell on Sept. 11, 2001, and it was those attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania that led him to decide to join the Marines.
“He was pretty affected by 9-11,” Joseph Fleming said. “He decided he wanted to be a Marine officer and he chose the infantry.
Joseph Fleming said his son was outgoing and open about his thoughts and feelings. “We had no secrets. He was a great person,” the father said.
And he knew what he wanted to do with his life.
Scott Fleming began his Marine training two weeks after he graduated from LaGrange College with a degree in education.
He met his soon-to be-wife while he was training in Quantico, Va., Scott and Brandi Fleming married a year ago.
He told his family he planned to make the military his career.
Scott Fleming talked to his family in Georgia – father Joseph, mother Joanne; and younger sister, Andrea – several weeks ago and told them “things were looking good” in Afghanistan. Yet in an e-mail a week ago he wrote about the fight on a recent mission during which his and other platoons engaged the Taliban.
“There were casualties and he was responsible for calling in medevacs,” Joseph Fleming said. “He says ‘next week my platoon is going back into that area and everything should go fine and if not everything will be fine.’
“And it wasn’t,” Joseph Fleming said.
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