PFC Jack Fleming

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Remembering PFC Jack Fleming

Born May 16, 1919, Died August 10, 1944 

Son of Sallie and Clarence Fleming 

Brasstown, North Carolina

In the quiet valley of Brasstown, North Carolina, where mornings still begin with mist rising off the pastures and the sound of roosters in the distance, a young man once left home to fight in a war half a world away. His name was Jack Fleming, born May 16, 1919, the son of Clarence and Sallie Ford Fleming — and my mother’s cousin.

Jack grew up in these mountains, in a time when hard work and faith were woven into daily life. He had an older brother, Edwin, who passed away on March 30, 1941, only a few months after Jack had been called to serve in the Army.  The family’s youngest son, George, born in 1925, would later enlist in 1943 — following his brother’s path into the service. He survived the war, though the shadow of loss would never leave their home. 

Jack served with Company B, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division — a unit known as the “Break Through Regiment.” These were the men who helped pierce the German lines in Normandy and later stood firm in one of the fiercest battles of World War II — the Battle of Mortain.

When he filled out his Army registration card, Jack was 21 years old. On the line that asked, “Name of person who will always know your address,” he wrote his mother’s name — Sallie Mae Fleming. It’s such a simple question on a government form, yet it says everything: even as he prepared to go to war, he remained anchored to home and to the mother who always knew where he belonged.

In August 1944, Hitler launched a desperate counterattack to split the American forces and drive them into the sea. The 117th Infantry, made up of farm boys and mill hands from the Carolinas and Tennessee, was in the path of that assault. For six days, outnumbered and surrounded, they held their ground. Their courage stopped the German advance and turned the tide of the war in the west.

PFC Jack Fleming was killed in action on August 10, 1944, at just 25 years old.

For its heroism, his battalion received the Presidential Unit Citation — a distinction shared by only a few. A newspaper report on May 10, 1945, listed Jack among those honored, alongside another North Carolina soldier, LeRoy Campbell of Robbinsville.

But behind those lines of military recognition was heartbreak at home. Aunt Sallie had already lost another son before Jack. The notification surely hollowed the air from the Fleming home — the kind of grief mountain families bore quietly, holding one another and trusting that the Lord’s arms were wider than the pain.

Jack was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 12, Site 5346 — among the nation’s honored dead. Yet his story belongs as much to Brasstown as to Arlington.

When I think of him, I picture the long dirt road that once led from the Fleming home, and the mountains as they must have looked the day he left — quiet, steadfast, and unaware of the sacrifice that would echo from them for generations. 

He was a son of these mountains — beloved, and a reminder that freedom endures because of the quiet courage of ordinary men who loved home enough to leave it.

Aunt Sallie lived a long life, passing away at the age of eighty-nine, but the pain of losing her sons was always just beneath the surface. On a family trip to Washington, D.C., a relative stopped at Arlington to take a photograph of Jack’s headstone. When they brought it home to her, she crumbled — the years falling away in an instant beneath the weight of memory.

 Written by Debbie Finch, in memory of her mother’s cousin, PFC Jack Fleming (1919–1944), U.S. Army, 117th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division.