A Long Island mother is reflecting on her son's death two decades after his death.
Army Specialist Jacob Fletcher died 20 years ago in Iraq.
He was the second Long Islander to die in the Iraq war.
To mark the date, his mother Dorine Kenney placed flowers at his grave Tuesday.
“I just don’t want people to forget about him,” she said. She stressed how important it is that people don’t forget that he gave his life for his country. “He’s missed, he’s loved. He had a lot of courage.”
With so few words able to fit on a headstone, Kenney said she thought about what she’d like people to know about her son. She said two words came to her heart: courage and compassion. Those two words are on his headstone.
Fletcher was 28 years old when he was killed, just days before his 29th birthday. Kenney says he decided to enlist after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Kenney says she’s doing OK, living a full life surrounded by people who support her. But she says she’ll always wonder what life would have been like had he survived. It would’ve been different, she said.
