A 26-year-old Marine raised in North County has lost his legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan's Helmand province, his mother and other family members said Friday, according to the North County Times.
Cpl. Michael Fox, a 2003 graduate of Rancho Bernardo High School, was injured after he had stepped on a roadside bomb during a patrol in the Now Zad district of Helmand province. Fox ended up losing his legs in the blast, NCT reported.
Fox’s mother, Margaret Fox Jones of Escondido, received a call from a Marine Corps official after the event.
"I was shaking so bad,” Jones told the paper, “because I know you don't get those kinds of phone calls unless something is terribly wrong with your boy.”
"Don't worry, Mom. I'm going to be OK," Fox reportedly told his mother over the phone from the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
Fox, an infantryman, was on his first assignment to Afghanistan since joining the Marine Corps at age 23, the NCT reports.
His unit was on patrol in armored vehicles when it stopped to check for roadside bombs, according to what officials told Jones and Fox's aunt, Myra Strandburg, who is also from Escondido.
Local
Fox and the other service members came under small-arms fire shortly after getting out of their vehicles and were forming a defensive position when Fox stepped on what the military calls an improvised explosive device.
He also sustained broken arm and other injuries from the blast.
Fox is due home in march, according to NCT.
"I'm happy that he's alive and he'll be back," Jones said. "I didn't want him to go in the first place, but he told me that it was his job and that he had to go."
For more information on Fox’s story visit our media partner, the North County Times.
