Sherman L. Fleek is an American military historian, born at Hill Air Force Base and raised in Layton, Utah, specializing on Mormon military history. He has also written on topics related to Latter-day Saint history that are not always military in nature. Fleek rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, serving as an aviator, Special Forces officer, and historian in several command and staff positions. His last duty in the Army was chief historian for the National Guard Bureau in Washington DC, when he retired in 2002. The Army approached him in 2005 while serving as a historian for a Civil War non-profit preservation foundation, to enter federal civil service and become the official command historian for the United States Army reconstruction effort in Iraq. Fleek deployed to Iraq for three months in 2006 as a historian. Fleek served as command historian of Walter Reed Army Medical Center from 2007 to 2009. In May 2009 he assumed the position as historian for the United States Military Academy at West Point. [1][2]
Fleek received a bachelors degree in English from Brigham Young University in 1982, and a masters degree in history from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs while serving in the Army at Fort Carson. He is a Latter-day Saint and as of April 2009 was serving as a member of the high council of the Winchester Virginia Stake of the Church. He served a LDS mission in the Idaho Pocatello Mission, after having completed four years as an enlisted soldier with the Army, 1973-77, in Germany.
Books by Fleek include History May Be Searched in Vain: A Military History of the Mormon Battalion (414 pages, Arthur H. Clark Company) which won the Utah State History Society Amy Price Military History Award for 2007. He also wrote, Place the Headstones Where They Belong : Thomas Neibaur, WWI Soldier (Logan: Utah State University Press). Fleek also contributed many articles to Military History, America's Civil War, Wild West, as well as Army and Mormon Heritage Magazine.