Letter-writer is willing to battle for his combat patch

Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Minor was recently threatened with legal action and with being kicked out of the Army by his new command in Iraq, after he wrote a letter to Stars and Stripes objecting to a requirement for all soldiers in his unit to wear the 1st Infantry Division combat patch. Here Minor, right, and another soldier pose for photo while on a patrol during a deployment to Afghanistan in February 2006.


Letter-writer is willing to battle for his combat patch
By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, May 11, 2008

Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Minor has watched friends die on combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the teenage translator killed by a grenade tossed into a Kirkuk street. Minor gave his Purple Heart to her family.

He was a college student in Ohio until recently, when he decided to return to Iraq, he said, so that a new father in his Reserve unit wouldn’t have to go.

“I’d take a dozen of him for 20 of my soldiers,” said Sgt. 1st Class John Pumma, Minor’s former first sergeant with the 2100th Military Intelligence Group in Ohio. “He’s a super solider.”

But Minor, 30, was recently threatened with legal action and with being kicked out of the Army by his new command in Iraq.

~snip~

“Minor failed to use his chain of command or NCO support channel prior to writing an article to the editor of Stars and Stripes,” said the form signed by 1st Sgt. Louis Edwards II, at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=54710

...and tell them why he is wearing his 3rd Herd patch-the Brigade Commander would really look like an asshole (Which he is, but a first-rate one).

mark