SFC Rick Mullins sits alongside his dress blues inside his office at Tennessee Community Counseling near Eastgate. Mullins served 40 years in the defense of his country.Bio:
Name: Rick Mullins Age: 59 Home: Chattanooga Military branch and rank: U.S. Army, sergeant first class
Rick Mullins loves the American flag. If he sees a ripped one flying around town, he makes it his mission to replace it.
“I do it in respect and out of respect – I’d say I’ve probably changed 15 or 20,” he said with a chuckle. He recalled a time when he was about 18 years old, not long after he enlisted in the U.S. Army, that he climbed up a pole at the East Lake Center to swap a tattered flag for a new one.
“I’ll be nice about it,” said the self-proclaimed flag protector, who was born and raised in Chattanooga. “It ain’t gonna cost you a dime – I’m going to bring you a new one.”
After four tours in the Middle East – one with a field artillery unit during Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, two serving as a military policeman in and around Baghdad, and one as a customs officer in Kuwait – Mullins, 59, retired from the Army as a sergeant first class in October 2016.