For United States Air Force staff sergeant Joshua Gilreath, Tennessee Football runs in his blood.

This past May, Gilreath had a dream come true when he presented Butch Jones with a folded Tennessee flag.

“One of my state representatives gave it to me when I was 18 years old in Bristol,” Gilreath told VolQuest.com in May. “He gave it to me before I went to Iraq and he told me to make our state proud. I carried that with me through all four tours and the 22 countries that I was in including Moscow, Russia where I did Presidential protection. I carried it to the 27 states my wife and I where in. I always carried it with me. I wanted it go around with me and my wife. Like I said that was just to show home was always with us. When I got injured and had my surgery in Germany, it flew over my bed again to let me know home is right there.

“This is a dream come true,” Gilreath said.

We live our dream every day, thanks to brave men and women like Gilreath.

Like Gilreath, Jones got emotional, too, and Tennessee’s head coach said he would hang it in his office and invited Gilreath and his wife to a practice.

“It gives you goosebumps,” Jones said. “You become emotional. You can feel the passion. He’s a great illustration of that. Here’s an individual who has laid his life on the line to protect our country and everything that it stands for. To feel the passion, the magnitude, and relevancy to what football means to him. It puts it in prospective.”

Gilreath took Jones up on that practice invitation, and former Tennessee All-American Antone Davis tweeted out a photo of Gilreath’s tattoo of the coordinates of Neyland Stadium.

We’ve seen some fine SEC football tattoos before, but this is certainly up there with the best of them.