Army Staff Sgt. Jeremy W. Doyle

Died August 18, 2005 serving during Operation Iraqi Freedom

24, of Chestertown, Md.; assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.; killed on August 18 when an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee following a mine-assessment mission in Samarra, Iraq.

Md.-based soldier killed in Iraq explosion

Associated Press

Jeremy W. Doyle met a nice girl named Leah when they were teens.

“He told me when I was 13 that we were going to get married one day. He just told me, and I followed along,” she said.

They were high school sweethearts, until Doyle’s parents split up during his junior year in high school and he went to live with his mother in Maryland.

On a visit to the States in 1999 after joining the Army, he met up with Leah and the two began dating again. They married in 2003, just two months after he returned from his first tour of Iraq.

Doyle, 24, of Chesterton, Md., died Aug. 18 in Samarra when a bomb detonated near his vehicle. He was based at Chesterton.

“I have no idea what I’m going to do. He was my whole life. He was my everything,” Leah Doyle said.

He served in Kosovo and Germany. Though injured in January while trying to disarm a land mine, he went back to work the next day with shrapnel still in his body.

“He was adamant to return to his men,” said his mother, Debbie Grove.

Later he would joke that he would set off any metal detector anywhere.

He also is survived by his father, John, and stepmother, Sandy.