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Troops bask in Bush's praise

Jun-21-2004 » Filed Under: 3/2 SBCT

I missed this article when it was originally published. Mike Gilbert explains the origin of the "Ghost Rider" nickname.

[Link to Full Article]
MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune

It's a long way from Fort Lewis to the White House, and presidents don't make the trip often - not in 59 years, to be exact.

But Friday, President Bush was profuse in his praise for the local soldiers fighting the war on terror and for their families who support them back home. [...]

Bush recognized Fort Lewis as the home of the first two Stryker brigades, the first of which is seven months into a yearlong deployment in northern Iraq. And he embellished a little bit of Stryker folklore.

"In Samarra, Iraqis have taken to calling the Stryker brigades the 'Ghost Riders' because they arrive in near total silence, strike the enemy without warning," the president said.

The reference wasn't exactly right, but Stryker troops probably won't complain.

It comes from the brigade's first mission, in Samarra, where for three weeks in December they moved rapidly in and out of the city in search of regime holdouts and other insurgents.

Toward the end of the operation, the story goes, an Iraqi interpreter told soldiers that some locals had begun to refer to the Stryker troops as "ghosts" for their ability to get in close to the target rapidly without detection.

The tale made its way around the brigade but wasn't any kind of sensation - nobody painted hard-looking ghosts on the sides of their Strykers or anything like that.

But by April, an Army acquisition officer briefing reporters at the Pentagon told a slightly embellished version of the story. It was picked up in the Army Times and, later, the Stars & Stripes newspaper.

Actually, the phrase "ghost soldiers" has a negative connotation in Army parlance - a reference to the administrative practice of filling units with names on paper, but not actual able-bodied soldiers.

At any rate, by the time the president told the story Friday, he'd added a Wild West twist - the "Ghost Riders" - in a line that got some of the loudest cheers of his speech.


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