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Final Strykers return home

Dec-19-2006 » Filed Under: 172nd SBCT

By ERIC LIDJI, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

FORT WAINWRIGHT, Alaska (AP) - Of the many handwritten signs lining the lattice fences of Fort Wainwright, one, written from a wife to her husband abroad, read, "If you can read this, I can finally breathe again."

With the last flight of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team - now known as the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team - arriving Tuesday morning, the friends and family members who had waited the longest could finally release their breath.

"I got up at 5:30," said Shannon Robertson, who was waiting for her husband with her two small children. "My alarm clock didn't even go off. I was up." Around 80 soldiers - the last of the 3,800 in the brigade to leave Iraq - returned to Fort Wainwright just after 9 a.m. The final day of travel took 29 hours and crossed three continents.

The soldiers started their trip in Kuwait City, where they had been arranging for the return of other soldiers in the brigade and helping to tie up loose ends for a mission that lasted 16 months.

"They were the guys who made sure everything else had been shipped out," Fort Wainwright spokeswoman Linda Douglass said. "Essentially closing it out." [...]


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