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MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune
The Army officially activated the last of its seven Stryker brigades in a ceremony Friday at Fort Lewis, with one mission clearly in mind: getting its 4,000 mostly new soldiers ready to go to Iraq.
The 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division is scheduled to complete its training and preparations by early 2009.
The commander, Col. Harry Tunnell, was asked whether he thinks U.S. combat troops will still be in Iraq by then.
“That’s a question you’ll have to ask someone else,” Tunnell said. “We are training to go to war.”
President Bush this week vetoed a war spending bill that would have required troops to start coming home by Oct. 1. But Democrats who control Congress have vowed to keep pushing to end the Iraq war.
Friday’s ceremony at Soldiers Field House formally put Tunnell’s unit on the Fort Lewis Stryker assembly line that has turned out three other brigades since 2003, all built around the namesake family of eight-wheeled armored vehicles.
Those three have all deployed to Iraq. The first of them – the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – is in Baghdad and Baqouba, 11 months into its second combat tour there.
The most recently completed Stryker unit – the 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division – finished its move into Iraq this week and is beginning operations in the Iraqi capital and in the Salah al-Din and Diyala provinces to the north.
As for the newly activated 5th Brigade, about 2,300 of its soldiers have arrived at Fort Lewis and begun to train. The rest are due by July.
Brig. Gen. William Troy, the post’s interim commanding general, congratulated the new soldiers on “joining the great Stryker nation … the most lethal and agile formation on any battlefield anywhere.”
“Be proud of being part of an elite force,” Troy said.[...]