My Righteous Indignation

So, because of a situation arising with Delta Airlines involving my sister, Wendy, and being angry at how they handled it, I sent the following to the Today Show, New York Times, USA Today, SL Tribune and Get Gephardt (an investigative show in Utah):

My brother-in-law, 1st Lt. William C. Hill, USAF, is scheduled to deploy from Wright-Patterson AFB to Baghdad, Iraq in early December. I’m not going to debate the morality or immorality of this particular war, or war in general. What infuriates me is how companies, in this case, Delta Airlines, treat the families of people who put everything on the line to serve a cause higher than their individual selves or families.

Lt. Hill was initially scheduled to deploy to Kuwait City in early October. Based on this, his wife, my sister, Wendy, purchased tickets for herself and their two boys, Alex, 4 and Wyatt, 1, to fly out to Idaho and be with family from Thanksgiving until New Years. When Lt. Hill’s orders were changed last week, my sister attempted to change her ticket dates so they would have a few more weeks with their daddy before he headed to war. She was told that she could change the tickets, but it would cost $100 per ticket. Phone calls and emails to Delta Airlines either went unheeded or received responses that amounted to “it’s your fault for not buying tickets that are more flexible with travel dates and your circumstances don’t really matter.”

What kind of service do we, as individuals, companies and governments, provide to the families of soldiers? Do we go out of our way to treat them a little better than average, to do a little more? I have seen random acts of kindness passed on to my sister- strangers have given her money in the airport and helped with the boys when Lt. Hill was gone. But does that die out when the bottom profit line becomes a factor? We should be going out of our way to make life more comfortable for soldiers’ families, not making it more difficult.

The email Wendy received from Delta (which I seriously suspect was a form letter because it didn't reference my sister or her husband at all) said they were turning down her request said they had a need to be fair to everyone. Fair? Are you kidding me? How fair is it to take a husband, father, son and friend and ask him to fly thousands of miles around the world, to fight a war, without a guarantee that he is going to come home? I can’t believe Delta even thought twice about it- families of soldiers shouldn’t even have to pay to fly and now they’re going to charge my sister extra because the United States Air Force changed her husband’s orders?

I understand that companies have a need to have policies in place to prevent abuses of this kind of situation. If it were a case of changing their minds about travel dates, it would be completely different. It’s not even the extra fees that she will have to pay- $200 for the two extra tickets isn’t that much money, but Delta’s behavior in inexcusable. Why are soldiers’ families treated like everyone else by corporate head honchos when they should be bending over backwards to make these families’ lives easier? We will pay the $200, the tickets will get changed, Lt. Hill will leave his wife and kids over Christmas, New Years, his anniversary, his wife’s birthday, and I pray to God that he will return home when his service is over.