$51 for 2 Minutes: German Pay Phones Anger Troops
By JAMES DAO
Published: March 1, 2012
When Specialist Reynald Matias was heading to Afghanistan with his Army unit late last year, their chartered flight stopped to refuel at Leipzig-Halle Airport in Germany. During a brief layover, he called his wife in Tacoma, Wash., using his debit card on a pay phone in the terminal’s troops-only transit lounge.
“What are they charging you?” his wife, Crystal, asked when he reached her. He did not know, so she told him to hang up. A few days later she got the answer: $51 for what she estimated was a two-minute call.
“Military pay isn’t up there,” she said. “It really hurt us.”
For many American troops passing through Leipzig to the war zones, the steep cost of a quick call home from pay phones has been a source of growing indignation. The Pentagon estimates that about two dozen commercial charters carrying American forces stop at the Leipzig airport each week.
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