A Story From My Father

Stories have great cultural significance, whether they be a story that changes the way a civilization considers a certain phenomenon or a story that makes one thinks about something a bit longer, stories tend to change something, even the stories passed around the dinner table for pure entertainment purposes. One such story came from my father, who was a cargo plane pilot in the navy. A lot of my father's stories stemmed from his Navy past. This probably had to do with the fact that due to his navy experience, he got to visit a lot of different places, from Italy to Kuwait, and many countries that I would have never heard of otherwise.

This particular story involves some country in the middle east, but that is not important. What is important is that it was not a planned landing. Not an emergency landing per se, but a detour from the prescribed path for sure. The problem with this is that now the airplanes were at a foreign airport and did not have enough fuel to return to a friendly airport or to an aircraft carrier. The navy provides pilots with ways to refuel at these airports. One way is to use a military IOU, which is essentially a slip of paper from the US Government that says "We'll pay you back later." One might understand why a foreign, unfriendly airport would be hesitant to take an IOU from the US. Government. The other primary way is with a credit card backed by the US Government. It is just a normal credit card but goes to a military account. Pilots carry these for situations just like this. However, when my father presented this credit card to the refueling crew at the airfield, they shook their heads no. Instead, they motioned to my dad's wallet and said in accented English, "American Express!". They wanted my father to pay with his personal American Express card! So that is exactly what he did. He called ahead to American Express to explain the situation and they pre-approved the transaction, and the order went through. He cannot remember exactly how much it was, but he estimates that with today's price of fuel that it would be around $20,000. Needless to say, my father was anxious to get the military to reimburse him!