RETURNING THE FAVOR

I was on my way home from getting engaged to Zhenya in March, 2005. My first Aeroflot flight landed in Moscow. "Oops, bad news...the onward flight to New York has been cancelled." I'd just learned that my kids were being sent to "visit" me in Colorado a week before they were supposed to, a week before their spring break was actually going to happen. Plus my leave was about to expire.

I asked the women at the gate if hey could simply put me on he Delta Flight that was also going to New York. "Nyet," they all said. I begged them. "Nyet." Finally I asked them if I could speak to their manager. Hermann Herman came. I explained the situation to him. He seized on one phrase. "Did you say leave? Are you military?" "Yes, I'm military." "Do you have your military ID card?" "Here." "Give me your passport and your tickets, and wait here" I waited about 45 minutes.

Hermann came back and gave me the new tickets I needed. "I don't understand; why did you help me," I asked. "Well, I was military, too. Only I was on the other side. I was a soldier in the USSR, stationed in East Germany. But hey, we both share the brotherhood of arms, right?" He moved from Moscow in few months and was posted all over the world. Just a month ago he was going through some old papers and ran across my business card, and managed to find me. 

Colonel David Bennett