I had been attending a conference in Annapolis and was coming home on
Sunday. As you may recall, Los Angeles International Airport was closed on
Sunday, October 26, because of the fires that affected air traffic control.
Accordingly, my flight, and many others, were canceled and I wound up
spending a night in Baltimore.

My story begins the next day. When I went to check in at the United
counter.

Monday morning I saw a lot of soldiers home from Iraq. Most were very
young and all had on their desert camouflage uniforms. This was as change from earlier, when they had to buy civilian clothes in Kuwait to fly home. It
was a visible reminder that we are in a war. It probably was pretty close
to what train terminals were like in World War II.

Many people were stopping the troops to talk to them, asking them questions
in the Starbucks line or just saying "Welcome Home." In addition to all
the flights that had been canceled on Sunday, the weather was terrible in
Baltimore and the flights were backed up. So, there were a lot of unhappy
people in the terminal trying to get home, but nobody that I saw gave the
soldiers a bad time.

By the afternoon, one plane to Denver had been delayed several hours.
United personnel kept asking for volunteers to give up their seats and take
another flight. They weren't getting many takers. Finally, a United
spokeswoman got on the PA and said, "Folks, as you can see, there are a lot
of soldiers in the waiting area. They only have 14 days of leave and we're
trying to get them where they need to go without spending any more time in
an airport then they have to. We sold them all tickets, knowing we would
oversell the flight. If we can, we want to get them all on this flight.
We want all the soldiers to know that we respect what you're doing,
we are here for you and we love you."

At that, the entire terminal of cranky, tired, travel-weary people, a
cross-section of America, broke into sustained and heartfelt applause. The
soldiers looked surprised and very modest. Most of them just looked at
their boots. Many of us were wiping away tears.

And, yes, people lined up to take the later flight and all the soldiers
went to Denver on that flight.

That little moment made me proud to be an American, and also told me why we
will win this war.

If you want to send my little story on to your friends and family, feel
free. This is not some urban legend. I was there, I was part of it, I saw
it happen.