UNC Press Blog

We welcome a guest post today from Meredith Lair, author of Armed with Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War. In the book, Lair focuses on the noncombat experiences of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam—finding that consumption and satiety, rather than privation and sacrifice, defined most soldiers’ Vietnam deployments. In this guest post, she revisits an incident involving the luggage of soldiers flying back home at the end of their deployment to Afghanistan last summer.—ellen

Last June, Delta Airlines prompted a minor Internet controversy when it charged an excess baggage fee to a group of soldiers returning from the war. Flying from Baltimore to Atlanta, en route from Afghanistan to Fort Polk, the men of U.S. Army Detachment 62 found themselves with several extra bags. Though their orders authorized them to check four bags apiece, Delta’s policy at the time allowed soldiers flying coach only three. The extra bags—fourteen in total—would cost $200 each to place on the plane. After a futile negotiation with Delta employees, two soldiers poured their frustration into a three-minute video they uploaded to YouTube. It went viral, garnering tens of thousands of views almost instantly and prompting hundreds of news stories. Within three days, Delta had apologized and revised its baggage policy for soldiers en route to and from United States war zones.

The video, made by Staff Sergeants Fred Hilliker and Robert O’Hair, was shot on the plane and briefly outlines their ordeal. After Hilliker provides some context, he turns the camera on O’Hair and asks him to describe the outcome. “We ended up paying, out of pocket, our own money, to allow that fourth bag to be taken on the plane,” O’Hair explains. To drive home the unfairness of the policy, Hilliker then asks, “What was that fourth bag for you?” As O’Hair later put it in an interview with Fox News Radio, “My extra bag was my weapons case. I had my assault rifle, a grenade launcher, and a 9-mm pistol.” In the video, he describes these as “the tools that I used to protect myself and Afghan citizens while I was deployed in the country.” Hilliker concludes the video with some up-close headshaking and an admonishment for the airline: “Good business model, Delta. . . . Not happy. Not happy at all.” Once uploaded, the video prompted immediate outrage from bloggers, news editorialists, veterans, and angry patriots, who objected to the disrespectful “welcome home” they felt Delta had given these returning heroes.

The soldiers who made the video had a keen sense of how it would be received, suggesting their awareness of the cachet military service has afforded them in American public life. In a single take, they framed their grievance perfectly in order to maximize the viewer’s disgust: Delta was cast as the monolithic, unfeeling corporation that exploited their service for profit, while the soldiers themselves were cast as stoic warriors returning from an austere existence defending other people’s freedoms.

The fourth bag, the one for which O’Hair had to pay, contained weapons, essential implements of warfare that speak to the harsh conditions one would expect to find in a war zone. The sacrifices the soldiers made on behalf of the nation, first to serve in the military and then to deploy to Afghanistan, were compounded by the financial hardship of having to pay to transport their weapons home. Whether or not the baggage fee was a hardship for the soldiers is arguable; their commanding officer actually paid it for them, and, because they were pre-authorized to carry four bags with them, they were always entitled to reimbursement at taxpayers’ expense. Regardless, the public embraced Hilliker and O’Hair’s version of events, as evidenced by the hue and cry that forced Delta to change its policy. Yet no one has ever asked what is, in my opinion, the most important question: What was in the other three bags? Continue reading ‘Meredith Lair: What Was in the Other Three Bags?’ »