A Midwest Company Shows Its Gratitude To Our Soldiers

Now this is a great story:

Four days isn’t a long time. If you don’t believe it, ask a soldier who’s on a quick visit home before heading off to Iraq.

That’s how much time 2nd Lt. Kristy Goddard of Oskaloosa and 170 other soldiers in her Army Reserve military police battalion had.

They had been in pre-deployment training at Fort Dix, N.J., and went en masse to the Philadelphia airport to catch flights home for those precious four days.

Enter the weather, which virtually shut down the airport. So there the soldiers sat, waiting, watching the clock, knowing they would be lucky to get home for a day or two.

Long story short, a Iowan business called Musco Lighting had a limosine pick up 9 of the soldiers who were heading to the midwest and to take them to DC where the weather was better and then flew them in their corporate jet back home.

So the jet made it to Moline, Ill., and five soldiers, including Goddard, got out.

"The pilots asked the others where they were going, and a couple of them said Kansas City," Crookham said.

"The soldiers said not to worry, that they’d rent a car.

"Have you ever tried renting a car at 2:30 in the morning in Moline? The pilots said they should get back on and they’d fly them to Kansas City."

That left two others, who were flown to Minneapolis.

"Nobody could understand what this meant to Kristy and those other soldiers," said Barb Goddard, Kristy Goddard’s mother.

"Who knows how long they would have had to wait for a commercial flight, because so many people there had their flights canceled and had to be put on other flights.

"This meant the world to us. We feel so bad for all those other soldiers stranded at the airport, but Musco Lighting did what it could for as many of those soldiers as it could."

And, at great expense. Not that it mattered to Crookham.

"We never gave a thought to the cost," Crookham said. "It was never a consideration. There wasn’t any question about what we should do. Those soldiers are going overseas for us."

The President of the Company, Joe Crookham, said that the money mattered not:

"You can make money and you can buy things and some people would say that makes you rich," he said. "I think this made all of us at Musco rich. Not in dollars, but in the notes and letters we get from soldiers who we were able to help. That’s the best payment you can possibly imagine."

If you have a few minutes send a email of thanks to the company.  More of this kind gratitude is needed everyday.

Curt

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