It was cold in Chicago on Christmas Day 2004 and at O'Hare International Airport, like most of the other airports in the country, airport managers and airline executives were still trying to dig out from a pre-Christmas meltdown that had all but crippled air traffic over the United States.
Flight delays were interminable and the concourse was filled with irritable, even angry travelers, frustrated that their holiday plans were being disrupted. But there was at least one flier at the airport that day who -- though he had more cause than most to be impatient -- managed to keep his emotions under control.
After all, spending more than two years in a Pakistani prison has a way of teaching one the virtue of patience.
Who knows? Maybe if Erik Anthony Audé had not been so impatient with the soldiers at the airport in Rawlapindi in February of 2002, they wouldn't have checked his luggage quite so thoroughly. He might not have been arrested, carted off to that dismal prison in the middle of nowhere, and later convicted.
Now, though, his ordeal was almost over.
email
print
default
increase
decrease
