January 16, 2014.

Hefty Bank Fees Waylay Soldiers

"Then what was there to worry about? People are being killed off all the time, aren't they?"

Fort Hood National Bank lets soldiers overdraw their accounts by hundreds of dollars at its seven branches on the Fort Hood U.S. Army base in Texas. It charges them up to $35 for each overdraft.

He tried to make her understand. "This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event----years after it."

Not long after Samantha Smith started her customer-service job at the bank in 2010, she noticed she spent most of her time on soldiers struggling with those fees.

"And what good was that?"

The bank disclosed the fees, she says, but many soldiers didn't understand it would charge them $35 repeatedly, even for small debit-card transactions. When their Army paychecks arrived, the bank withheld overdrawn sums and fees, often leaving them short of funds and vulnerable to more overdraft charges, she says.