Now before you get all in a tizzy over a US carrier billing a fighting soldier over in Afghanistan a whopping bill, I’ll let you know right now you can put your protesting placards away because it all turns our okay in the end.

According to an article over on Gizmodo by Jack Loftus, and by way of Cnet, PFC Jose Rivera was deployed to Afghanistan under the impression that his overseas calling would be billed by AT&T at $4.95 per month and after numerous calls to his wife back home, received a mobile phone bill much more than expected.

Apparently Rivera’s first language isn’t English and misunderstood what AT&T had said and the bill for the overseas calls came to a whopping $16,000 which apparently relates to about $5 per minute for the international calls from Rivera’s Forward Operating Base in Shindand, Afghanistan.

Rivera’s commanding officer stepped in to try and sort things out but AT&T Customer Service didn’t budge on the excessive bill when a request to lower the bill to $9,000 was made. AT&T also apparently failed to flag the account for excessive usage and didn’t send out any warnings which they usually do.

Rivera’s superior, Capt. Evan Brainerd, penned a letter to AT&T which stated… “I have been disgusted by the way our soldiers have been treated, and largely ignored by AT&T’s customer service throughout our efforts to resolve this problem. I am certainly not claiming that our soldier, PFC Rivera, is blameless and should not pay to a certain extent for his phone usage. However, $16,000 (every penny that this soldier and his family can hope to save during the course of this 1 year deployment) is a gross injustice.”

However, and here’s where it all turns out okay in the end, apparently an AT&T spokesperson contacted Chris Matyszczyk of Cnet and gave this comment…”We are crediting the family’s entire bill.” See, AT&T isn’t the ogre that some would think they are.