When Specialist Reynald Matias was heading to Afghanistan with his Army unit late last year, their chartered flight stopped to refuel at Leipzig-Halle Airport in Germany. During a brief layover, he called his wife in Tacoma, Wash., using his debit card on a pay phone in the terminal’s troops-only transit lounge.

“What are they charging you?” his wife, Crystal, asked when he reached her. He did not know, so she told him to hang up. A few days later she got the answer: $51 for what she estimated was a two-minute call.

“Military pay isn’t up there,” she said. “It really hurt us.”

For many American troops passing through Leipzig to the war zones, the steep cost of a quick call home from pay phones has been a source of growing indignation. The Pentagon estimates that about two dozen commercial charters carrying American forces stop at the Leipzig airport each week.

In interviews, service members said calling rates are not printed on the phones in the segregated lounge, where American troops must stay during layovers. The phones do not accept prepaid phone cards bought in the United States, and troops say their complaints to a customer service line are ignored or not answered.